There's actually kind of a funny history behind the Eggplant emoji. Emoji are Japanese in origin and around the time they were taking off there was this Survivor like gameshow where one guy was confined to his apartment and he had to try and survive past the basics by applying for and winning sweepstakes items from various promotions from newspapers and magazines.

The participant's shortened form name was Nasu - which means "eggplant" so since the guy started the challenge with literally nothing including clothes they put a little Eggplant over his junk in post. That became a Japanese cultural meme that translated over once emoji became more widely adopted.

You probably won't see actual dick emoji in the actual set because emoji are an all ages access thing and exist on an international level. It's actually kind of funny how different cultures use the same finite set. Like in China how the angel emoji is construed as "I'm going to end you". One could see the things as becoming essentially a hieroglyphic set where they gain their own full individual linguistic meanings.

Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There's a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community's tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It's really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people's no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.

A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it's just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a'la Alien is don't even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.

Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There's good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.

Umm. No. Sorry gunna pull my union card on this one since this is my Industry and while I am not an armorer or a props person I am emeshed in their understanding of property on a set as an On set dresser.

There is a legal duty of care held by everyone who handles a prop weapon. Furthermore there is a duty of care held by Producers on a show. Baldwin was not just an actor, he was a producer on Rust which means he had hiring and firing power.

Regularly this is how prop weapon safety works.

Prop weapons are only handled by an armorer who must maintain a full supervision of the weapon. It can never be used with live ammunition.

Loading can only ever take place by the props person (non union exception) or a designated armorer who must have an up to date licence.

Any mishandling of the weapon up to this stage leaves the armourer open to criminal liability. If someone steps in to this process at this stage they might take the lions share of liability. If an actor or someone who is not the props person charged with care of the weapon grabs it for instance without a hand off.

During the hand off of the weapon to an actor the props person does a last physical check of all the rounds in the weapon in sight of the actor. IF an actor accepts a weapon without doing this check then they are considered criminally negligent for any harm done with the weapon that would have been reasonably negated by this step. If the actor uses the weapon in a way that is unsafe after this check all liability is shoulded by the actor.

Following the weapon that killed on Rust it was used with live ammunition to shoot cans and abandoned on a cart. This makes the props person negligent by film safety practice. It was picked up by the 1st Assistant Director whom was not entitled to handle the weapon AT ALL which transfers some criminal negligence to him. The 1st AD handed the weapon to Baldwin and claimed it was a safe weapon WITHOUT performing the check. Anyone who saw this trade off on the set should have set off general alarm. But they didn't. This could have had to do with power imbalances on set. You generally do not tell a Producer that they are doing something wrong unless you are either willing to trust the producer to be reasonable or baring that, are willing to lose your job. Wrongful termination suits are nigh nonexistent in film because chasing one might blacklist you from other productions.

The 1st AD is the main safety officer on set and Baldwin as an experienced actor would have been briefed on weapon safety protocols many times before. Having the 1st AD just hand you a weapon on set EVEN one that is an inert rubber replica would be an instant firing offence for the AD. Accepting the weapon without insisting on a check leaves the liability on the actor. They might have a lesser share depending on how experienced they might be. If they were ignorant of the protocol at the time then the production team would take that share liability for not properly enforcing safety on the set.

Baldwin as a producer in the days leading up to the accident had shown signs of being negligent in other areas of production safety and the people hired into positions that were to enforce safety on set. People left the production citing the unsafe conditions in protest. He may not shoulder the full liability of criminal negligence but he ABSOLUTELY owns a chunk of it. Directors and Producers REGULARLY push the boundaries of crew safety when they think they can get away with it and the bigger the name the more likely these accidents are. Remembering WHY we have these safety protocols and the people injured or killed in the past is something that is well known in the industry. We remember those killed or permanently maimed by production negligence because there but for the grace of God go us. Everyone who has been in this industry more than a decade personally knows someone whose life was permanently impacted by a bigshot throwing their weight around because of the natural power imbalances on set. One of my Co-workers sustained a permanently debilitating brain injury last year for just this reason. You dice with some one else's death you gotta pay up when you lose.

Had an older co-worker who kept saying that Andrew Tate had some real gems and that he was just telling young men to give up videogames and hit the gym if they wanted some self worth.

So one day I looked him dead in the eye and gave him my best impersonation of a 1950's radio voice and said. " Young ladies if you don't work on refining and improving your womanly figure with clean living and labourous exercise and not stop wasting your time reading novels then how will you ever expect to catch a husband?!"

I would like to say that I scored a point but he just sputtered and went on being horrible.

The trucker I swamp for has swapped rhetoric from "Kamala laughs like a hyena/ Trump is fine" to declarations about how he doesn't care about politics and how maybe we should all just stop talking about it.

Very funny how fast that disengage happened.

I am glad someone is calling the Florida school system on their bullshit. Being non-binary hard and being treated like the coping mechanisms you use for avoiding hating the experience of dealing with people and existing in your body are somehow a delusion, some sort of sexual kink or deliberately confusing is like trying to go about your day with weights strapped to you. It makes dealing with every social interaction so tiring. It really feels like everybody else in the room is obsessed with your sex organs and characteristics like complete perverts that they don't see the question is about how happy you are and how you feel about all the people in your life and whether you feel anxious and isolated being around them or just comfortable and able to express your full range of personhood.

