Jess (fka Dinru) | Late 20s | it/he/they [tme] | white, nonbinary, neurodivergent | USA
I like computers and magical girls and trying to make this hellworld a better place | Blog content is around PG-13 most of the time and might be poorly tagged
the most “fucking, fair enough i guess” response ive ever gotten to something i said was in the ER
me: hi, i need a rabies shot triage nurse: oh? why’s that? me: i got bitten by a bat triage nurse: what were you doing that you got bitten by a bat at 3 in the morning? me: removing a bat from my bedroom
im given to understand that it generally takes a lot to leave ER staff speechless, but it sure was a good 5 seconds before she thought of anything to say to that
@solipseismic i am FASCINATED to discover that you are a real person and not a fictional character because this has been tagged about you often enough that i assumed it was a fandom thing. is your story any more interesting than mine or did it just make a disproportionately massive impression on your fiend group?
i had to take a moment to compose myself this (fandom thing) is possibly the funniest thing anyone’s ever said about me. probably not more interesting but like 200% more stupid and so accordingly has made a bit of an impression on most of the people who know me
>be me (freshman living in college dorm)
>go for a walk in the beautiful spring weather
>there is a bat on the sidewalk in the middle of the day
>sidebar to note that at this point in life my bat knowledge solely consists of “usually flying” and “only comes out at night”
>how terrible this bat must be disoriented by the bright sunlight (middle of the day) and fell from where it was ……………………… roosting (on the sidewalk)
>if i put this bat in a box with some water and then bring it back out at night maybe it will have recovered enough from the. sun
>text my roommate asking him to put a towel in a box
>i pick up the bat (on the sidewalk) (middle of the day) (no gloves)
>one bat in a box later i log onto tumblr dot com and post something along the lines of: does anyone know what to do in case of accidental bat acquisition
>mutual from area with many bats: you need to get rabies shots IMMEDIATELY
>i have no car (freshman in college dorms)
>surely it isn’t that serious
>thanks to google i now have 200% more bat knowledge and Boy I Fucked Up
>me to my mutual: it only bit me a few times and its teeth are so tiny it didn’t even break the skin i’m sure i’ll be fine :)
>i am of a curious nature so i google rabies symptoms
>oh! i need to get rabies shots!
so my ER experience was actually something pretty similar
me: hi, i need a rabies shot
triage nurse: oh? why’s that?
me: i got bitten by a bat
triage nurse: what were you doing that you got bitten by a bat in the middle of the day?
like honestly just give your non binary characters traditionally “gendered” features. just do it. it’s not like being androgynous ever stopped non binary characters from being misgendered.
frisk undertale and kris deltarune were androgynous and are only ever referred to by “they/them” and ppl are still arguing over how the “main character is not the player but their own person” message didn’t apply to their genders bc they refuse to wrap their head around different pronouns. raine owlhouse was paraded around as “disney’s first ever nb representation” by everyone and their mother but bc they have short hair other countries dub them as male. this also happens to most anime nb characters bc of how japanese pronouns work. halara raincode literally has the color scheme of the non binary flag AND their in-game profile says that they, and i quote “have no specified gender” AND several characters remark on it in the actual game but bc theyre voiced by a female voice actor ppl still call them a woman.
like literally at this point just give your nb characters huge tits and a massive beard. if ppl refuse to accept the existence of non binary characters in media, then there is no way to make a character non binary “enough” to convince them otherwise. no matter how much you hammer in their androgyny in an attempt to detach them from “male” and “female,” there will be people determined to assign gender roles to any trait you give your character.
creators being hesitant to give their non binary characters traits that could be associated with a binary gender is why every goddamn genderqueer character that the creator wants you to take seriously in popular media has shoulder length hair and a board-flat figure and a perfectly neutrally pitched voice. like. just do what you want at this point. the character is non binary because your story said so and people who misgender them would have done that no matter how androgynous they look.
I like how it’s described as a union could “cripple American Capitalism” when more precisely it’s just that a union would be so powerful as to force WalMart (or any other company) to pay their workers like human beings. That’s not going to break Walmart. They’ll barely notice.
They’ve successfully convinced us that the unions are the greedy monsters. For so many years, the companies have painted unions as “we want you to pay janitors three million dollars a year and if you don’t we’ll set your stores on fire”.
But it’s more like “We want you to take an almost imperceptible fraction of your bountiful profits and use it to make your employees’ live marginally better, and maybe give them medical benefits, y’know, so they don’t die”.
Big companies did not stop hiring ten year olds to work in coal mines because they just woke up one day and said “my god, we’re monsters”. They did it because their workers stood together and said “really, enough of this crap”.
Companies are not going to give people raises unless it’s economically necessary that they do so. Anything they can do to lower their expenses, and raise their profits, they are going to do. And no one person can stop them.
But thousands of people, millions of people? Better chances.
I am dead serious: If you are a Walmart employee, at any level and in any store — like if you are a high school kid with a part time job stocking shelves — message me any question you have about unions. Like ask me “What’s a union” if you want. I will explain it to you.
I am a grievance chair for a white collar union whose workplace only unionized within the last five years and whose management fought as every step of the way, but in the end we fucking won. It can be done, and I can tell you how.
Just another reminder that Walmart Germany was a spectacular fail because of ver.di (which is a national service trade union that has it’s control over almost all trade and service companies in Germany) among other things.
Like, ver.di essentially came up to the CEO of Walmart Germany and was like “Hi, welcome, we wish you the best and that we can work together well :)” and the dude was like “hahaha no” and tried to pull the american concept here so ver.di pulled out a list of all the breaches of german law that Walmart was doing (underpaying workers, trying to avoid paying health care by using part-timers, trying to be open for more than 80 hours per week, firing people on short notice without warning or exit payments, etc) and long story short, they got some massive hefty fines for it. They also set up a list of demands for the workers and organized national strikes to push them through, making the employees of 85 hypermarkets neatly stand in front of the store doors with signs, whistles and chants (and certainly not the “Wallmart! Wallmart!” chant). In the end, that plus other things caused them to bail after 9 years with a gigantic loss (almost a billion just from sales) from one of the best retail markets in the world.
So all those issues like “no healthcare” or “work full-time and need food stamps” or “work on sundays and holidays” and shit? Unions are there to set their foot down against that for you. They are there to keep you safe from the corps wrath while fighting for your rights.
Cause if you, an individual, complain, they just fire you and laugh about it. A union is a collection of hundreds up to MILLIONS of people, supported by lawyers, going against employers for you.
