Real Deal Space Bird Energy (C.A. MacLean)

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24 Oct 2024

www.amazon.com/dp/B09FF7XY66 My #scifi action/adventure epic Architects Of The Illusion is right here in physical & digital! Sweeping battles, derelict stations, emotionally compromised space birds and cosmic entities who are making life more metaphysically complex than said space birds would like.

Congratulations to all Brazilians who aren't revanchist fascist freaks on a good night

If they fill out the red light district with mannequins those are propstitutes

Watching It Follows again. The movie is deliberately set up so that it's impossible to pin down a time period (lots of 60s/70s/80s aesthetics, then you have things like that weird clamshell e-reader) but it makes It Follows feel very liminal, before we even started really using that term.

Guess forgetting to code switch around a straight person who then promptly talks over you and subjects you to one of the stupidest takes of all time about all queer people is like an At Least Once queer rite of passage

The incident in question was two years ago but still lives in my head because it was how do you remember to breathe levels of so insidiously conceited and stupid

Tickles me how the root of 'question' is 'quest'. It's a verbal adventure

I love how the autumn always puts me deep in an Iron Maiden mood. Maybe it's pure memory association, since most of their albums in the time that I've been into them have dropped in September.

That one season I worked at a Halloween shop, nobody found out who was moving the corsets, riding crops etc and making an ersatz BDSM section but it was me

Last night I dreamed I was at a Galneryus concert and the merch table was selling Criterion movies. take me back

Mass Effect deepened my love of sci-fi, influenced me to become a better writer, and gave us a generational epic for the ages. The trilogy does tell a complete story, but Bioware and its creatives who gave that to us didn't deserve for their partnership to end at the hands of totalitarian oligarchs.

I hope "Maggie" grows up to create all sorts of dark and weird and cool things and looks back on this incident as the first moment she realized people who try to shame your creativity or tell you what not to create don't deserve to be listened to.

LC von Hessen 𓆙 💀@lcvonhessen.bsky.social

So the "advice" doled out in this column makes me INCREDIBLY fucking angry as a former kid who was repeatedly taken to task by teachers for "inappropriate" drawings, culminating in a 9th-grade suspension spurred by Columbine paranoia and residual Satanic Panic. Arionne here says that was JUSTIFIED.

According to the stats I've now listened to Unleash The Archers' Faster Than Light 587 times since it came out in 2020, and that's just counting plays on this player. holy

Had pizza and watched witches (Rob Zombie's The Lords Of Salem)

My sunset right now

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

October 19th. This marks the seven year anniversary of when I parted ways with a very toxic, abusive job. Let's talk about the building blocks of a non-functional workplace. (It's going to get darker than you think.) Appropriate vibes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9Hy...

Our location closed down, was leased by another furniture company, which itself then closed, and now the building stands empty. But we took a bad place, and we made it a good place, because we had each other, and because of that, the laughs inside those walls outweighed the frustrations.

I hope K's doing alright. I'm with a much more functional company now. I no longer dread the thought of the impending workday like I did when I was with them.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

Head office are all in. They would mainline the flavor-ade with a smile. They're the type who - I have seen this - will attack and insult customers who give them bad reviews on google or whatever. Seeing these ghouls do that, it was embarrassing to be associated with that shit.

And I have no doubt that if I were to put my story on glassdoor or google or w/e, they would have tried their damndest to immediately discredit me as 'a disgruntled former employee' and claim it was all lies, but ALSO they would go after the one of us from our store who is still with the company.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

Basically, the owner's insane financial trap for his managers leaves them on the hook for virtually unpayable amounts of money to him for every bit of shrink or even truck-damaged losses etc. It's fine-printed into their contracts that that money needs to be paid back before they exit the company.

So what I didn't know at the time is that during those autumn months, K was working for free the entire time. I believe we have a word for when someone is contractually bound into doing labour without compensation. The company's owner put K into a bespoke (I hope) position of modern slavery.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

Nobody can endure what K was doing for long. In August, a bad medical diagnosis made something snap in her, and she just disappeared one day when I rolled in to work, leaving her store keys and a resignation letter. That was one of the longest days of my life.

But this is about what happened after. That autumn, she did come back, working at our store, not as a manager, just...doing things. If I'd known what was really going on in real time, I...don't know, I might have said something, or...who knows. We like to think we'd be brave when it counts.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

-by the time I came back in summer 2018 after a winter layoff, K was working six days a week with us, AND six NIGHTS a week at the gas station just next door, just to make ends meet. She'd duck out in the middle of eleven hour shifts just to be able to sleep. This is insane and unsustainable.

