If you have been fired or your job is in danger for speaking ill of the dead, you should know a few things about US employment law.*

1. The term “wrongful termination” applies to you even if you do not have a contract or a union. It means that if your company does not have a policy that governs what employees can and cannot post on their personal social media accounts, and you belong to a protected class (literally everyone does, but that’s a lecture for another day (about how many discrimination claims cishet white guys can file)), you may be able to claim wrongful termination — I.e., that you were fired for a reason not pertaining to your ability to perform your job duties or follow your employer’s policies.

2. Most companies, large or small, shit their pants when they see a demand letter from an ex-employee who they know was fired for a bullshit reason.

3. The cost of a lawyer to get a quick consult and a demand letter on their letterhead is almost certainly way less that what your former employer may be willing to pay for clean underwear.

*I am not a lawyer but worked as an HR investigator in a past life. I want to share what I learned from a Master’s degree and 13 years of experience, but I have also been out of the game for a year and a half, and a fuck of a lot has changed in that time.

This is the most popular thing I’ve ever made now it’s on tumblr for everyone to see

One more thing before I go bury myself in a pile of blankets:

To everyone who voted Democrat for the first time, every former trump supporter who voted for Harris, everyone who voted for the first time, every Republican who did not want this result and voted for Harris, thank you.

I got a text from my cousin who has voted third party for decades who voted for a Democrat for the first time yesterday.

My aunt who voted for trump in 2016 and who's husband is a proud MAGA sent me a Snapchat late last night saying she is one of the women who secretly voted for Harris.

A former friend from college who used to be deep in the Republican party posted on Facebook yesterday that he voted for Harris.

I know you aren't the only ones.

I see that you tried.

Pro-writing tip: if your story doesn't need a number, don't put a fucking number in it.

Nothing, I mean nothing, activates reader pedantry like a number.

I have seen it a thousand times in writing workshops. People just can't resist nitpicking a number. For example, "This scifi story takes place 200 years in the future and they have faster than light travel because it's plot convenient," will immediately drag every armchair scientist out of the woodwork to say why there's no way that technology would exist in only 200 years.

Dates, ages, math, spans of time, I don't know what it is but the second a specific number shows up, your reader is thinking, and they're thinking critically but it's about whether that information is correct. They are now doing the math and have gone off drawing conclusions and getting distracted from your story or worse, putting it down entirely because umm, that sword could not have existed in that Medieval year, or this character couldn't be this old because it means they were an infant when this other story event happened that they're supposed to know about, or these two events now overlap in the timeline, or... etc etc etc.

Unless you are 1000% certain that a specific number is adding to your narrative, and you know rock-solid, backwards and forwards that the information attached to that number is correct and consistent throughout the entire story, do yourself a favor, and don't bring that evil down upon your head.

Editor here. Can confirm.

"Two centuries later" just triggers a mental note to check if timing is consistent throughout the book, because it may mean more time jumps are ahead. "200 years later", or heaven forbid, "201 years later" will have me draw up a time line. The more specific the number, the more critical people become.

Strange phenomenon. Well spotted, OP.

actually i think i might have an explanation for this from linguistics? i think folks get more nitpicky if you have specific numbers because of gricean maxims, specifically the maxims of quality and quantity

basically gricean maxims are a set of guidelines that we all carry in our heads that we expect other people to follow when having a conversation in good faith - i’m copying and pasting definitions from someone else because my attempts at summing up quality and quantity weren’t going so hot

so basically, when you put a rough number in a text, people think subconsciously ‘oh, the exact number isn’t important, because if it was they would tell me an exact number, so i don’t need to worry about this’, whereas if you put something precise in, people’s brains go ‘wait, they think i need to know this information so i’ll remember it, but now it’s later and they’ve said something that contradicts it, so at least one of those times they were lying and i must figure out which time it was’

Also: don't specify data storage sizes. Just, you know, don't.

that describes me now, let alone when i was seven

I can’t decide if

a) This dude has run into Obi-Wan before and is just like this asshole lives to ruin my commute or

b) He sees a guy hanging from a droid in traffic and is immediately like “must be a Jedi. Our fucking tax dollars at work”.

now see I like goats. goats use their brains to invent new crimes and formulate evil plots, which means they are often preoccupied with their own inner worlds and the logistical problems of how to maximize the impacts of their mischief. unlike rams. which have no interest in criminal activities more complicated than giving and receiving as many concussions as possible.

An extremely funny and 100% real thing about this difference is

When a goat buck and a ram get into a fight

The buck rears up on his hind legs, as bucks do, to be able to come down on his opponent with a sweep of his horns

And the ram um. Puts his head down and RAMS his opponent. At head level

So like um when a buck is reared up that puts his dick at head height.

