“There aren’t enough hours in a day.” There are actually. The problem is that we think 40 hour work weeks are an unavoidable fact of life.
The problem is that everyone has to work 8 hours, pretty much no exceptions, and with getting ready time + (unpaid) lunch + commute, “8 hours” is actually anywhere between 9 and 12, every single day, with more work to do when you get home because our society and culture was built around having one member of the household home full time and nothing has changed now that almost everyone works.
No wonder Americans are reliant on DoorDash and fast food, there’s no time or energy to cook. No one wonder mental and physical health are in shambles, many just spent all day sitting in fluorescent lights with little to no stimulation. “Just wake up earlier” “Just meal prep”… these are ok short-term, individual solutions, but the broader, systemic issue is obvious. We aren’t built for this. There’s no work-life balance. Genuinely, I think if our culture could normalize a shorter work week, many individuals’ biggest problems would simply evaporate.
I just wanna emphasize that part about how there was an assumption that there was another adult (a wife) at home who was taking care of all the home things and it was just one adult lworking a 40 hour week to support the family financially. If we were to translate that into today’s modern context, it means that each partner should be working about 20 hours a week, if they’re each contributing to the workload of household things approximately equally. 
The 40 hour work week was originally a really great win for labor… And as with most things that were developed that long ago, it is hideously out of date.
Ultimately, you can like or dislike any character for whatever arbitrary reason. It’s neither activism nor a moral failing, don’t let the internet convince you otherwise. On the other hand, if you consistently find yourself lacking any interest in the, e.g., female characters of the media you engage with that may be a sign of some unconscious biases you need to examine.
You say “be aware of your biases” once and all of a sudden your notes become filled with the most un-selfaware people on the whole website tripping over each other to justify themselves.
every piece of “"autistic representation”“ in hollywood sucks not just because of the infantalization and inspiration porn but because movie executives always fail to realize the real universal autistic experience: spending your childhood slowly and unfalteringly realizing all of your friends not so secretly hated and/or merely tolerated you at best and you’ve missed every social signal about it ever
there is nothing quite as damaging as realizing you were the only one not invited to a classmate’s birthday party. the only one left out of yearbook photos. the only one not told about an in-joke or groupchat or anything of the sort. once you experience it even once it fucks with your head for the rest of your days
the variation on this is being treated like you’re everyone’s weird and vaguely amusing autistic pet rather than a human person with independent agency and autonomy, which. is equally psychologically damaging but like in a different genre of way
everyone leaving personal anecdotes on this post is making me so sad. do you guys need, like, a hug? therapy? warm milk and cookies and a big stuffed animal, maybe??
My eighth grade homeroom teacher once did something that permanently altered how I saw not just her, but all women whose personality was ‘I’m well-meaning and nurturing and love kids uwu’. She knew an autistic boy in our class fixated on spoken word poetry and poetry jams and loved writing. She knew damn well everyone thought he was a loser. She found his attempts at sincerely conveying his emotions via poetry incredibly funny. He thought she supported his poetry writing and his aspirations of being a poet.
She had him perform in front of the entire homeroom, who burst into laughter and cackled at him like he was a comedian and not someone performing a piece about his ongoing struggles with depression. I sat there, too stunned to even process what was happening, as he performed at the request of a neurotypical adult he trusted and that adult as well as 19 of his peers laughed their asses off at him. Myself and 3 others at least didn’t laugh, but I don’t think that lessened the damage any.
Because, to be clear, it did hit him that people were laughing at him. Not 'laughing with him’, as the teacher claimed later, no, people were laughing at the funny loser talking about serious things and trying to project his voice and do inflections and lmao lol what a loser what a freak lololol. He tried to tell himself the teacher didn’t know that would happen. When I confronted her after class about that being messed up and bullying, however, she had said - with him in earshot - that it was funny and I needed to lighten up.
He spent the rest of the semester visibly depressed, withdrawn, not talking to anyone, angrily asserting that poetry was stupid, which expanded to literature being stupid. Our English Literature teacher was also our homeroom teacher, and she spent the next three months confused on why he was doing the absolute bare minimum to pass or alternately not doing anything at all. She could not wrap her mind around how having 20 people laugh at him to his face might be related to this. To this day, over a decade later, she will deny that she had any part in his unhappiness. Kids around school who weren’t in our homeroom knew about what happened and quoted lines from his poem at him as a funny meme. Kids in the lunchroom would put on reenactments of it for their friends, to cackles and laughs. Bits of it ended up written in pen and pencil on a variety of surfaces.
