officialcreature

[officialcreature]

i think one of the best parts about being a teenager in the early to mid 2010s was that cigarettes were definitely not cool anymore and vapes hadn’t popularized yet so my lungs made it out of my peak impressionable years relatively unscathed

[officialcreature]

How are you gonna sell a shirt with a cartoon of hot bears lounging together and only sell it up to an XL?! That should be punishable by death!!

[officialcreature]

is shaving defiance? is promoting plastic surgery girl's girl behaviour? is makeup self care? are heels empowering? is reading apolitical? is voting feminist? is giving up on your career freeing? is starting a traditional family with 5 kids my own choice? is having rights feminist?

[officialcreature]

wouldn't it be awesome if you stopped using fatness as a visual shorthand for ineptitude/cruelty/greed/selfishness today

[officialcreature]

We have to start getting out of our cars, walking up to the people taking 20+ minutes in the pharmacy drive through and attacking them through their driver's side window

[officialcreature]

I feel like the debates around the right words to use often end up being because it's something people feel they can change, but sometimes the original words aren't even really bad. It's just they've taken on a negative context because of societal views of the people they apply to. So the new words eventually just become bad.

For an easy example I was told "waiter" is out and it's "server" now. Why? You're waiting on someone, you're serving them, basically the same thing, and everyone knows exactly what you mean and picture the same thing. Waiter only became bad because we look down on people in the service industry. Server will be equally bad one day at this rate. Nothing was changed

[officialcreature]

“I’ve seen the Punisher deal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw, also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.

My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity- it’s the self interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands both have been created to severe them. The man in the action movie looks one way, jthe man the food just shot in a traffic stop another. ” One day everyone will have always been against this, Omar El Akkad, page 84

[officialcreature]

Literally saw this immediately after posting my rant

It's so annoying that the problem is capitalism because everyone is so beaten into worshipping capitalism and fearing anything else that they don't care even when they agree something is caused by capitalism.

"Cost efficiency" and profit are responsible for:

- Shift to subscription based payment for everything

- "You need the app"

- Everything breaks faster because of planned obsolescence and it's just cheaper to use cheaper parts to build stuff

- Bad/automated customer service

- etc etc etc ec-fucking-cetera

And you can explain how seeking ever greater profit is responsible and people will agree and then just not care.

The worst part is all these things were small decisions. It was one person's job to come up with a way to cut costs in order to ever increase profit and they suggested that a piece in the washing machine could be made with plastic instead of metal. It saved the company $1 on every machine made. It wouldn't be the end of the world for anyone. How could anyone be mad, it's really not a big deal?

But the thing is that one person exists in every business and has been having to come up with that idea every year for decades and it accumulates. Now everything is made shitty, the service provided is shittier, the ways in which they make your experience worse are ever growing, but it's the only way they could keep increasing profits and no one ever suggested to make it suddenly drastically worse, so you can't blame one person.

Even if you could, you could never get to speak to that person because the only person you can speak to is the person with limited English skills they gave the customer service job to and you only speak to after you go through a long automated system (which you gave information that the person then still asks for). You can't be mad at that person either though, because none of this is their fault, they're just trying to make ends meet, they're just as much a victim of the horrible system that placed you two in this exact spot and it would be fucked up to yell at them. So all you can do is suffer through it unable to ever hold anyone accountable because you can't get a hold of them and only the financial elite are truly to blame and you can't touch them.

Then when you try to say no to anything when you get the chance, when you try to complain about one of these tiny changes that add up to make everything worse, you're over reacting. No one wants to fight that fight, and you're the problem for making everyone think about it and making things harder. What's the company gonna do, everyone else is doing it and you need to stay competitive?

So long story short, every time someone suggests making something slightly worse for profit, no matter how tiny the change, that person should be publicly executed. They should do a national broadcast on live TV at 9pm EST so everyone can tune it. It should also be hosted on every streaming service, YouTube, Twitch, etc. and everyone should love it.

[officialcreature]

It's so annoying that the problem is capitalism because everyone is so beaten into worshipping capitalism and fearing anything else that they don't care even when they agree something is caused by capitalism.

"Cost efficiency" and profit are responsible for:

- Shift to subscription based payment for everything

- "You need the app"

- Everything breaks faster because of planned obsolescence and it's just cheaper to use cheaper parts to build stuff

- Bad/automated customer service

- etc etc etc ec-fucking-cetera

And you can explain how seeking ever greater profit is responsible and people will agree and then just not care.

The worst part is all these things were small decisions. It was one person's job to come up with a way to cut costs in order to ever increase profit and they suggested that a piece in the washing machine could be made with plastic instead of metal. It saved the company $1 on every machine made. It wouldn't be the end of the world for anyone. How could anyone be mad, it's really not a big deal?

But the thing is that one person exists in every business and has been having to come up with that idea every year for decades and it accumulates. Now everything is made shitty, the service provided is shittier, the ways in which they make your experience worse are ever growing, but it's the only way they could keep increasing profits and no one ever suggested to make it suddenly drastically worse, so you can't blame one person.

