[ID: a doodle of two people looking away from each other. The first person is thinking, “If they wanted me to know they would tell me. I shouldn’t ask about it.” The second person is thinking, “If they cared about it they would ask me. I shouldn’t talk About it.” End ID.]
I would like to nominate “You promised” “I know” as one of the most heartbreaking exchanges in the english language
It’s about the quiet betrayal, about resignation in place of an apology, the helpess admittance that thing have changed, that they know they promised but they have to break it this time, for whatever reason…
Their flagship store and New York has unionized along with 3-4 other stores! This is happening! People are tired of being seen as dollar signs and being made to work just to get to work more, to survive instead of thrive. Keep it UP.
Arguably one of the coolest looking nudibranchs is the Phyllodesmium iriomotense, an aeolid nudibranch native to Japan and Indonesia. It feeds on soft corals and gets to be about 2cm long. While it is small, it definitely seems like some alien one would find on an ice-planet!
i dont claim to be an expert on love but i think theres something to like… ok so my girlfriend got undertale on the switch a while back, right? and she’s definitely not a bad videogamer but it takes practice yknow, esp when youre doing a neutral route and actually fight stuff. so when she got to the hardest bosses i took the controller and beat them for her. not because she couldn’t, but because i love her. and that’s what my brother did when i was a kid playing sonic adventure 2 or whatever, not because i was dumb but because he was good at it and he loved me. and when i want my girlfriend to read something (a post, an essay, a novel) but she’s too tired to actually read so it i read it to her and i do silly voices and she laughs and we have more fun that way. when you hand a water bottle to your friend and they open it without you even having to ask. when you spent a million years fixing the flat tire on your bike and then your dad just takes the tools and does it for you. its not a judgement, it’s just a service. you could do it yourself, but why should you have to when you are loved?
Just the other day I was chatting with an older woman about this exact thing. She’s retired so she enjoys going on almost-daily walks around her neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods. Well she told me that it was really weird that in the newer constructions where the younger families live, EVERYONE has their blinds closed all the time. In fact she can tell a younger family lives in a house based on the simple fact of whether or not their blinds are closed in the middle of a sunny day. It’s to the point where she can’t even tell if they’re even HOME and available for a visit to welcome them to the neighborhood!
When she said that, I realized that I do that too when I live in a more publicly visible apartment. I told her that I think it’s because of the internet. Younger people feel like we’re constantly being watched, observed, and JUDGED for merely existing. So when we’re home, we just want to be alone, unbothered, and unobserved because it’s the one place we can control that. She was very surprised to hear that I felt like that and she was VERY concerned for us young folk (and to be honest after talking with her I became pretty concerned too…)
People from her generation will have their blinds open all day, hang out on their front porch, and randomly visit/enjoy random visits from neighbors and strangers. If a stranger knocks on my door it’s scary and if they want to stay and chat? It’s a huge inconvenience and it feels super awkward and weird and I’m stuck wondering why exactly they’re talking to me, when just a few decades ago welcoming someone new to the neighborhood was just what you did! In fact to not do so was rude!
It made me really worried that as the Panopticon sinks its teeth deeper into our psyches, we are losing the very essence of what makes us human and got us this far as a species: community. I find that being on the internet for hours a day tends to almost trick my brain into thinking “I’ve been social all day, my social need is full” when in reality I’ve only talked to one, maybe two people I know from my real life all day, and only for short bursts, not REAL conversation.
I find it hard to have the energy to invite friends to hang out, and when I want to I feel like I’m a big inconvenience for asking them to take a break from their busy lives for me (not that they would ever say that’s the case, but it’s this nagging feeling internally). I feel like while we used to be a series of large islands of local community, our islands splintered apart and started drifting away from each other. Now your island is just you, your immediate family, and maybe a couple close friends. Those living physically closest to you feel like they’re miles away and unreachable, to the point where you might as well not even bother.
I guess I just have one question for you: Do you know the names of your next door neighbors?
That makes me think about how the rate of paranoia of being watched must be so much higher now than it used to be and must only be increasing, which is very concerning,,
I’m surprised that this post doesn’t contain a link to turn off all of these settings (maybe another version of this post does, who knows)
Go to https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols and this will take you to a page which states what information Google is currently tracking. Each section has a blue slider next to it. Click it and it will come up with a confirmation box, scroll through it and select “pause” and you should be good to go.
I would go to this link regularly to make sure the sliders haven’t reset, too.
