Your immune system getting weaker when you're stressed has got to be the dumbest stress response ever like oh you've been having a horrible terrible no good week? Let Me Make It Worse.

Im gonna shill for Marie Kondo again but this is why I find her books (yes, books, the TV show is fun but ultimately misses a lot of the core ideas) so good.

A lot of home org advice fully misses this aspect. Kondo not only acknowledges it, but leans into it. And ultimately this helps motivste me to keep my space tidy - it's really hard to me to keep on the nebulous goal of self-care, but much easier to get up and put things away if I envision my salt and pepper grinders as like, retail workers who are now standing in an empty shop (my dining table) and just wanna go home (the spice rack where they live).

Normie tidying process: that heater should be put away for summer! I mean, I'm not gonna need it

Me: well it's just chilling and also I can't be arsed.

Kondo: that heater has done a good job keeping you warm over winter and now it should get to go have a rest in the cupboard

Me: !! Sabbatical for my heater!! Thank you for your service sir and have a very nice break!

just saw a tiktok or something where the person was saying they did this and they were on a hike and they were like "i managed to get myself to go on this hike because i promised my boots we would go" and its like. OH YEAH. THAT.

hey man . ur doing great . high five .

unless its egregious, i'm not embarrassed to be fooled by ai. "oh i got lied to via something made by the Lying Machine the machine we made to Lie really well" like it's gonna happen it's no egg on your face. just be chill about it

don't get me wrong. it's always devastating always humbling. no one wants to fall for the lying machine it just sounds bad. but you can't dwell

you were born in 2006? what are you? a Honda Civic?

speculative biology/fantasy/fictionalized large predators that kill indiscriminately and don't eat what they kill drive me up the fucking wall. it is so, so dangerous and exhausting to be a large predator. you don't want to get into a fight, you don't want to exert too much energy, because if you fuck up you can die. and once you manage to kill something, you eat it. you don't go and kill the rest of the herd, you scare off the rest of the herd and eat the thing you killed until something scares you off.

did you know tigers only have a 10% success rate as hunters? TIGERS.

There are exceptions if a predator has a bunch of easy prey in a confined space (fox in a chicken coop for example) and some mammalian predators will kill extra and store or bury them for later if the pickings are easy.

So for fantasy/sci-fi creatures, this behaviour might be understandable if the predator gets into a small underground base or space station or what have you and the humans are unarmed and not much of a threat to it. But yeah, it should at least be shown to stop and eat one or two of its first victims before it begins stocking up the larder.

Concept: A creature gets into the underground base, eats a couple of people. But it doesn't stop there because the rest of you are sitting ducks and it plans to save you for later. Walls and other obstacles can't stop it, its claws tear through anything in its way. You reason that it's a fossorial predator, and it's clearly not built for a pursuit over open ground, so you and the other survivors make for the exit up to the surface...

And run straight into the ambush of a different kind of predator. It's far taller and has longer limbs than the other one, this one *is* built for the chase, but a whole group of you popping up out of the ground one by one means it barely has to put in effort at all. It will eat well for weeks.

You realise, too late, that this is no unfortunate coincidence. The surface predator was working with the burrower to drive you out here. These creatures may not be sapient, but they appear to have a strategy. Some kind of symbiotic relationship, perhaps?

You never stood a chance.

Anyway, you just met the sci-fi horror version of these guys:

[ID: A photo of a coyote and an american badger walking together on a prairie. End ID]

My father is a classic layabout lazy bastard. He's the guy that people try to stereotype people on benefits as when they call them "dole bludgers". Sits in a filthy house all day whining that his wife won't clean it up, gets a great idea for a new business every few months and gives up after two weeks when it becomes clear that starting a business is hard, does everything he can to avoid doing a single scrap of work in life, uselessly drags his feet when the government forces him to actually do some.

Or at least, he was, until about three years ago, when he was sent off to do mandatory Work for the Dole at a volunteer organisation. He'd done a lot of Work for the Dole in the past, of course, and like most people who are forced to do a shitty job under the threat of starvation, was neither enthusiastic nor particularly useful. But in this particular place, he was given a job that he could do better than anyone else (he was one of 2 men working with a legion of elderly women, and the only person able to easily haul around the heavy goods that the organisation works with). He quickly found himself with a job he could understand, he could see the clear utility in, and that his coworkers greatly valued him for. He started arriving on time every day, putting in the effort, getting shit done. He started caring about the results. And when his Work for the Dole time was up, he kept volunteering.