Even if you could, you could never get to speak to that person because the only person you can speak to is the person with limited English skills they gave the customer service job to and you only speak to after you go through a long automated system (which you gave information that the person then still asks for). You can't be mad at that person either though, because none of this is their fault, they're just trying to make ends meet, they're just as much a victim of the horrible system that placed you two in this exact spot and it would be fucked up to yell at them. So all you can do is suffer through it unable to ever hold anyone accountable because you can't get a hold of them and only the financial elite are truly to blame and you can't touch them.

Then when you try to say no to anything when you get the chance, when you try to complain about one of these tiny changes that add up to make everything worse, you're over reacting. No one wants to fight that fight, and you're the problem for making everyone think about it and making things harder. What's the company gonna do, everyone else is doing it and you need to stay competitive?

So long story short, every time someone suggests making something slightly worse for profit, no matter how tiny the change, that person should be publicly executed. They should do a national broadcast on live TV at 9pm EST so everyone can tune it. It should also be hosted on every streaming service, YouTube, Twitch, etc. and everyone should love it.

[officialcreature]

Wild how other people know of and perceive us. Like there is this guy I chatted with on Grindr for a min, but nothing ever really came from it

2 months later come across vids he uploaded of himself jerking on some porn site

Year later see his face as one of the therapists at a local practice

5-6 years later see him in the self-checkout at Walmart (with who I'm assuming was a boyfriend?)

Literally what an interesting number of ways to know a stranger

[officialcreature]

I never quite get these things because I can't tell if the person really doesn't know or what? Like they shut it down because they view many legal entries as ones that should be illegal and they would love to limit legal migration even more too.

Are they right? No. But I don't think it really makes sense to pretend and play dumb as to why they do it either? So I can't tell if these people are really naive to the point they don't know why Trump would make legal migration harder, or they are just pretending they don't so they can pretend to be shocked?

Either way isn't helpful to anyone

[officialcreature]

Saw a vid like "You can tell when a skinny person used to be fat because they'll hide their chin and cover their stomachs and hunch over" and I was like, what? I'm fat as hell and I don't do any of that shit. And then I remembered the general disposition of people who tend to prioritize weight loss

[officialcreature]

[officialcreature]

The tik tokification of 'bad words' like sex/seggs suicide/unalive pedohile/PDFile grape/rape only originally censored because of moderation rules but now in colloquial (online) speech is going to send me to an early grave

[officialcreature]

The cost is insane, there's 110% mark up there, but some of the reasons these things always seem so high for anyone curious is:

- the incredibly convoluted system of medical charges means this cost will be negotiated with insurance companies that will pay a fraction of it

- many people who don't have insurance qualify for free or reduced price due to hospitals often being non-profits (and those who don't probably won't pay it leading to the hospitals eating the cost)

- Hospitals have a HUGE amount of overhead they need to cover, and unfortunately if they charge $20 for a bandaid everyone realizes the upcharge on that, but how much should a dose of anti-venom cost, unknown and so it's where hospitals will put a lot of their upcharge

Some of the anti-venom specific reasons:

- Anti-venom isn't in high demand, but all hospitals need to stock it. So if only a few thousand people need it every year, then the cost of production, distribution, storage, and expired product will need to be put on a small number of patients. If insulin was only used by a few thousand people a year the costs would be way higher (though they're of course already way too high)

- Rattlesnakes inject a lot of lower intensity venom compared to some snakes that inject a small amount of highly toxic venom, so more doses are needed for rattlesnake bites

- Due to a weird situation with poor manufacturing from the usual rattlesnake venom manufacturer in the US, they were shut down and the anti-venom now used, while higher quality (the old one used to cause horse allergies for example), wasn't actually made for rattlesnakes, so it also takes even more doses for that reason

Honestly I'm surprised the charge for a few days in a pediatric ICU was as low as it was.

Tl;dr

Prescription drugs are just where hospitals charge for a lot of their overhead, but almost no one would ever pay anywhere close to full price. Plus lack of demand and weird things with rattlesnake venom specifically make it expensive to produce/use

[officialcreature]

Also great that we elected an anti-choice president and senator in my state. Now we get more babies to families that will struggle to support them, all while cutting school funding!

While the election results were depressing I'd been saying since the day he was elected that if Biden ran again Trump would beat him. When he was running I said Trump would beat him. When he dropped out I said it was Democrats only chance, but still they'll probably lose and the reasons are 99% their fault.

The most depressing outcome though? The levy for the school my partner works at failed 55% to 45%. The levy was an emergency levy that was to cover a $14 million yearly shortfall they've been running for two years. Without it they'll now be cutting almost everything they're not legally required to (sports, arts, bussing for high school, etc.) and cutting teachers leading to increased class sizes.

Luckily my partner's job is not on the chopping block at all, but it's just so depressing. Most of the school levies in my state failed. People really just don't have any sense of community anymore 😞