I’m just gonna come out and say the controversial thing that’s been weighing on me for months now.
I am visibly Trans and I experience transphobia on a regular basis. I have never once been misgendered or made to feel uncomfortable by a member of my Jewish community.
I am visibly Jewish and I experience anti-Judaism on a regular basis. I am consistently devalued, shunned, and othered by Queer people in Queer spaces and Queer communities because of my Jewish identity.
LGBTQIA+ people need to do better to accommodate religious minorities. Anti-Jewish sentiment due to Queer-based religious trauma isn’t any better, kinder, or more moral than anti-Jewish sentiment due to white supremacy.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is not untalented but he shouldn’t be making billion dollar disney movies or whatever. This guy should be in a garage making deeply earnest but unpolished rap opera concept albums and posting them online for a niche fanbase of no more than 100,000 too-online theatre nerds. Hiring him to make forgettable paint-by-numbers radio friendly disney princess pop is trying to raise devil’s pupfish in captivity. You have to stop giving him money and let him go make cringe in his natural habitat or you’re never going to get anything good.
The thing with the writers strike and actors strike is that. You ALL have to start realizing that the cool creative jobs they paint as “glamorous” in the media are actually ALL struggling in a big way, and basically everyone below “Huge Household Name” is actually often having to spend THEIR OWN DAY JOB MONEY to keep trying and trying to “break into” that household name status.
Like, im a cartoonist. Just starting out, but already fairly successful! My comics are sold in a handful of states, i sell out of my works, and i even have been featured as a finalist in a couple awards shows AND have pieces bought by a cartooning museum. I still barely make a couple hundred per month off it IF IM LUCKY, and spend almost as much trying to print more. Oh yes, i have to print my own comics! And working for a big comic company, they generally require you to bring some level of your own equipment. Heck, even if you make it “big” as a cartoonist…you wanna know how much you get paid if your comic that you spent months of back-breaking labor on is adapted into a marvel movie? A one-time check for $5000. Out of the BILLIONS those movies make, in perpetuity for eternity, you are given $5k. Pre-tax. Pre-agent. Pre-lawyer. (Yes we have agents and lawyers too, quite often). There’s hardly any cartoonists who can afford to quit their day jobs, and even those who do are never living above the lower middle class range.
Now obviously cartooning is not the same as acting or writing, but my point is that we NEED yall to stop thinking just because you see our work as cool that we are living some dream life!!! Basically the only people who are living these dream lives you think of are CEOs of major companies and the occasional celebrity. The rest of us are just out here, struggling to survive just like you, we just happen to have a side hustle which is Kinda Cool.
Too many people are forgetting these things too quickly:
-SESTA/FOSTA passed. Despite the many, many warnings of sex workers.
-A bunch of apps started their censorship policies because Apple directly threatened their revenue if they didn’t promise to cut down on the amount of porn on their sites
-MasterCard and VISA tried to outright stop processing OnlyFans work SPECIFICALLY because of the association with sex work, and no other feasible financial reason.
There is not a sudden regressive movement among individual people. Free The Nipple didn’t fade into obscurity because people didn’t care. It was stopped. By policies. By laws. By arrests. By censorship. These things have been purposefully put in place by companies and politicians. They saw the work we were trying to do wrt bodily autonomy, sexual liberation, and sexual freedom, and they forcibly put a stop to it.
Do Not Let HR do this to you. It is not illegal to talk about wages in the work place. I did and got a 12% raise!
True info. Now let me add something: The power of documentation. (I was a long time steward in a nurses union.)
Remember: The “‘E” in email stands for evidence.
That cuts both ways. Be careful what you put into an email. It never really goes away and can be used against you.
But can also be a powerful tool for workplace fairness.
Case 1: Your supervisor asks you to do something you know is either illegal or against company policy. A verbal request. If things go wrong, you can count on them denying that they ever told you to do that. You go back to your desk, or wherever and you send them an email: “I just want to make sure that I understood correctly that you want me to do xxxxx” Quite often, once they see it in writing, they will change their mind about having you do it. If not, you have documentation.
Case 2: You have a schedule you like, you’ve had that schedule for a while, it works for you. Your supervisor comes to you and says “We’re really short-handed now and I need you to change your schedule just for a month until we can get someone else hired. It’s just temporary and you can have your old schedule back after a month.” A month goes by and they forget entirely that they made that promise to you. So, once again, when they make the initial request, you send them an email “I’m happy to help out temporarily, but just want to make sure I understand correctly that I will get my old schedule back after a month as you promised.” Documentation.