I saw one line, which people meme’d to death, written on the wall in the bathroom at the local theater. (We were the rare small town with an old theater at all, an ancient family-owned one that inexplicably continues on to this day.) I tried scrubbing it off, but it didn’t work. I took long enough trying to get to it that the theater manager came in. He asked me what was going on. The autistic kid’s other major interest, I knew, was film. He came to this theater all the time. He was going to see this if it didn’t get covered and he was already being heckled on a daily basis. So I told the theater manager about the whole thing. The performance, the mockery, all of it.
"Mrs. Johnson knew he was going to do it? And she didn’t stop him?” he asked at one point, to which I replied, “Mrs. Johnson came up with the idea in the first place.”
He stared at me, absolutely horrified. “That woman is a monster.”
I think about that a lot. Mrs. Johnson was nice, blonde, blue-eyed, thin, white, had a normal marriage to her high school sweetheart, taught Sunday school at her church, allegedly became a teacher because she cared about kids so much, showed genuine empathy for other kids when they were going through something, dressed nicely, and was the ideal small town woman who hadn’t left her small town she grew up in but instead accepted a teaching job there even when the pay was low. She was anti-bullying and anti-racism and stood up for me when another kid got mad one of my stories in English class mentioned gay people. I’m sure she thinks of herself as a very good person. She certainly does not fit the model of what most people think of when they imagine a bully.
She also deliberately orchestrated an autistic 13 year old being mocked by a group for her own entertainment and then let the mockery continue unabated without a word of objection for four months.
The theater manager, Ronnie, is not conventionally attractive, he’s aroace and therefore single by choice, he’s not extroverted, he moved to this small town from out of state - something people here hold against him as if he’d committed a crime as an unspoken 'you will never be one of us’, and he is outwardly unexpressive a lot of the time, with a flat affect and lack of expressions.
He outright banned the next kid he caught writing that stupid meme’d line onto the bathroom stall. He drove across town to get paint and painted over the writing I’d been trying to get rid of that very night.
I’m not autistic, but I have ADHD. I have a lot of similar problems. I think, a lot, about Mrs. Johnson wanting my permission to show my writing to people. I’d told her beforehand not to and that if she did, I would be getting my parents involved. I think about how that could have gone down for me, how she said I was a good writer and she just wanted to help me. I think about how many other neurodivergent kids probably felt safe with her and the amount of damage she might’ve caused over her 43 years of teaching. To this day she denies she ever did anything wrong. It was a joke. Kids these days are so sensitive.
When the autistic kid she’d used like an animal performing a fun trick for her amusement became so depressed that he first stopped going to school, then tried to kill himself, that was the response: “He’s too sensitive.”
Not “maybe I was wrong”, not “and from now on I promise to come down hard on bullying”, nothing else. He was too sensitive.
Nothing gets me on guard now like very nice, sweet, loving neurotypical women who assure you that they’re anti-bullying and they love kids and they’re here to help. Having completely convinced themselves that they’re always in the right and always good people, they are capable of astonishing cruelty, whose consequences they will not stop and whose victim they will never see as human. When I corrected her spelling once, she got visibly upset for a moment. When kids quoted lines at this kid to make fun of him, for months, she could not see why this might be upsetting, why having your poetry about your depression turned into a meme by kids you spent 8 hours a day with might hurt in any way.
He was 13. She was in her late 50’s. Or, as my mom put it, she was old enough to know better. Many neurotypicals assured me at the time it wasn’t bullying, it was just a joke. Ronnie, undiagnosed but likely neurodivergent, inarguably hit upon the actual problem here: “That woman is a monster.”
It’s just that when the monster looks 'normal’, we call the monster’s actions something else. Bullying is such an ugly word. Let’s reframe it as comedy instead.
You’d think an English Literature teacher would know changing what something is called doesn’t change what it is.
I was going to put this in the tags but it expanded.
Anyway this is like the most insidious part of being an autistic child. The adults you’re supposed to be able to trust are the worst of your bullies every. single. time. And worse, unlike your schoolmate Brayden who’s still thirteen or whatever, they have actual authority and power over you that they love to wield.
