Pocket kitty

(via)

peek into improved leverage food styling

#redemption spoilers #some blurry screenshots cuz that aint my forte || thank you @inklingdancer for reminding me of this post about the missing food stylist for the french connection job. particularly, how it was tough for me to suspend my disbelief seeing the chaos that was eliot's meal that he made for parker to talk about food being his art.

a full ass wrap, corn bread, and an omelet?? okay? i just rewatched the episode last night and im tryna convince myself that eliot just plated two-ish meals on one plate in case one thing didn't catch her eye, something else would. (in my memory, i replace this dish with the gorgeously described venison stew in @out-there-on-the-maroon & @hugealienpie's phenomenal The Really Ugly Statue Job fic.)

i won't screenshot the actual plates prepared for that night's dinner. imo the menu makes no damn sense, even if you want to pass it off as a fusion place, but! i think its forgivable because they might be working on the old chef's recipes and/or adjustments had to be made for the newbie cooks he was working with. the steak looked real good, tho. also let's not get me distracted with the SNACK that is eliot's forearm.

anyway, im writing today that i am happy to report they most definitely must have gotten someone with an eye for food for redemption because god, eliot's dishes look delicious. huge portions, but everything looks like it makes sense now lol.

like first you have the brunch eliot prepares in episode one.

not quite sure what the egg is sitting on, and i dont think that's egg benedict because the egg looks more fried. i would clock it as maybe a quick onion and potato hash cake garnished with egg like a boss. and of course the fruit salad (look at those perfectly proportioned orange slices!). plus a bonus alka seltzer because eliot is a Very Very Good Spouse who takes care of his Very Very Lightweight Husband.

the berries make a comeback, but this time! the greens are removed from the strawberries which is a detail i am personally going to love bringing too much attention to. because like, the berries in episode one being unpeeled is like "okay this is a quick and perfunctory meal" but imma still make it look semi decent. this tho, this is INTENTION and LABOR in making it prepped for sophie. i wonder if there's maybe something underneath it, given the height of the fruit. maybe a granola or oatmeal?

the plate looks like a few dips with a nut bread and a flatbread (straight up imo looks like matzo given its edge, plain color, and thinness? i would have said a big parmesan crisp but this is vegan so obviously not? lets imagine eliot making his own for years now cuz of hardison and now he bangs them out for every occasion). maybe a squash mash and a warm green salad (collards? spinach? kale? not sure). potentially hummus or another kind of wheat-y spongy bread in the top left corner?

im not talking about the flowers because i will cry.

like with the french connection job, there is admittedly a lot going on here. but! i feel like these all fit together, and tell me the same story as my reasoning before: basically, that eliot is putting out a spread of various things hoping something sticks with sophie and warms her heart in a deep way on this hard anniversary. anyway, eliot fucking loves sophie and cares for his crew and redemption got someone to think through their food, even if it's not a full blown stylist thank the fuck god.

came 'cause I got tagged; stayed for the incredible food commentary

Thinking about the Leverage crew in the Good Place afterlife.

Accountants would cry trying to tally their points. They've encountered people who did bad things for good reasons before, but the scale the Leverage team operated on is new. The personal improvement of all the Leverage crew over the course of their life is huge, but the number of people they've hurt (the system doesn't allow for "but they deserved it"; and it's really hard to measure "they would have hurt more people if we hadn't stopped them", although the accountants still have to try to factor it in).

Glenn and some friends would lobby for Nate to be made an honorary demon because they want his help designing tests. Also, he's really hard to test because he keeps figuring it out.

Vicky would keep sending Sophie through the same test--meeting a promising new thief--and insist the goal was for Sophie not to train the thief but instead discourage them from pursuing a life of crime, but really Vicky is just taking notes on all of Sophie's acting tips.

Shawn puts bad people in a situation to do bad things and Eliot close enough to see. Either the bad people won't do bad things and thus improve, Eliot will find a way to stop them without beating them up and thus improve, or Eliot will beat them up. Shawn calls it "economical and enjoyable!"

They create a neighborhood where Hardison has opportunities to fix a corrupt government or business, but he keeps using his normal methods, and "refusing to work with corrupt and unethical people on their terms" and "stops bad people from hurting innocents" count as positive points even as his methods rack up the negative points. He also hacks the Bad Place. Changing your own score is negative points. Changing other people's scores to spare them suffering is positive.

Parker's case keeps getting handed to different architects. The architects keep succumbing to the temptation to try and build a security system she can't beat rather than teach her not to steal.

