Signtist

It felt like they were trying to pack so much symbolism in that it all got too convoluted, and I rarely understood what exactly was going on. I could tell that they were trying to say something profound, but it felt like an artist trying to make a realistic painting with fingerpaint - the medium just didn’t suit the message. But maybe it was just over my head.

In what way?

Morality is subjective, and as a result moral condemnation carries no weight to anyone but those who already agree with the condemnation. Condemnation isn’t meant to directly change the behavior of those who disagree, it’s meant to spur those who agree into taking action to combat what they view as immoral.

As a dude who uses a photo of my wife about to bite into a big turkey leg as my phone background, they’re the best photos to use. Nothing’s more fake than a photo of someone posing and putting on a fake smile, and we’re one of the few who get to see some of the real ones, like this one. We cherish that.

Yeah, I understand that frequently arguing with people isn’t ideal, but if you’re not field testing your opinions against someone who’s actively trying to disprove them, then how can you really know they’re right?

There are plenty of things I was sure about until someone argued with me well enough to make me think harder about it and come to a different conclusion. Isolating yourself with only people who agree with you is convenient, but stifling; community is uncomfortable.

Never been happier to be disabled…

Man, I’m glad it wasn’t like this for me. I went to school in the middle of nowhere North Dakota and nearly all of my professors were active and attentive. My genetics class was the only one where the professor was phoning it in, just reading the textbook as a lecture, but me and the other students complained, and he got replaced with another much better professor a few weeks into the semester.

This trick has become a reflex for me, to the point where I barely even wake up when I get a Charlie horse in the middle of the night, since I start flexing my foot automatically when I feel it coming on.

I made $5,000 last year in overtime from clocking in about 20 minutes early every day. My supervisor can see when I clock in, and at this point clearly doesn’t care, so I just keep doing it. It’s not like I’m working when I don’t need to anyway, whether or not I’m on the clock.

I had a lot of nose bleeds as a kid, so my sister would never let me borrow her books because I’d always give them back with drops of blood on random pages.

I’ve recently gotten into vinyl, and what I’ve learned is that convenience is often antithetical to experience. When just about every song ever made is immediately available to me at a moment’s notice, I stop caring; I’ll listen to a song I like for a little while then move onto the next one without thinking about it, and I won’t form any lasting memories along the way. When music is something that takes time and effort to enjoy, I have a chance to form a memory about my enjoyment, and when I have to physically find a song in order to listen to it, it gives that song much more meaning than if I spent less than 5 seconds typing the name in on Spotify.

I keep people guessing. Need something big and heavy? Try my dick! Need something short and thin? Try my dick! They both make my wife roll her eyes, so I might as well use them.

Got a huge bag for Christmas one year and ate the whole thing in a few days. The inside of my mouth was white with canker sores for a good while.

This is what people don’t understand. Those in power, whether they’re part of the government, a wealthy CEO, or a religious leader, will do what benefits themselves if they think they can get away with it. We keep talking about powerful organizations and what they could do to benefit everyone, but fail to realize that powerful people don’t want to benefit everyone.

They only do what benefits everyone if they feel like they can’t get away with just doing what benefits themselves. It’s our responsibility to make sure they don’t think they can get away with it, and clearly strongly-worded letters and quippy signs held outside their offices for an afternoon or two isn’t enough to do that.

Just look at the comment I responded to for the definition; if you’re doing an activity well, it’s a skill. You might disagree, but that’s between you and the dictionary. The rest of us will be here working on making sure people are paid well regardless of whether or not you think their work isn’t “skilled” enough.

The focus on skill in the first place was so that they can make it a competition that they can exploit to call people “unskilled” without backlash from the “skilled” workers. If you put effort into your job, you should get paid fairly for it. I can think of a few CEOs that would take a pretty big pay cut if that were the case, though, so we’re certainly not going to get it by asking.

As someone who’s had multiple surgeries that forced them to re-learn how to use their own muscles, anything that requires purposeful muscle movement is a skill. And even if it wasn’t, there aren’t any jobs that have you move a box. There are, however, jobs that require you to move a box to a specific known location without breaking the contents of the box, which is a skill.

I wholeheartedly believe that anyone who’s amassed more than 10 million dollars in this country is doing something unsavory to get it - we shouldn’t blindly trust anything they say about anything. Mark has orders of magnitude more than that; everything he says should be considered a lie until proven true from multiple sources.

That was an issue for me as well when I started working from home, but I was able to slowly start getting myself to do things on my own, instead of needing to tack them on to preexisting commitments like going to work, which has actually helped me out a lot. The trick was for me to do the smallest possible thing, and ramp it up incredibly slowly. I started working out again by literally doing one sit-up a day. For weeks that’s all I did, but eventually I moved up to 5, then to more, and added more exercises until now, where I’ve got a whole weekly routine.

I did the same thing for other chores that needed doing, and it’s been long enough now that I can just decide to do something that I need to do in the moment, instead of always saying “I’ll do it after work,” which would always turn into “I’ll do it after work tomorrow” when work actually ended. It makes outings more fun, too, since they’re not always filled to the brim with all the things I was putting off doing.

I like that people like dogs - they deserve a good home and loving owner - but they make me nervous. I was almost attacked by a dog on the street as a kid, and my dad had to take the bite instead to save me. 2 other kids in my family have been bitten by dogs as well, both times by dogs they had spent a significant amount of time with, but that suddenly got triggered by something out of the blue and attacked. I just can’t trust that they’ll always be friendly, and even one second of aggression is enough to cause some real damage.