I was lucky enough to not really be the center of attention, because I have the 'good’ autism that makes you succeed at academics and quietly read after you finish your homework. My best friend Tori was a flaming queer weaboo furry who was unable to hide those things about him self well enough to avoid scrutiny in our tiny, rural, conservative school.
In freshman gym class we had to run laps around our outdoor track in ninety degree (Fahrenheit) weather and ridiculous humidity because we live in a subtropical climate. I, having specced more into jock than nerd, finished before my friends and milled about the bleachers watching them finish. Above me, the substitute teacher, an absolutely miserable woman who loathed all of humanity, was openly and loudly mocking my best friend with a gaggle of volleyball girls who she’d let sit out of the lap running.
The next day I went to our actual teacher about this and she was just like “Well maybe he should try not being so weird.”
Having to wait a long time while in short-term waiting is so exhausting. I have trouble not getting angry at people who unintentionally put me in that state.
I hate mobile game ads where they deliberately play the game poorly, I hate them so much because it WORKS on me. I get that impulse like “oh come on the right move is so OBVIOUS, just fucking-” and I catch myself because I don’t WANT to play the fucking going-through-gates-to-increase-number game, I just want THEM to stop playing it WRONG where I can SEE IT
Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.
Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:
If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.
Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that’s rolling out.
if you want to turn off as much ai crap in firefox as possible, from this post on mozilla’s connect forum, you should also set all these to false using about:config:
browser.ml.enable
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
to get rid of the revamped sidebar, which is also trying to incorporate ai:
sidebar.revamp
unrelated anyone got browser recommendations for when we have to jump ship from firefox
and now keep in mind that all the other browsers are doing this shit, too, but you can’t reconfigure them as with Firefox
on A for Effort’s last point, is there any browser that offers users even half as much control as Firefox? if so, I’d like to try it as a backup
European: Americans will be like I’m going to watch a whore movie and eat a hamburger slathered in lard
Americans: it’s true I do do this.
American: British people will be like alright I’m off to eat some wheezy bangers (beans and bread out of a can)
Brit: I’ve seen this reblogged by several people I normally trust so: How mocking British cuisine and dialect has a long classist history and how it became frighteningly normalized on an American (uniquely cruel, uniquely ignorant) internet: a thread. 1/?
So anyways with the rapid rise of fascism I feel it’s a good time to point out that it’s perfectly legal to follow unjust orders slowly, badly, or inefficiently
Breaking the law, even an unjust law, has consequences that not all can afford. But also a very large number of us are also very stupid, or very confused, or very lazy, and so it’s not unreasonable that someone at the bottom of the chain of command might make a typo, or misplace some paperwork, or leave a Friday afternoon email for Monday morning.
When something goes wrong, or an operation slows down, because a low-level worker somewhere sent a package to the wrong address or left someone on hold for an hour or didn’t fill out a particular form correctly- Do you immediately assume malicious intent? Or do you usually just brush it off as some underpaid idiot being bad at their job?
You also gotta not brag about it. Keep your political opinions on the down low. Be noncommittal or ignorant or undecided. Say things like “I’ve never heard of that”, “where did you hear that?” or “that’s interesting, I heard a conflicting story from here, how weird”. Never be outwardly confidant of what you know. When there is a silence, don’t fill it- leave the space and let the other fill it for you. That’s how you get information, that’s how you find sources, that’s how you reduce the value of anything others get out of you.
Virtue signalling by wearing pins and ribbons and loudly declaring your place is not safe in some environments. It will place scrutiny on you and everything you touch. Nobody believes the guy who says “fuck my boss and everything he stands for” scratches the boss’s car by accident, even if it is an accident.
If you want to slow the march of a tank, filling the path with mud is going do more than laying down in front of it.
So fun fact: back during the Second World War, the U.S. Army, yes that U.S. Army, wrote an entire manual about how to sabotage a giant machine made of people that is destroying the world and everyone in it. It’s called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. What @teaboot describes is one of the most highly recommended strategies in there, because just about anyone can do it no matter what role they have in the machine, and it’s really remarkably effective.
The whole thing’s on the internet archive and I highly recommend reading it cover to cover.
ALT