At some point, Nate has figured out he's in a simulation and refused to cooperate unless he speaks to whoever is in charge ("You need my help to keep this from happening again"), Sophie has earned Vicky's trust and convinced Vicky to show off her other work, Eliot has learned to tell the demons and real people and simulations apart and followed a demon to the exit, Hardison has hacked his way out, and Parker found an air vent that leads out of the testing room, and the five meet up again, ready to break out of the Bad Place.

Shawn develops empathy for Chidi's stomach aches.

As much as I mildly despair about the functionality of Tumblr, I’m forever grateful we don’t have the creative interface of other social media platforms. 

I keep seeing youtubers talking about how the new algorithm on their creative dash is so detrimental to their mental health, both in terms of how they feel about themselves as creators and the content they make—dreading to find out their performance rating, regardless of whether they enjoyed it or not. And it’s the same across multiple other platforms, TickTock, Facebook, Instagram. Fuck, I’ve even seen people with business accounts complaining on Twitter.

And then there’s Tumblr. Where sometimes you can’t find your own posts even though you know you tagged it, time stamps are hidden in the ellipses at the top right hand corner of the post, your bread recipe keeps getting flagged as porn, too much punctuation causes asks not to send, and checking your activity feed causes the app to crash. You want to know your trending numbers? You want to know what’s performing well? Fuck you, guess.

Excuse me the fuck WHAT

IMAGE ID: Screen shot of a tumblr post with the menu accessed via the three dots at the upper right corner of the post dropped down. The three dots and the time stamp, “Posted - 2:28 AM” are circled in red.

Sadly on the app the timestamp showing on your TL is the time of the last reblog.

You have to access the original post on OP’s blog to know when it was posted -_-

Reblogging for this very good point from @favinatriceneea

Fitzmack + Enemies to Lovers + Bodyguard AU

Day 10 of Pride Month

As much as I mildly despair about the functionality of Tumblr, I’m forever grateful we don’t have the creative interface of other social media platforms. 

I keep seeing youtubers talking about how the new algorithm on their creative dash is so detrimental to their mental health, both in terms of how they feel about themselves as creators and the content they make—dreading to find out their performance rating, regardless of whether they enjoyed it or not. And it’s the same across multiple other platforms, TickTock, Facebook, Instagram. Fuck, I’ve even seen people with business accounts complaining on Twitter.

And then there’s Tumblr. Where sometimes you can’t find your own posts even though you know you tagged it, time stamps are hidden in the ellipses at the top right hand corner of the post, your bread recipe keeps getting flagged as porn, too much punctuation causes asks not to send, and checking your activity feed causes the app to crash. You want to know your trending numbers? You want to know what’s performing well? Fuck you, guess.

Excuse me the fuck WHAT

IMAGE ID: Screen shot of a tumblr post with the menu accessed via the three dots at the upper right corner of the post dropped down. The three dots and the time stamp, “Posted - 2:28 AM” are circled in red.

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

When I first discovered the word nonbinary, I learned that “If you’re nonbinary, you have no connection at all to a binary gender (men/women)”. 

After a while, I started to hear the opposite: “If you’re nonbinary, you’re either a nonbinary woman or a nonbinary man”. 

Right now, this seems to shift again. Now I hear: “If you’re nonbinary, you’re a nonbinary woman. You can’t be neutral or a nonbinary man”. 

Which one of these statements is the truth? None of them are - or at least none of them are the ultimate truth that covers everyone. They’re all oversimplified: Gender identity is complex and deeply personal and just like it would be wrong to say “All women feel exactly this way”, we can’t say “All nonbinary people feel exactly this way”. 

Nonbinary covers a wide range of unique experiences. There’s no wrong way to be nonbinary! You might feel a connection to a binary gender or you may not. Either way, only you get to define what nonbinary means for you individually. 

I hope this also serves as a reminder to you how much these things change and shift over the years. The common answer to “Am I a real nonbinary person if…” depends simply on the year you ask the question. 

So, don’t invest too much energy in trying to find the right answer - find the answer YOU feel happy with. 

With all my love, 

Your Tumblr Dad

So, is it just me, or do activist groups need to just have, like, a thing that’s like “I’m new and eager to help but I need my hand held”?

I think about this a lot, obviously, because the thing that most often gets identified as a support need for me is needing help doing something the first time.

I’m usually fine after that, as long as it doesn’t change much, but I can’t do something for the first time without just a tiny bit of hand-holding.

And I mean that literally. I get overwhelmed and I have a meltdown. This isn’t something that I can power through - I’ve tried - it’s a debilitating part of my disability.

