I was talking to my dad about renewable energy and he was like “the only problem with solar farms is they take up so much space.”
And it made me think about a city and how much sun exposure all the rooftops in a city get and…why not just make the city it’s own solar farm by putting solar panels on every rooftop?
As a kid, when your parents are poor, you’re poor. If they don’t have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone’s parents are rich, that doesn’t necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples’ kids aren’t rich kids, they’re just some rich freak’s exotic pets that can talk but aren’t allowed to.
That’s… not how class works
ALT
OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She’s from a prominent family, practically royalty where we’re from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare… she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be “adopted out of poverty” at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.
She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).
He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).
And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is “raised rich” and then suddenly he’s not One of Them because “well teeeeechncially :^) you’re from the oppressing class…”. Like…. shit, man!
Social rules don’t mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.
Probably especially rich ones.
people are totally on board with the concept of “sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad” but refuse to connect that to the concept of “this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation”
like we understand “the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful” and we can’t wrap our heads around “a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn’t predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that’s totally under your control.”
like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it’s an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don’t give a shit about saving the enemy’s children too, i don’t think very highly of your motivation or your methods.
If (what’s left of) the fuckin’ middle class can hold financial stability and basic safety over their kids’ heads in “exchange” for fealty, and cut them off and throw them out for insufficient subservience (like daring to be queer/trans/wrong-religion/wrong-political-stance), what in the EVERLOVING FUCK makes you think the rich won’t and haven’t on a regular basis?
“most allegedly haunted houses turn out to have gas leaks!”
no they don’t. you are merely skimming the surface of mundane shit that can be wrong with old houses with your one puny little explanation that only fits a very small number of cases. try harder
They should bring back paranormal home inspectors because it is fascinating the amount of spooky happenings they resolved with one surveyor and his clipboard
not surprising AT ALL
as I said in the tags, I believe in ghosts! wholeheartedly! I believe I’ve had weird experiences that can’t be explained any other way!
but
I work with/in old buildings professionally
they are the most temperamental, bizarre beasts you can ever imagine. the number of things that can make strange sounds, drafts, smells, or even motion in an old building are insane. like yeah, maybe you saw a ghost! or maybe you had a gas leak!
but to assume it must be one of those two things is to ignore the vast smorgasbord of Obnoxious Stuff Old Houses Do
Tell me more about the Obnoxious Stuff Old Houses Do.
[cracks knuckles]
settling. this is a real thing, hence why people bring it up so often. wood expands and contracts, which can cause noises or doors sticking in their frames or becoming easier to open
pressure differences in rooms. I mentioned this in the tags of my reblog, but I work in one house that has many rooms with two doors on opposite sides. sometimes, opening or closing one will cause the other to open or close if it’s not firmly shut or wide open. I have had guests mistake this for Ghost Phenomena. it is not; that happens every time like clockwork and it’s all down to pressure
faulty window or door seals causing drafts
doors not shutting all the way when you think they have, making it easier for said drafts to blow them open “on their own”
black mold. never encountered this personally, thank the gods, but it can apparently cause hallucinations
faulty wiring- can cause flickering lights, alarm activation, devices randomly turning off or on, etc. speaking of alarms…
motion detectors or alarms “randomly” going off because dust blew across their sensors. one of my houses was having some plaster work done a while back, and the fire alarm kept going off because our very sensitive smoke sniffers picked up rising dust from the work site
leaky roofs can also cause water to drip into alarms and such and short them out, which sometimes makes them emit warning noises and/or go off as normal
weird acoustics. I lived in an apartment from 1920 once, where I could hear people in the downstairs unit as if they were in my own- ONLY when I was in the shower. terrified me the first few times I showered at home alone, until I figured it out. row houses are even worse for this
once I was working late at the museum alone, and scared myself silly thinking I heard heavy footsteps from a floor below (I was more scared of a break-in than ghosts, though, tbh). turned out a windstorm had blown a large metal element loose from- and then completely off of -the façade, and the sounds I heard were it flapping back and forth. we got it fixed, if you were wondering
animals get stuck places (scratching in walls) and die (smell, flies). never experienced this one either, knock on wood, but I know it happens
thicker walls can mean less street noise gets through than in some newer buildings, contributing to a feeling of isolation that can really creep one out even if nothing is amiss
now like I said, things I can’t explain away have happened to me. “I heard the staff door open and close, complete with motion sensor ding, and footsteps moving around the room it leads into- and also my coworker heard it too, from a completely different area of the house -but nobody was there and there are no other exits from that space” can hardly be chalked up to dust in that sensor
oh oh oh!! I have a really cool fact as part of my answer!!
Okay, so you know how colour is a spectrum, right? Your eyes only REALLY perceive blends of three base colours- red, blue, and green. (Yes, green.) All other colours are blends of these three primaries- red and green make yellow, red and blue make magenta, and blue and green make cyan.
As you mentioned, magenta is a “"fake”“ color- this is because colours are made of waves! The waves on the red end of the spectrum are Low Frequency and the waves on the blue end are High Frequency. You’d *think” halfway between both wavelengths would be the result, but that’s green, and we already have a colour for green! So to fix this paradox, the line from red to blue becomes a circle and we see magenta instead!
