@withbroombefore / withbroombefore.tumblr.com
Alright okay fine i did it i started watching leverage are youโre all so correct it is a beautiful sexy show about the most autistic people in the world doing robin hood crimes and flirting with each other. And i love it.
-person who forgot to take their not-feeling-terrible medication
So this post is the single reason I took my meds today. Reblogging out of duty.
>Join a union
>Hear people constantly complaining that the current union leadership is super corrupt, it's all just the same ten guys making all the decisions in secret and nobody else in the union ever gets to know what's going on
>Go to the monthly union meetings that are completely open to all 1200 union members
>The only attendees are the same ten guys every month, giving detailed reports about everything that's going on
Yeah, there's a surprising amount of people who just...don't interact with the union they are in at all. At all. And then complain when shit gets voted in they didn't want.
Maybe get involved. Show up to shit. Just a thought.
This is also true of the Democratic Party btw. People are always complaining about what "The Democrats" should do, or aren't doing etc etc.
but like literally in my early 20s I started going to my local party's meetings regularly and with-in a few months they were like "hey you want to be on the committee to re-write our by-laws?" yes, yes I do thank you. "hey you want to get elected to be one of our representatives to the meetings of the state party?" why yes thank you so I got to go and debate the budget of a swing state Democratic Party.
I had to move for work not that much after that but like people I know from that have been delegates to the DNC, have elected officials come to their homes for events. Literally there's a middle aged lady I know who when Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, Hillary started with a small tour on a van, she called it her Scooby Van, and her first stop in New Hampshire, with its "first in the nation" primary was to a bakery in my home town and the person she sat with at what was her first or second official campaign stop of her run for President is a lady I know who isn't some super secret Democratic overlord or anything but a local lady who volunteers a lot.
Just the other day I got invited to meet my Senator (again) tomorrow I'm going to meet my state's governor (again) because I volunteer, if I wanted I could likely get to be a delegate to the DNC
so many organizations are open doors that people just refuse to push and then are big mad it didn't read their minds and do what you think.
I live in a town of 960 people, and four years ago I ran for an open seat on the Library Board; within three months I was chairing the board because the lady who was the chair had been doing it for 14 years and she wanted a break. Someone also threw my name in the ring to be on the school board; another candidate won the seat that time.
In my first three years on the library board, we
So when I ran for library board for my second term, I got voted in with 100% of the votes cast... and I also won an open seat on the school board as a write-in candidate with 19 votes; and I lost an election to the Select Board (our 'mayoral' system is a 3-person board) by just 38 votes out of 450 cast.
So now I'm solving library problems on the one hand, and solving school board problems on the other hand. It's an education in educational policy and finance โ federal and state aid programs, local policy on athletics and sports and core education vs arts funding, union negotiations, and more. If I ever decide to run for select board again, I'm going to be much better informed and prepared to understand the issues. Meanwhile...
Just yesterday, I drove through a town of 65,000 people. There was a group of people on a street corner holding up "pro labor" signs and "free Palestine" signs and "anti-war" signs, and "Jill Stein for President" (mind you, this is March 2025 -- there isn't a presidential election until 2028!) and "The Green Party wants your vote!" signs. There were maybe ten of these folks?
So when I got home, I went to their city's "Boards and Commissions" website. They have 19 vacant seats on various committees and boards and commissions, including two (the Wetlands Commission [wouldn't that be a Green Party issue??], and the Diversity Commission) that don't have enough members right now to hold meetings under state quorum rules. And there are 85 people on other commissions and boards that are up for re-election this year, and more than half of them don't want to keep running for these seats; they'd welcome a challenger.
In other words, the local community is STARVING for people to fill local government responsibilities.
