I went over there and played in the arcades, ate some good food, hung out with people who liked the same things i do at a concert, and took some great photos with them.
He went over and put on a kimono and conical hat, ran through the streets shouting ching chong, called it a playground, went to a forest and took video of dead bodies, and caused a minor international incident.
So yeah, i’m better than logan paul.
Reblog if you’re better than logan paul!
Pretty sure there’s things living in sewer outfall pipes that can claim this.
If I can, I always opt to ditch my name tag in a dementia care environment. I let my friends with dementia decide what my name is: I’ve been Susan, Gwendolyn, and various peoples’ kids. I’ve been so many identities to my residents, too: a coworker, a boss, a student, a sibling, a friend from home, and more.
Don’t ask your friend with dementia if they “remember your name” — especially if that person is your parent, spouse, or other family member. It’s quite likely to embarrass them if they can’t place you, and, frankly, it doesn’t really matter what your name is. What matters is how they feel about you.
Here’s my absolute favorite story about what I call, “Timeline Confusion”:
Alicia danced down the hallway, both hands steadily on her walker. She moved her hips from side to side, singing a little song, and smiled at everyone she passed. Her son, Nick, was walking next to her.
Nick was probably one of the best caregivers I’d ever met. It wasn’t just that he visited his mother often, it was how he visited her. He was patient and kind—really, he just understood dementia care. He got it.
Alicia was what I like to call, “pleasantly confused.” She thought it was a different year than it was, liked to sing and dance, and generally enjoyed her life.
One day, I approached the pair as they walked quietly down the hall. Alicia smiled and nodded at everyone she passed, sometimes whispering a, “How do you do!”
“Hey, Alicia,” I said. “We’re having a piano player come in to sing and play music for us. Would you like to come listen?”
“Ah, yes!” she smiled back. “My husband is a great singer,” she said, motioning to her son.
Nick smiled and did not correct her. He put his hand gently on her shoulder and said to me, “We’ll be over there soon.”
I saw Nick again a few minutes later while his mom was occupied with some other residents. “Nick,” I said. “Does your mom usually think that you’re her husband?”
Nick said something that I’ll never forget.
“Sometimes I’m me, sometimes I’m my brother, sometimes I’m my dad, and sometimes I’m just a friend. But she always knows that she loves me,” he smiled.
Nick had nailed it. He understood that, because his mom thought it was 1960, she would have trouble placing him on a timeline.
He knew that his mom recognized him and he knew that she loved him. However, because of her dementia, she thought it was a different year. And, in that year, he would’ve been a teenager.
Using context clues (however mixed up the clues were) Alicia had determined that Nick was her husband: he was the right age, he sure sounded and looked like her husband, and she believed that her son was a young man.
This is the concept that I like to call timeline confusion. It’s not that your loved one doesn’t recognize you, it’s that they can’t place you on a timeline.
What matters is how they feel about you. Not your name or your exact identity.
THIS. sometimes ole miss thinks i’m her son, or her husband, or her cousin bill or her friend kathi, and once she called me “mommy.” doesn’t matter. she knows i’m someone who cares about her.
when my grandmother developed dementia, she took to calling me ‘virginia’. she had gone to a time in her mind when long red hair did not mean her metalhead grandson, it meant her eldest son’s fiancee. she gave me a lot of advice for how to keep my head and my temper with young leo, who could be a handful but was a gem if you didn’t let him push you. “i know you’re a firecracker, ginger,” she’d tell me, “but don’t make a fight out of it. just hear him out and then make your own decision. he respects that.”
i didn’t correct her on my gender or the year or my name. i didn’t tell her that virginia and leo had been married forty years and were doing fine; i thought that might reassure her, but then, it might just throw her for a loop, so i kept it to myself. i kind of wanted to tell her leo had been an excellent mentor to me and she’d taught him well, but i figured i could save that for a better opportunity. (as it happened, i didn’t get the chance, but i think she knew she did a good job.)
i just understood that she saw me as a young person she wanted to teach and look out for, and maybe a person whose agency she wanted to validate despite society trying to squash it.
so i listened to her advice and thanked her, and told her i’d think on it, and she was happy. and i did think on it, too, and it helped me in my relationship with seebs.
people with dementia are still themselves. they’re not clear on the details, but they still love and care and have things to teach.
My grandmother recognized me and my husband, but she also thought I was ten years old, so, yeah. Timeline confusion. Just roll with it. You can’t “fix” them with the “truth” when truth is a concept that has lost all objective meaning for them.
The RNC sent me a notice of official census material that was actually a fundraiser for the republican candidates running in the midterms. The paperwork was presented as being an official document required to be filled out by law, but it was patently false. This is corruption. This is meant to deceive people into giving data and money to a political party under the guise of nonpartisan census data. This undermines trust in the census, local government, and the democratic process. This is beyond disgusting, and I’m mailing back the form to tell the RNC how I really feel about their bullshit.
It’s day 4 of our Kickstarter! If you are looking for a social media platform that lets you:
choose who can see, reblog, and comment on your posts
create and join user-moderated communities
blacklist posts containing certain terms or tags
talk to other users via nested comment threads
then you might like Pillowfort.io. Check out our campaign for much more information about the site, our business plan, and how you can get into the private beta!
I backed this because it’s super cool! If you visit the site right now you can check it out as a demo user, which is helpful to see if you like what it looks like.