He's one of two people paid to work in that warehouse now (the other person being the manager), and he's a lynchpin of activity there, their sole regular and reliable source of physical labour. When he takes holidays, they have to plan around it, because his consistent hard work has become such a critical asset to their work. And he's not taking nearly as many holidays as he should -- he works extra unpaid hours, lifts loads that are somewhat heavier than he should be lifting, shoulders the work of others when they need breaks, and we all have to urge him to take more days off for his health since he's not a young man any more. For my entire life this man has been a pile of old mud in the shape of a human, and the instant he found a job that fulfils his needs, he won't fucking stop. He's gonna die in that warehouse and die happy.

usually when you have a stomach bug your body is like yes sir we'll get this punk out of here, 48 hours tops. then you get a cold and your body is like I dunno ... between a few hours and eleven months ... maybe a week minimum .... you gotta understand we're short staffed

tbf to the body, stomach bugs are easier to flush out since they are already in The System That Flushes Things Out From The Body, and that includes BOTH ends.

with a cold you gotta wait for the macrophages in your blood to start Eating Everything, and they are. not big. it takes them a while. please be more considerate of your macrophages in the future, theyre doing their best

I've got to find myself more macrophage

Now Hiring: macrophages

Fake job listings out of control.

I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything

"I got that dog in me"

The dog in question:

Sigourney Weaver as Gwen DeMarco in Galaxy Quest (1999)

this may be an Unpopular Opinion (even on tumblr) but like the 8-hour workday is just Too Gotdamn Long

like even sitting in an office for eight hours a day isn’t particularly pleasant (or healthy, as we are beginning to see) but when we’re talking about doing *actual work* for that same amount time it gets pretty fucking brutal

doing literally *anything* (even leisure activities) for eight hours straight tends to be less than enjoyable but when we’re talking about things like construction, landscaping, factory work, and hell, even foodservice and retail, eight hours is a fucking ETERNITY

i might just be a lazy weak-willed bitch but honestly i think i’m not entirely wrong

this was being worked towards by leftist labor unions way back in the day after the time of FDRs new deal. people in the 40s and 50s were already starting to realize that we no longer actually needed an 8 hour work day or even a 5 day work week.

even with the comparatively primitive factory tech of the time we were already creating a huge amount of excess production back then and companies were making massive amounts of profit. So it already stood to reason that companies should either let their employees work less and thus each employee could work a shorter shift without lowering the yearly compensation of each employee, or in cases where businesses provide an active service they would shorten the shift but hire more people to cover the necessary operating time. but of course that would mean less money for people at the top so companies fought back hard and we ended up with nixon’s bullshit and so on and now its considered the norm for us to spend the vast majority of our lives doing work that really just amounts to waste. 

The IWW realised this and were fighting for it all the way back in the 1930s. This is a take with a lot of historical and theoretical grounding, OP, so you’re standing in good stead.

I’d also like to add it’s also been studied and scientifically proven that after 6 hours, we have an extremely noticeable drop in productivity. Sweden saw nothing but benefits from a 6-hour work day, including worker productivity, happiness, and half the amount of sick-leave used when applied to nurses.

https://onlinemasters.ohio.edu/the-six-hour-workday/

Just gonna add that the IWW is still kicking and basically anyone who is not an employer can join.

You can only reblog this on the 3st of January

the 3st huh?

Harry: Why do you look like that? Chakotay, laying face-first on the floor: Like what? Tom: Like you’re dead. Chakotay: It’s because I’m dying. Leave me here to perish. Tuvok: Commander Chakotay accidentally called the Captain “babe” in front of the entire bridge crew today. Chakotay: *sobs into the floor*

David Lynch's "Angriest Dog in the World".

every major structural social problem right now is basically "we don't have enough skilled workers on the ground" and the reason is always "well we've been intentionally underpaying and understaffng them for decades to increase corporate profits" and somehow the news always just mentions the "shortage" without digging into the cause

air travel is a mess? shortage of air traffic controllers - for some mysterious reason

logistics a mess? shortage of truck drivers - for some mysterious reason

public transit can't meet demand? shortage of bus drivers - for some mysterious reason

We even mysteriously have shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers... FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON

FUCKING PAY PEOPLE AND HIRE ENOUGH STAFF