[Image ID: Text reading: In the middle of a busy clinic at our practice, I got pulled in by my manager to speak to HR, who must have made a special trip because she lives several states away, and told I was being 'investigated’ for discussing wages with my other employees. She told me it was against company policy to discuss wages.
Me; That’s illegal.
Them: (start italics) three slow, long seconds of staring at me blankly (end italics) Uh…
Me: That’s an illegal policy to have. The right to discuss wages is a right protected by the National Labor Relations board. I used to be in a union. I know this.
HR: Oh, this is news to me! I have been working HR for 18 years and I never knew that. Haha. Well try not do do it anyway, it makes people upset, haha.
Me: people are entitled to their opinions about what their work is worth. Bye.
I then left, and sent her several texts and emails saying I would like a copy of their company policy to see where this wage discussion policy was kept. She quickly called me back in to her office.
HR: You know what, there is no policy like that in the handbook! I double check. Sorry about the confusion, my apologies.
Me: You still haven’t given me the paper saying that we had this discussion. I am going to need some protection against retaliation.
HR: Oh haha yes here you go.
I just received a paper with legal letterhead and an apology saying there was no verbal warning or write up. Don’t even take their shit you guys. Keep talking about wages. Know your worth. /End ID]
At one of my old (shit) jobs my boss would continually come have these verbal discussions with me and would never put anything in writing I took to summarizing every discussion we had in email. Like “just to confirm that you asked me to do X by Y date and you understand that means I won’t be able to complete the previous task you gave me until Z date - 2 weeks later than originally scheduled - because you want me to prioritize this new project.
The woman would then storm back into my office screaming at me for putting the discussion in writing and arguing about pushing back the other project or whatever. At which point I would summarize that conversation in email as well. Which would bring her storming back in, rinse and repeat ad nauseum.
Anyway I cannot imagine how badly that job would have gone if I hadn’t put all her wildly unreasonable demands in writing. Bitch still hated me but she could never hang me for “missing deadlines” because I always had in writing that she’d pushed the project back because she wanted something else done first.
Paper your asses babes. Do not let them get away with shit. If they won’t put what they’re asking you to do in writing then write it up yourself and email it to them.
I’m not even particularly familiar with drag show culture, but looking at it from a distance, it really seems like the whole point isn’t about the cross-dressing, that’s just the kick that gets the first rock rolling. Like you take something that’s so deeply ingrained in someone’s head as something they are Not Allowed To Do, and definitely not be seen doing that, and then you’re given a whole freaking stage and an audience and someone going “honey, you’re not just allowed to, you’re kinda expected to. Like you can go as buckwild as you want but that’s what the audience is expecting to see here.”
And the next thought is “holy shit, what else can I do that I’m never allowed to do?” and from there on getting into the hobby is pretty much about going buckwild with the same kind of unrestrained, erratic giddy glee usually only known by dogs unleashed to run circles on an open field.
Guy On Bicycle gets so smeared he leaves his hat behind to escape!
All Victorian ADULTS. Awesome.
I love this so much. Someone slowed it down so it’s not the old-fashioned herky-jerky of old films, now someone colorized it…the past feels like the present because, well, people. Lookit them having fun! *beams at everyone*
I see US tech jounalists on Mastodon, once again, charging against the EU for “damaging european users” by forcing companies to deliver “a subpar experience”. So let me paste something I wrote over there a few weeks ago:
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I keep seeing very important US tech journalist here talking about how Threads not launching in the EU is: - somehow shameful and a sign of how “you can’t innovate in the EU” - a problem for the EU, which will led us to creative interpretations of the GDPR to finally allow Meta to launch here.
And I think folks from the US tech scene really, really don’t understand several things:
1) how incredibly hostile the EU (and a good chunk of the European political parties) are to “big tech”. 2) how surprisingly immune to lobbying the EU Parliament appears to be. 3) how actually popular it’s that the politicians take a hard stance against macrocorps. Every time the European Commission has gone against big tech most the press and the people have cheered them as our champions against evil.
And I can’t even start describing how IMPORTANT for the future could be that people started being able to turn off YouTube algorithmic recommendations. I think YouTube shares with meta, pretty much 50/50, the responsibility for the global resurgence of fascism we have seen in the last decade.