This teacher is standing up because they know there's others much worse off who aren't secure enough to do it. Pretty admirable I think.

Buy hards?

The entitlement of the average right winger really is something to behold.

I don't highly enforce my pronouns. Not because it doesn't effect me but because being labeled a troublemaker who is hard to get along with is a career limiting move... And some interactions are so limited that it's not worth creating social awkwardness to self advocate. Days where this happens a lot make me depressed, grumpy and eats into the energy I have reserved to enjoy my leisure time.

Which is why it is so frustrating that some people demand that calling me by my dead name or refer openly to my sex using pronouns I hate is completely consequenceless that even when I tell them the only reprocussion to them is that I will not like being around very much them they get angry. Like I am cheating them of being owed that I automatically enjoy their company.

They are so bloody sensitive that the consequence of me thinking they are kind of shit to be around is somehow a tyranny. I just wanna yell at them like dude.. You keep bringing attention to the physical body that represents my least favorite aspects of existing by mentioning directly in conversation because that's what words like "she", "her", "girl" and "woman" mean to you. You might as well be openly talking about my fucking genetalia because that is your only qualifier for using those words. You are reflecting the things I didn't like about about the experience of myself back at me. If I openly referenced your least favorite physical trait every time casually in conversation how much would you enjoy being around me?

I realize it's a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it's actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah... Minimalism is kind of for the rich.

This is more than a little misogynistic. There are female armorers in their 20's out there who are kicking ass after a couple of gigs and old dogs who refuse to change with the times who are timebombs waiting to go off. Gender, how pretty you are, even experience have nothing to do with aptitude. On a set it's more mindset, willingness to learn, commitment to doing the craft well and wits than experience.

You want to blame something, blame industry nepotism. That's why she was there. She's the kid of another armorer who pulled strings for her to get her jobs. Not a gendered thing either. The majority of people I see fucking shit up in my industry aren't there because someone has aspirations to sleep with them, it's because they are somebody's kid, relative or best friend and they can't be fired.

Film has enough gendered bullshit issues without people pulling this shit about one of the few departments that actually has gender parity.

Info dumping is a love language.

Not just theater but musical theater the absolute stronghold of the LGBTQIA+... Yeah let's just talk openly about how I believe the vast majority of my coworkers and peers (who probably have backgrounds of religious trauma) are morally defunct and how their ability to feel loved and supported shouldn't be considered protected by society!

I want to grab her by the shoulders and say : For fuck sake honey. No one in your field wanting to touch you with a 9 ft pole isn't their fault. Having someone openly homophobic in a role where getting the gold star of casting has been for the past several years meant actually choosing someone who has actual experience in a similar identity to what they are potraying... It would be suicide for a production. People are going to look to a queer character to project themselves in those situations. Knowing you're just a bigot doing it for self agrandizement, accolades and cash is going to cause fucking boycotts from the very target audience of the show!

Spilling your theocratic dirty laundry on twatter because you can't hold it in can be a "career limiting move" and that's just normal in a pluralistic society.

You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don't know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.

It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.

I dunno if anyone is interested but of you got some spare coins laying around the Canadian based charity Rainbow Refugee has been helping get out threatened LGBTQIA+ folks from multiple countries including Russia for quite a while now by arranging sponsorships and legal support and advice for LGBTQIA asylum seekers. If you know anyone looking to get out or would like to donate here's a link :

https://www.rainbowrefugee.com/

Maltheism or Dystheism might be your bag. Dystheism is the idea that God(s) are not all good and may be evil and Maltheism is a more recent addition that posits a strong belief that there exists only a categorically evil divinity.

Honestly they have sown the myths of trans healthcare so hard that people legit believe 5 year olds are receiving puberty blockers. The barest of sense is easier to hijack than people can believe. It's why we can't depend on a majority vote for stuff like this. The airbrains are being given butterflies to chase and then telling us we're crazy. They probably have some fictional bogeyman-esque case someone wrote an article about or a interviewee they managed to play out of context nonsense from to cite you.

Don't need a professional expert to acertain whether the market is sour. Where I am the cost of renting a one bedroom apartment is around $1800 a month plus utilities on the low end. Mind you I am in a city but is you drive an hour and a half away to the farthest "commutable" burbs you are still looking at rents that are $1400 for essentially a one bedroom basement suite.

There are a lot of people my age I know who are working proper professional jobs double income no kids situations who are never able to save up enough for the initial down payment for a house. Why would they when they face so much precarity? Whatever money they are able to sock aside for a rainy day might only cover a car repair or some time off work if they have a life altering event like a parent dying and paying down chunks of student loan.

They wouldn't be able to handle paying for repairs and maintenance for an actual property while still paying high mortgage. Practically every early millenial I know who didn't start making their nest egg through a job in trades right out of high school and instead spent time in the post secondary system getting a degree got bit.

The national identity of being Canadian over the last while has been every four years wondering if the downstairs neighbors are going to decide to restart up the meth lab they keep tinkering with and bracing for the sounds of domestic violence to resume.

I throw no shade on Mildred... As long as she's one of those girls who like dress in 1950's fashions and is way too into electroswing.

Then it's only fitting.

Kind of love the Dionysis call out since he's kind of the Greek patron god of genderqueer folk due to his complicated history of cross-dressing to fly under the radar of the Gods and his connections to death and rebirth.

A shout out to all my fellow rose' vintages!