We really were friends. I remember my birthday that summer, K took us all to Boston Pizza and we had a great night. The summer prior, we were all at her place for burgers. Just feeling normal, enjoying life, like what was about to happen wasn't about to come crashing down on us.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

But instead I'd like to tell you about the kind of human toll this business environment takes on the people who live through it, and the darkest thing I've seen this fucking company do. Let me tell you about my first manager. We'll call her K.

K took pains to run a functional store. She paid enough staff for us to do our thing properly (and in hindsight protected us from the toxic nature of head office's bullshit), and with that pay coming out of HER pay...

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

Or perhaps how the other stores would be so desperate to hold on to their own stock that when we would call to have stuff delivered via the company network for a customer order, they'd lie and gaslight in order to Gollum the shit out of their precious instead of sending that second-to-last lounger

Or the fucking time a heavily pregnant woman came in sobbing because the delivery team was refusing to do the assembly job she'd paid for and needed by that night for a baby shower because the delivery head and my manager were having a kitty slap fight over some stupid shit

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

Or the time the company owner and the landlord were embroiled in a kitty slap fight over email regarding who paid for the repairs to our broken heating in the dead of winter, meanwhile I'm inside in a winter coat and typing up ad copy in thick gloves

Or how my manager at the time I was let go, had (before my time) fallen off the loading dock, got badly hurt, and the owner basically pressganged him back to work before he was fully healed, so when I knew him he walked with a cane in his twenties

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

In fact, after I was gone, when the store re-opened after the covid closures, my former coworker had to do TWO WEEKS WITHOUT A BREAK OR A DAY OFF because the manager was on paternity leave, while head office mused about "trying to get someone else in there to help him".

I could talk about things stemming from being a detached building in a shit mall lot, like the time a hard drugs dealer set up literal shop on our back porch, or the time a methhead came into the store smoking meth and then it turned out he had a warrant out on him for assaulting shopkeepers

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

But the skeleton staffing. Here it's against employment law to work a full eight hour shift without a break. I did that tons because I was the only one there on many days. Family member brought me lunch but I wasn't technically on break, if someone came in I had to see to that.

In the summers (it was a patio furniture store) I frequently did eleven hour shifts with the extended hours, which isn't unheard of in fields like nursing/medicine, but in retail is a byproduct of not having enough people to cover the hours. At least we got a break on those days.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

-that the store managers had to decide between running a functional store and being able to feed their families. This led to across-the-board skeleton staffing. For example, one winter there was just me and the manager.

The manager position was a trap: they were the owner's financial scapegoats. Every bit of breakage and theft and any other form of loss, in addition to paying their associates out of their own pay instead of company money, was held against the store managers financially. We will come back to this.

youtube.com2 MINUTES NOTICE -(OFFICIAL VIDEO) // HELLUVA BOSSYouTube video by Vivziepop

The people I actually worked with at store level were great. Amazing. We weren't just coworkers who got on, we were actual friends. But the company itself was structured such that it wasn't functional. It was destined to eat itself.

The fish rots from the head down; everything was structured so that the owner enriched himself at the expense of the stores being able to run properly. Every store manager had to pay the associates out of their OWN salary. That meant-

To the girl who came into my store tonight in a #HelluvaBoss hoodie and I got to talk about the new season IRL: thank you that legit made my night

She was like "HAVE YOU SEEN EPISODE 3 YET" and, were places reversed that would probably be my exact response too

Mentioning Dirty Bird by name in the face space was nowhere near my bingo card for tonight's shift

Worthwhile thread. With family in WV, I've been around Harpers Ferry plenty; my aunt still lives on a trail that once had a house used as a waypoint on the Underground Railroad. It was only torn down relatively recently, maybe a decade ago;

Erik Loomis@erikloomis.bsky.social

This Day in Labor History: October 16, 1859. John Brown and a group of followers invade the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today WV) to start a war and end slavery. Let's talk about this key moment in American labor history!

I remember the house being dilapidated when I was a kid/teen, naturally, having stood in disrepair since the 1800s. But looking back, those old bones shouldered the weight of history. Of the fears, desperation, and flickers of hope within those walls. Fuck the Confederates and their modern spawn.

Having a personal arcade (as in the arcade cabinets) in your house lmao

Eric Alper @thatericalper.com

Thinking about how ever since the 90s, between Iron Maiden, Bruce's solo band and Blaze's solo band, we've had at least two Maidens in play at any given time. Feeling pretty rich in hindsight as an enjoyer of That Sound

So let's say you have a character who is plant-based. Like a forest elemental or something, idk. So let's say that character is into BDSM as a sub. Would that make them... collared greens?

Laugh tracks were/are such a bizarre concoction. Imagine if horror movies had scream tracks to let you know when to be scared

BTW my Thanksgiving leftovers this week lasted longer than that press secretary's career before she was fired for being too stupid even for a literal kakistocratic regime