Um so

A lot of bucks get their dicks rammed really hard by rams in fights its like it's. A thing. Super common

And this happened to one of my goat bucks once and he screamed and ran to a bush and cowered and cried and had a nosebleed. And I thought he was hurt but. He was not I sat with him for an hour or two to calm him down and o inspected him and he was. Fine like he was totally normal the next day. He was just like damn bro you punched my dick with your skull that SUCKED

Like goats are doing you know posturing and like, going for psychological warfare or whatever and rearing up to look big and be like YO MAN YOU WANNA GO???

And rams are already like oh yeah no we are doing this and they just don't even consider like they locked on 30 seconds ago they're doing it

OK I don't know if goat kids do this too cause I've never raised any, but lambs from the day they're born have to punch their mama's udder in order to get milk out, that's how lactation works in ewes, so the instinct is very firmly ingrained in their little baby lamb heads to "punch the dangly thing on adult's belly in order to dispense food." By the time they're big enough to wean, they will sometimes punch hard enough to lift their mama's back legs off the ground in their enthusiasm for food.

I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. One year I had to pull a few of the ram lambs two weeks early for reasons (nobody @ me they were fine) and because they were smaller than usual and there were only a few of them I didn't want to dump them straight into the pen with all the big guys to get beat up. Instead I put them in a smaller pasture and tossed the Boss Ram in with them as a babysitter because he's always been relatively gentle with lambs and letting The Boss get used to new guys alone usually helps with dominance fighting later.

So here is this big, dominant ram, undisputed king of his domain, locked in a pen with four of his newly weaned mini-mes who have never shared a pen with an adult male before. He's got the biggest horns and the hardest head on the farm, he's ready for anything.

Except. The lambs have no interest in bashing skulls. The lambs are hungry. The lambs see an adult with dangly bits in approximately the same place as their mama's dangly bits. Their entire three months of lived experience tells them punching those dangly bits results in food.

That ram, who had never before run from a fight, spent a very uncomfortable and confusing time being chased around the pen by four miniature copies of himself, all of them crying at the top of their lungs and very determined to punch him in the nuts.

Fucking SOBBING

for context of those who have never actually seen it and thus are having a hard time picturing this all- this is how a goat prepares a headbutt, exposing their junk for the sake of better angle of attack and adding gravity to the damage modifier potentially causing some wicked wounds

and this is the sheep version that prefers traction and distance

to further complicate things this is also how both of them say ‘i declare you friend, i wish to play’ as it genuinely makes them happy to bonk so this is by no means a ‘only when angry’ event

This is actually something I was thinking about is that rent can not exceed 1/3 of monthly minimum wage income.

So let's say state is on federal Minimum wage which is about 1100 a month so in that state no matter what rent on any place could not exceed 370 dollars.

Even if minimum wage was 15 dollars (about 2400 a month) max rent could be 800

So if landlord want more money they would have to fight bosses and state legislature to get it.

Like average Pennsylvania rent is 1400 and in this world if landlord wanted to charge that the would have to get minimum wage raised to 26 dollars an hour.

To bosses and landlords:

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

actually i'm reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.

There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.

Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.

Likes. Are. Worthless.

They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.

Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.

And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.

Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or "threatening" to withhold our fucking work (you're not entitled to it! it's ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we're well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We're just stating facts.

also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ???? 

these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio

not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts

pls… i beg of you… reblog creations… or else there won’t be any more creations

it makes me so sad to see so many creators talking in the tags about how they’re not creating as much because less and less people are interacting. this is proof that interaction is vital. this is proof that a lack of interaction leads to discouraged creators and leads to less creations. liking—and only liking—does not encourage creators.

and that’s because (1) the purpose of this website is to share things that bring us joy and (2) likes don’t share things or ensure something is seen by more people, not like they do on other sites. so, when so many people decide to only like a post and not share it (i.e. not reblog it), that tells the creator that those people didn’t think their hard work was worth sharing with others. that’s discouraging. 

and the creator isn’t the only one that gets something out of that. you get something, too. you get the joy of sharing something you like; that’s a meaningful experience for both you and for the creator. and that experience—that interaction—encourages the creator to create more, and so there’s more joy to be had for both you and the creator.

long story short, interaction (i.e., reblogging, which is interaction in its simplest form on this site) brings joy. it’s literally all about the joy, people. the joy in discovering and sharing and appreciating and marveling at creations. so please reblog—for everyone’s sake, including your own. 

REBLOG!! Support content creators!

first thing this morning i was innocently strolling down the sidewalk when before mine very eyes passed a nefarious passerby wearing a t-shirt that read, shit thou nought: [tumblr] girl. official tumblr font and everything. on this random, devastating sidewalk stranger, in the tiny non-english-speaking city in which I reside. when I tell you my hearts nearly thumped to a stop in unison, oh my bleeding stars

h- hearts? plural? it’s not medically advised to have more than one are they yours?

Of course they're gaud's hearts. The question you were trying to ask if they're gaud's biological hearts.