TV Executives: “if the strike goes on, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”
Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.
Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.
And the thot plickens….
HOLY FUCK
SAG-AFTRA = Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
More info:
- The actors walk off at the end of June if the studios don’t sit down with the writers
- Rumor is directors will follow. This will grind everything to a halt.
- Nobody is asking for a boycott. Neil Gaiman has pointed out that making Good Omens S2 a huge hit actually puts more pressure on Amazon to negotiate with the writers
- This implies it’s okay to catch up on old streaming content without breaking the line too
- This is a screenwriter strike; books will keep coming out.
- Movies already made will keep coming out for months. Again, actors have not called for a boycott; you aren’t breaking the line if you go see a movie.
- I don’t know where this puts podcasts but none of them have studio funding or platforms so they’ll probably keep going.
- Substack/Tumblr book club are all public domain works and will keep going. In addition to Dracula Daily there’s Whale Weekly, Dickens Daily, My Dear Wormwood (The Screwtape Letters), Letters from Watson (Sherlock Holmes) and more.
- Your local library always needs love. With the Libby app you don’t even need to physically go there.
I wanna emphasize “nobody is asking for a boycott.” A thing that’s happened a lot in the last decade or so is that workers will pursue a particular action, and as it starts to go around online, the internet game of telephone expands and expands the actions called for and who’s expected to take part in those actions.
The problem with this is that what makes organized action effective is that it’s decisive, specific, and clearly bounded. That’s because it has to be extremely legible to the targeted institutions that the losses taking place directly correspond to the demands of the workers. When workers are striking, and some people are boycotting, and starting and stopping on different days, that’s not expanding the impact of the strike. It’s making the contours of the effects of the strike blurry, and therefore debatable. At the negotiating table, the bosses will interpret that blurriness as favorably for themselves as possible. This functionally diminishes the power of the strike.
The “organized” part of organized action is essential. 21st century corporations are designed to absorb the impacts of disorganized action against them. This is why “voting with your dollar” doesn’t work: the market is not a democracy. In order for conscious consumer behavior to matter, it has to be sudden and dramatic.
When you hear about strikes, check whether they’re calling for a boycott. If they are not, don’t boycott, and don’t tell people to boycott. It’s actively harmful to muddle the messaging like that.
Scientists once thought that ADHD symptoms were always present. But previous research from Rapport, who has been studying ADHD for more than 36 years, has shown the fidgeting was most often present when children were using their brains’ executive functions, particularly “working memory.” That’s the system we use for temporarily storing and managing information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehension.
But for today, just don’t answer your boss’s call off the clock.
We know you believe in ACAB and think they all should get the wall.
But for today, just don’t call 9-1-1 on the guy screaming outside of your apartment.
The memes are fun. The memes are aspirational and keep us reaching for the horizon.
But look down, too, at what actually is.
Endure pains now—suffer the inconveniences now—knowing that they likely involve unpleasantness.
The Revolution™ is fun to imagine and involves no pain. But the real world does involve pain, and it’s necessary to exercise the muscles needed for future work and opportunities.
Really disappointed in all the anti-ocean-exploration sentiments that the sub incident has been bringing up in people.
Yes, going down to see an overhyped old boat in an unregulated piece of shit tin can is a dumbass idea.
But I don’t want to see terminally online suburban kids and twentysomethings, who have maybe once in their life driven past a forest spew out shit like “there’s just shrimp down there” “yeah dont go bother poseidon” or “water is water”
The ocean is a beautiful little piece of outer space below the surface of our planet and thousands upon thousands of people throughout the millenia have dedicated their lives for uncovering its secrets and pushing the limits of where humans can survive.
So, I looked in the comments, expecting to see discourse or historical background etc, but I found none. Therefore, I decided to learn more and add background. Apparently this machine was used because of polio because polio paralyzes your lungs. According to the wiki article on this bad boy, patients would spend two weeks in there sometimes. They still have these machines, though much, much more modern but they’re barely used at all anymore: “In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 there were only 39. By 2014, there were only 10 people left with an iron lung.” (x)
I’ve read about one man who still lives in an iron lung. He taught himself how to breathe again by gulping down air, but it’s quite laborious because of the paralysis. His name is Paul Alexander, and he’s a lawyer. He’s 71 years old and has spent 65 years in an iron lung. Wild, right? He’s been working on a memoir that he was inspired to write by the recent resurgence of cases of polio caused by anti-vaccers.
It’s amazing to me to recognize that we only defeated polio in this past century - that my mother’s father had it (he got lucky, it only deformed his feet and thereby kept him out of a couple wars); my mother got the big vaccination that left her upper arm scarred; and by the time I was vaccinated, polio basically didn’t exist. My grandfather must have been born like around 1900, so - in the space of less than 75 years, this was no longer something that parents dreaded the possibility of every summer.
In the 1950s, my mother would go to the corner shop. The owners had a daughter a few years older than my mum. She lived in an iron lung in the back of the shop.
Vaccinate your fucking kids.
Reminder that children were in these iron lungs. Children who just wanted their mums and dads, or wanted to cuddle their precious stuffed toy, but couldn’t because of the nature of these machines. Crying because they don’t want to go in this big scary tank, but if they don’t go in the iron lung they would die.
The polio vaccine exists so children wouldn’t have to have a machine breathe for them. All vaccines exist because we don’t want people to suffer. Please vaccinate and get vaccinated.
Incidentally: I had an elderly friend (now, alas, dead) who had polio as a child and recovered entirely (polio wasn’t fatal in a majority of cases! Most people recovered without visible damage!), and they were extremely healthy and active, and when they were very very old, like in their 80s, they suddenly developed this extremely strange syndrome where they had difficulty initiating or stopping motion — for example, they had trouble going from standing still to walking, and then trouble going from walking to standing still again. The doctors said, flat out: “this is a known long-term complication of polio and it comes from nerve damage but we have no idea how to treat it because so few people develop it in modern times that it has barely been studied using modern equipment”. So: even if you survive diseases without vaccination you can still have long-term complications — and a lot of researchers are worried about what’s coming from covid in that direction. Vaccinate!
