“Mom, there’s someone under the bed.” You bend down and see your son there instead and he whispers “Mom that’s not me up there!” You take a step back when someone tugs your shirt. You turn, your son is in the closet asking “who are they?” You suddenly hear him calling from downstairs “Mommy?”
You sigh, raising your voice so that all of your sons can hear you. “All right, everyone into the kitchen. Now.” Hearing a shuffle in the attic, you add, “Yes, Duncan, that includes you.”
You don’t see any movement as you go down the stairs, but you’re used to that. You know they’ll all be there by the time you walk through the kitchen door.
As usual, your children have all fitted themselves into the kitchen. The dimensions of the room are a little wobbly with so many of them present, but you’ve long ago learned to ignore how the laws of physics only occasionally apply to them. A host of little faces look up at you anxiously, and you smile gently.
“It’s okay, none of you are in trouble,” you reassure them. They relax - and how astonishing is it, that they trust you so much? You’re so proud of their progress.
One, however, still looks nervous. You beckon him forward, and he comes reluctantly, shoved by his identical older brothers.
“Are you new?” you ask carefully.
He nods, and you drop to one knee. “It’s okay, sweetie,” you tell him firmly. “I love all of my sons, even ones I haven’t met before. Ask your brothers, they’ll tell you.”
“’m here because I heard you were nice,” he says in a tiny voice.
You open your arms, offering a hug but waiting to let him decide whether he wants one. This child must have seen hugs before, because he flings himself into your arms and starts crying. That’s good. Some of your sons are traumatised from what they’ve seen, knowing more slaps than kisses.
Eventually, the sobs dry up, your other kids patiently waiting for your attention again. “Why do we look like this?” he asks, curious.
“Because this is what the first of you looked like - Wilson, where are you?”
A hand raises from the crowd and waves energetically.
“Wilson took on my son’s form to play Child or Double. Calling from downstairs when my son was in bed, getting tucked in when the child I bore was playing out in the garden. Once I figured it out, I hugged him and told him that as far as I was concerned, I now had twins. It took him some time before he believed me.”
Wilson shrugs unrepentantly.
“When my son died, Wilson stayed. It helped, having one of my sons with me while I grieved. Then another of you began to turn up, and I had twins again. Then more. Until now, when I have more of you than will technically fit in my kitchen.” You give your sons a look of motherly disapproval, but they only giggle. They know you don’t mind.
“It’s not like you need to feed us!” calls out one of your bolder sons. Eric, probably. Your newest, unnamed child looks up hesitantly, then steps out of your arms to join his brothers. Lucas might be a nice name, you think idly. You don’t have a Lucas yet.
“That does help,” you admit. You put steel into your next words. “However, there are Rules in this house, and one of them is no messing around at bedtime. I know that bedtime is a traditional time for the Child or Double game, but four of you is pushing it.”
You’d say more, but there’s a knock at your back door. You turn to answer it, knowing that your sons will have evaporated before your fingers grasp the handle, and brace against the cold night air as you pull the door open.
Two identical little girls stand there. One has a bruise on her cheek, and has clearly been crying recently. The other - the other is a Doubler, just like your sons. After this long, you can tell the difference.
“Please,” the Doubler says, and her voice trembles on the word. “Please. She needs somewhere to stay.”
Part of you is shocked, already looking ahead to the potential legal issues. The rest of you is all mother, and you whisk her into the nice warm kitchen and get her a glass of water.
Your son’s bed will be occupied by someone else tonight. You think he’d have been okay with that.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!
My mom said when she used to go to business meetings at GM in Detroit in the 1980’s, they would close the sidewalks to “repave” them whenever the unions were preparing to strike, making it more difficult or impossible for them to protest outside. This is a thing, this has been happening for decades. They know what they’re doing.
The little RB statistics chart is so pleasant and stimmy to look at and I want to see what it looks like when it gets really REALLY huge because it makes me think of some deep sea lifeform
Grant O’Brien of College Humor/Dropout, known for the series Total Forgiveness (in which he and Ally Beardsley did challenges to earn money to pay their student loans), on student loan forgiveness
That elderly couple who volunteers at the soup kitchen after church on Sundays and attends every town hall meeting has done more community direct action than 99% of internet leftists 🤷🏽♀️
100% agree homeless people should just starve and dumpster dive till le epic revolution happens!
and for sure local politics is so stupid it only handles dumb things like your schoolboard, judges, infrastructure, and rent laws! now tweets? Thats where the real work happens!
These are all noble and worthwhile things to do. People should do them. But they’re not gonna get us any closer to ending injustice. After the protest scene collapsed in Seattle, I watched people take up mutual aid, and it’s an endless black hole of effort for them. Meanwhile the cops are still kicking homeless people around and the sweeps are still happening. You can give people food, tents, tarps, and cigarettes all you want - the cops are still going to come around and throw everything in the dumpster AND eat the food you were trying to give them. I’ve watched it happen.
Also…attending town meetings? We used to FLOOD public comment trying to get the police defunded and members of city hall would ignore us and vote against us anyway. What the FUCK are you talking about.