New platforms generally depend on a critical mass of interest. At work, my team and I have tried out almost everything that looks promising, and we’re testing PF as well. My professional (lmao) opinion is that it could be big…but we have to decide it’s going to be big. We can’t wait for the pool to fill up and then jump in. We’re the pool people. This metaphor is bad so I’m abandoning it but hopefully you get my drift.
The framework is there, but Pillowfort has decided they’re not going to depend on venture capital financing or corporate sponsorship–which is frankly counter to all conventional wisdom about how social media works in this day and age, and is risky. Based on what I’ve seen, I think they’re taking an informed risk.
But that means we’re kind of the VC here. We’re the ones who have to take a chance on it knowing that it’s still in development, that it’s not fully populated right now, and that it won’t immediately be Better Than Tumblr in all the ways we’re used to. There will be stuff you don’t like, and you will have concerns. That’s all good.
Honestly, though? Nobody is out there building a Tumblr-killer who has the capacity to launch a fully-featured website. This is probably our best bet if we really want something tailored to our needs to take off.
This has become an essay about social media so the rest of it is under the cut.
This essay is great at articulately the meta value of places like Pillowfort. I want to also emphasize that, currently, sites that Pillowfort is going up against – Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr – are all facing blowback about the ways in which they’ve commodified their users’ data and engagement. It’s the users and their habits that are being sold, and all three sites have experimented with algorithms that show their users content they do not want to see (pulling popular posts from tags onto the main dash; showing likes as public timeline posts) or aggregating timelines based on relevance and interaction rather than chronologically. YouTube also does this to the point where “subscribing” or “following” is a basically meaningless term. Amidst all that, Pillowfort is providing a service to its users that lets them shape their experience and be the investors who decide, yes, i am willing to see ads to pay for the customization I am not getting anywhere else, or yes, i will pay to get more icons and features (like Livejournal). I see Pillowfort following the AO3 model of financing, and I think there is more than enough interest and incentive to support sites like this because of the way they center user experience over data collection.
Thanks for your very thoughtful write-up @robatics! You’re right that we are intentionally taking a risk in pursuing crowd-funding instead of venture capital specifically because we’d rather be beholden to the users who are actually involved in the site, rather than a small group of people who are going to primarily see the site as a vehicle to make a return on the money they gave us. I was around when LiveJournal was in its heyday and I watched it make increasingly poor business decisions that were counter to user experience after getting bought out. Then, when people migrated from LJ to Tumblr, we eventually saw the same thing happen to Tumblr (with the added fun of Tumblr never having been built for the kind of interaction and communication that people wanted to use it for to begin with).
It’s certainly a gamble, and there’s no doubt we’re a small team without a ton of resources behind us. You could call us ‘scrappy.’ But we’re building this site because it’s the site that we have been waiting for years to spring up and counter Tumblr, and when it never happened I just said, “well, guess I ought to try it myself.” And I know that there are tons of people on this site and other social media sites who are sick of the norms that social media has settled into and want a change; enough people that we could make this site successful if we all chipped in and signed on. And I understand, of course, why people are hesitant to trust us, because we are new and scrappy and small; but we’re also building this site from the perspective of long-time bloggers who just want to make a site that’s functional and actually provides us with the tools we need to talk to each other. And we need your help with that, and we hope you will lend it to us, because otherwise we either won’t have the money to develop the site at all (and we have been developing the site basically for free for over two years now, but we can only do that for so long, especially if we want to really start competing with established platforms)– or we’ll have to go looking for venture capital funding, and if we do that we’ll be under drastically increased pressure to design the site with maximum profit in mind. And we don’t want that any more than you do.
I know a lot of you guys don’t want to reblog those posts about the wildfires in Greece because they’re too long, so I figured I would make a shorter post for y’all.
Here is a link on how to help and what the current situations are, and here is a direct link to the fundraiser.
As someone who has personally been affected by fire, I would really appreciate if y’all could sb this??
This man hates exploiting people so much that he continues to do it even though it breaks his heart. Reblog if you cried 🤧
yeah Adam Ruins Everything did a great episode that included why the majority of unpaid internships are actually illegal, so fuck this guy (who apparently is also a rapist??) it boils down to if an unpaid internship doesnt meet any of the below criteria, its illegal:
so if youre interning for a publisher and theyre having you fetch coffee and answer phones? ILLEGAL. youre not being taught anything having to do w the industry youre supposed to be studying and youre taking the place of a PAID secretary. and the idea that doing internships at all makes you more able to get jobs is bullshit:
so really truly, fuck anyone who claims unpaid internships are a necessary “audition” on the way to success, classifying an unpaid internship as an “audition” or “tryout” is LITERALLY on the list of things that makes an unpaid internship ILLEGAL (source for more info)
As far as I know the only unpaid interships that are legal are the ones that are part of an actual school program like doctors, nurses, lab techs, etc. where they finish their program with interships where they shadow people who do the job & learn the actual thing while being supervised. i think doctors are paid for it though.
Here are four things that are very, very reassuring to find on land you’ve recently moved to. Definitely good signs.
1. Poorly concealed underground …. thing.
2. Small purple flowers twining around a skull. This species of flower does not seem to be present anywhere else on the property, and you’ve never seen it before. The skull is too large for a rabbit, too small for a deer.
Frankenuff’s Castle 