Why are these people out here holding up signs for a woman to run for president in three years, when there are 104 seats in their own community government that are up election this year? Demonstrate to someone, somebody, anybody that you want to help solve community-level problems, and that you know what you're doing... and there's no holding you back.
we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you canโt write an email
โikr i only use it for-โ whatever you use chatgpt for is also embarrassing. you do not need the plagiarism machine that lies and evaporates water for anything actually
Something about the pacing and editing of this bit when he just kept saying 3 really scratched my brain
For the ppl in the notes asking, this was the prompt:
one of my trans friends added me to a discord channel called "egg group chat" and I was starting to get very introspective before I realised they're organising a group buy of eggs from a local farm
โณTONIGHT! โณ
An episode of Game Changer over a year in the making - "One Year Later"
Premieres at 7pm ET / 4pm PT, only on Dropout
Starring host Sam Reich and contestants Jacob Wysocki, Vic Michaelis, and Lou Wilson
You have never seen anything like this
how quickly a year goes by ๐ฅฐ
Reblog for greater sample size.
We have 24 hours to make this the most voted on poll in Tumblr history
I love how here on tumblr dot website we regularly cast the greatest curse we can muster on each other by pointing our long creepy fingers and intoning "10,000 notes" in a voice that carries the winds of the mountain with it.
I might have made an error here
What, the forest-dwelling entities with imperfect human mimicry who insinuate themselves into groups of hikers? Yeah, we had one of those. Clocked it immediately, of course. Honestly it kind of fell in that so-inept-it's-kind-of-charming range. We just played along until it'd had it's fill of marshmallows and shambled back into the treeline. We might have been violating some kind of killjoy wildlife contact best practices but what the hell, can't plan around every little thing. Why, what happened to you guys
these tags are gold omg
It's a misconception that the mimics are hunting humans when they trail along at the back of hiking groups.
In fact, the creature you'll find suddenly walking beside you and acting as if they've always been there is almost certainly a juvenile, as the adults lose the ability when they reach reproductive age.
Recent studies suggest the forest mimic is less like a preying mantis (mimicry as a hunting strategy) and more like a cuckoo (mimicry as a protective strategy for their young). Adult forest mimics will leave their offspring near a group of hikers while they forage during the day, and retrieve them near trailheads in the evening. Groups of hikers provide safety from predators and allow the parents of the species the freedom to forage more widely.
For this reason, the traditional advice to never let a mimic into your vehicle is still very important, as this would separate the young mimic from its mother. If a juvenile forest mimic does follow your group to the parking lot, you can keep it entertained with trail snacks, dad jokes, and simple goofs. The mother will usually collect them shortly before sunset.
When you notice the woods around the trailhead go silent and feel a sense of nameless foreboding, find an excuse to avert your attention from the juvenile so it can sneak back into the forest to rejoin its mother, convinced it's fooled another party of unsuspecting humans.
surprisingly wholesome takes from the cryptid community here
I was browsing Ravelry, as ya do, and I noticed that Audrey Borrego has made all her patterns free because she's no longer designing professionally. I've only made one sweater she designed (the Atlantica originally published in PomPom), but I remember enjoying knitting it, and she's got some neat lace and color work patterns you might want to check out because, I mean, free now!
I'm dying.
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.
I got an A on that paper.
Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.
This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.
You will never learn to bullshit.
And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.
For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.
I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.
Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.
I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.
For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.
Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."
Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.
And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.
I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.
On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.
It's been 16 years since I took that test.
I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.
But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.
The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.
This is also a good string on this topic.
For the foreseeable future, and maybe for the rest of your life, the first question anyone is going to ask themselves after reading a written document from you is "did they really write this?" And unfortunately, this is an easy question to answer, because GPT has a very distinctive tone and if you don't read or write much you can't detect it enough to fudge it.
As a professor, I know when my students are using GPT. The problem is proving it beyond a doubt. So you can get away with this sort of thing in high school and college, but someday you're gonna have to write a cover letter or an email to a client. And then you'll either have to write something for the first time in your life, or you'll rely on your old friend GPT, and either way your cover letter will get thrown in the garbage.
There are no academic integrity committees or redos in the HR office. Hard as it may be to believe, we're giving you these assignments for a reason.
Whoever runs dropouts instagram is killing me in the comments under their video announcing that the subscription price is changing