Nothing short of an armed insurrection is going to make the suffering stop. I don’t give a shit about town hall meetings.
kundlejenner64
You and I both know you’re not gonna do any of that go pick up a ladle cornball. elderly trump supporters did an armed insurrection before the left
“The only thing that’ll change anything is violent revolution!” people make me roll my eyes because they never go and do their violent revolution. They always just use it as an excuse to not help anyone. “Nobody vote because the system is broken and the less evil candidate still sucks!” oh yeah? You gonna change the system before voting day? No? Then how does not voting help? “Poverty is a constructed problem, working at a soup kitchen won’t solve it, only overthrowing the system will!” oh yeah? You gonna overthrow the system tonight? You gonna do it before that single mum with two jobs and her three kids go to bed hungry? No? Then feed them, too!
“The system is broken, you’re being used, pain is inevitable under this regime!” Yeah. We KNOW. But are you out there fixing it, or just using that as an excuse to not help people when you can? Because if you’re using that as a shield for inaction without doing anything about it, if you’re not doing anything but complaining on twitter between sessions of your favourite computer game, you’re not an activist, you’re just larping as one. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen.
I worked at a volunteer center for many years. It was part of my job to match people with volunteer positions based on their abilities and skills. I knew everything there was to know about volunteerism at a local level and let me tell you something; for every social problem someone on the internet is complaining about, there is a volunteer position that is doing boots on the ground work on that problem. And that position is going unfilled. Old people volunteer more than anyone else - at least 80% of the people I placed were retirees. Unfortunately, the nature of being Old is that you can only do so much - for so long. Younger generations are NOT showing up to volunteer like past generations. They are all too apathetic. They wait to be asked for help. They think yelling about a problem on the internet does something to change it. They think the actions of a small group of dedicated individuals is worthless. If it doesn’t change the whole world, it’s not worth it. Volunteerism doesn’t solve the problem - so why bother with a bandaid?
I’d like you to look into the face of a disabled mother who was just told that habitat for humanity is going to build her a safe house (using volunteered labor and donated supplies) for her family after a year of them sleeping in her van: and tell her she doesn’t deserve that bandaid. Tell her the volunteers that took extra care to make the house wheelchair accessible for her youngest - didn’t REALLY make a difference. They wasted their time, right? You can tell her that her problems are systemic and explain the social issues and politics at play that allowed her to fall through the cracks all you like, but she’ll probably tell you to go tell it to someone else because she allready KNOWS. She lived it. If you’re not going to actually do something constructive about it - Ｆｕｃｋ off. Pick up a hammer and help build the house- or get the Ｆｕｃｋ out of the way.
If a child is starving, you feed them. They will starve before your protests are heard by politicians. They will starve while you work to prevent starvation in the future. They will starve while you try and solve the problem. If you aren’t willing to personally make a bowl of soup to feed that child - your words are meaningless to me. They are meaningless to that child.
When I was a kid, we were poor. My brother slept in a pile of clothes because he didn’t have a mattress. He wrote to Santa and asked for a bed and sent the letter in the mail and someone at the post office read it and they decided to volunteer their time to raise money and buy my brother a bed. They dropped it off on Christmas Eve. They told my brother that Santa sent them. They didnt even leave their name. I started volunteering shortly after, and then made nonprofit work my life until I was too disabled to continue. In my work I know I saved at least 2 lives because those people told me so - but potentially there were more. 2 human lives, that I might not have been there to save, if a volunteers actions hadn’t inspired me to continue the good work. Every ounce of good I did, was because of that mattress.
The thing is - volunteering and helping other people makes a direct and tangible difference in the lives of people. Not just feeding them and putting a roof over their heads - It reminds them of the best of what people can be and inspires them to do their own good. It affirms to them that we SEE the injustice that they face and we are going to HELP them in whatever way we can, even if it doesnt solve the systemic problem. Even if if just looks like helping one person. It ripples out. It always ripples out.
So you can yell on the internet about injustice and volunteering not solving the problems all you want - but no amount of your yelling is ever going to build a house or feed a starving child. If someone’s bleeding, just give them the fucking bandaid.
For the record, accidentally tapping on Tumblr live when it randomly appears every week does not count as using Tumblr live for the sake of this poll. This is only referring to purposeful use of the feature.
I'd appreciate it if people could share this for a larger sample size!
Has either union called for a boycott? Because boycotting can disrupt their plans and make negotiations harder unless they’re actively asking for one. I’m boycotting reality TV (which every studio is going to be pushing because it’s the only content they can make cheaply and without writers or professional actors) but nothing else unless we are asked to.
This is correct. If anything, I want the execs to be terrified because the consumers are demanding more from them and they have nothing in their reserves to sell and no way of making anything else to sell.
Also "new" content is going to keep coming out for a while because it's already been written and acted and edited. (I'd actually expect a lot of bad-but-finished movies that would normally never be released to get released once they start running out of the good stuff) There is less than no point to boycott anything right now.
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thatnonb1ny-cvmslut