Now again, this spectrum- it looks like this:
And most of the world recognizes the six listed colours as distinct. Which means that we take this blended gradient and add hard lines, like this, to clearly separate them from each other:
BUT, not all societies do this!! There are some whose languages don’t *have* different words for “blue” or “green”, and as a result, people raised speaking these languages have a REALLY HARD TIME distinguishing between what we recognize as “obviously” either green OR blue.
THEIR colour spectrum looks like this:
Which is correct and valid and makes COMPLETE sense, because we argue about differences in colour all the fucling time- “is this dark blue or dark purple”, “is this neon yellow or neon green”, and “is this orange or red” are some common examples. Any of those in-betweens could be treated as whole and distinct blocks with distinct boundaries.
And so, I propose this:
We merge orange and red cause i can’t be fucking arsed
English was like this until relatively recently. That’s why someone with orange hair is a redhead, not an orangehead.
Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but
Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the ‘standard’ sense?
Like, everyone I talk to who’s over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just… dont.
My mom tells stories of skipping school to sneak across the border and spend the day at a bar in Mexico. I was threatened with not being allowed to graduate because of senior ditch day. One of my friends had to go to his first hour class on senior ditch day because the teacher, who almost exclusively taught seniors, arranged a huge exam that day with no available makeup days, specifically to punish kids who took part in ditch day. Our wild and crazy ditch day was playing mini golf and then stopping for ice cream on our way back to one of our friends’ houses to play cards against humanity.
Don’t get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?
Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.
My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women’s football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn’t afford to go there anyway.
We’ve made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.
Then they become adults and it doesn’t go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you’d better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they’ve deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it’s a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there’s any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?
My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she’d write me up for improper use of sick leave because you’re not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don’t know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.
I dont really know where I’m going with all of this. I guess I just don’t understand the point of it all. We spend our youth working hard to provide a future that we still can’t afford. We have to be responsible and professional as teenagers. And we get nothing out of it. We can’t afford life or friends or fun. At least our parents got to have fun being young and dumb, we just got groomed on kik.
So I’m not the only one noticing this. I wish I had an answer or at least something to say about it. But I dont. I’m just tired.
Original report (waybacked PDF) is from 2007. That’s Gen Z kids.
When I, Gen-Xer, was about 12 - in my rural home, I had about a three-mile range. (Could’ve pushed it to more, but didn’t want to walk that far.) In the city, it was about a mile. Not that anyone was checking; again, that was about the distance I wanted to walk, and besides, that covered all of “downtown.”
My kids? Closer to that 300 yards limit at the same age. Not because I wanted to restrict them, but we live next to a freeway on-ramp and between two sets of train tracks… and there is absolutely nothing kid-friendly within a half-mile for them to visit.
I spent my 21st birthday bar-hopping. My kids spent their 21st birthdays at home with a nice meal. I don’t think either of them wanted to go bar-hopping - but yeah, as a society, we’ve removed a LOT of teen-friendly options.
See also: End of Third Places, switch from video game arcades to home consoles (hey, then every kid has to buy their own copy–great for game-makers!), shutdown of malls or restrictions on youth at them, closure of public parks, reduced/removed after-school programs, etc. Plus the places that think it’s illegal for a 12-year-old to walk to the corner store unsupervised.
I am, however, DELIGHTED to hear that the booze & other vices industries are panicking over Gen Z not going out to party. Like, you spent 30-odd years removing all the places and ways people can hang out together and have fun outside of someone’s personal house, and… guess what, when people hit milestone events (graduation, milestone birthdays, job promotion, whatever), they don’t immediately flock to the Party Zone that they have never been welcome at. How shocking.
It sucks that Gen Z does not get to party, does not have good celebration options. REALLY sucks that that’s often because school or job has decided to tell them not to celebrate, rather than just not having places to go. I’m just not upset over party capitalism taking a hit.
i need people do do me a favor and be absolutely normal about it
i have a completely normal coworker who does music and stuff and its good music and i want to send my army of followers to his video on yt and just +like it or something. something to boost him in the algorithm
the issue is no one can let him know this second life i live on the internet because if he finds out i have 25k followers on tumblr or 10k on twitter etc then the questions will flow and i will not be prepared for the conversation about werewolves that follows
Ok heres the video, just +like it and if you want to comment just say you’re from reddit or facebook or somewhere
If someone DOES want to share it to reddit that’d be awesome and I’d love you but I dont have an active account there
Just enjoy the music yall. Its honestly really good if you like some classic sounding R&B. The man’s voice reminds me of usher to some extent with a little more gravel. Its honestly just sex. Its really really good and he only have 114 subs and the video only has like 90ish likes or something. Honestly its sad. He sounds amazing.
Yes!! Hes REALLY good and his music is giving 90’s RnB. It’s fantastic and his voice is great and I really want him to blow up
Also here’s his Spotify for those of you wanting to add it to your likes and your playlists
this is making me so happy im so proud of you guys i literally dont have words
hey boss i can’t come in today it’s a sunny day and there’s a lovely breeze coming in through my window, yeah it’s rustling the branches of the tree outside that’s finally bloomed so it’s pretty serious
ALT