And I get so fucking frustrated. Like, I did door-knocking during the last election. Literally all I needed was a five minute phone-call like “here’s exactly where the building is and here’s what you can expect when you arrive.”

And I got that because they were desparate enough to need to ring people who might be up for volunteering.

But before that, I’d spent several weeks in an anxiety spiral, blaming myself for not being able to participate.

And tbh, the more I pay attention to most of my local activist groups, the more obvious the reason why this is becomes.

The fact that it’s difficult for nervous people like me to get involved versus people who have no problem throwing themselves into the unknown, means that the people at the top are all the kind of people happy with throwing themselves into the unknown who are then like “What’s wrong? Why would an email for a meet-up with nothing but an address and time be a problem? What’s wrong with having nothing but “email X if you want to get involved” on our website for potential volunteers?”

Because even “email X” is a problem for people who aren’t comfortable with email!

Like, “leave your email and we’ll email you a welcome pack” would be much easier, and if you inculded stuff like “here’s our regular meet-up space, and here are the people involved, and don’t worry, we have someone in charge of greeting new members, just look for the person with the [x] badge and tell them you’re new” I can absolutely guarantee that the number of people attending would sky-rocket.

Idk, I think I’m so annoyed because of the whole “slacktivisim doesn’t count” attitude.

Like, this isn’t even just a disability issue, though that’s the perspective I come to it from.

This is really common marketing knowledge. Do you want people to do a thing? Then lower resistance to doing the thing!

Make it as easy as possible! Get people involved in tiny ways that help them get comfortable, then start ramping up to getting them more involved.

Hold their hands.

Stop getting pissy at people for not getting involved and instead ask how can I help them get involved?

And yes, that includes posts on Tumblr that are like “it’s super easy to get involved!” and then link to groups that have these exact problems. The fact that something was easy for you does not mean that it’s easy for everyone.

(And obviously, this is based on my experience local to me, I’m not saying that no group has ever done this. And actually, if you do know of a group that is more accessible, please link it in a reblog so that I can share it.)

There’s a lot of “everyone knows” in volunteer spaces. Everyone knows that the meeting room 451 is actually on the third floor because the way that building was built into a hill messed with the numbering. Everyone knows you should get that one app to make phone banking more effective. Everyone knows Bob goes on about the thing and claims it’s the most important part of the task list, but you can ignore it and not spend 30 minutes on useless busywork. Everyone knows the url for the google sheet. Everyone knows except for the new would be volunteer who can’t find the meeting, keep up with the call list, get past the “important task” to do something of perceived value, or access the data they need to do the work. And then the volunteer orgs complain about how nobody is willing to contribute toward their goals.

I’m a newbie trying to do quality assurance on a big open source project. I’m on the email list, but I had to hunt someone down to find the virtual meeting link. Then I had to ask for the link to the QA regression script (a list of things we’re supposed to test). Then I had to go back to the meeting and say, “Hey, the link to the test server in the script is 404ing.” Where upon I was told the server address had changed, they just hadn’t updated it in the script, here’s the new one. Then I marked about half of the items in the script as failing because they didn’t work as described or the tools described apparently didn’t exist. Only to be told that the script descriptions and tool names were out of date and I should just test the way things should work with the new tool names. All of these things were things that “everybody knew.” Which, ok, fine, if QA is only for the old hands we can go with that. But then they spent the last 15 minutes of the meeting asking everyone to encourage other members of the community to join, lamenting that they hardly ever got new volunteers to help with testing, and complaining that a pro software in the same niche was eating their metaphorical lunch.

Dudes. My dudes. You can accommodate newbies or you can resign yourself to working with an established, well integrated, team that knows all the history and context. The latter is easier, but it’s also a way to watch your project slowly die. Build *and maintain* a fucking on-ramp.

Not to toot my own horn, but I’m part of this group, and our meeting attendance literally jumped about 20% after I took over the web duties a few years back. Why? Not because of my super-slick web skills, I’ll tell you that for danged sure.

It’s because I started adding several things to our meeting listings:

1. A link to a Google map of the location 2. Accessibility info about the meeting space, including stairs vs. elevators, whether we have access to gender-neutral or single-occupant toilets, noise and light levels, scents (we meet in churches a lot; it helps to know how recently someone’s burned incense or candles in a room) 3. Parking info about the meeting space (this also includes info like, “the parking lot is on the south side of the building, but the only unlocked door is on the east side” or “you’ll need to be buzzed in; give X person’s name rather than the group name for quicker recognition by the desk staff”) 4. Link to a rideshare option for people who wanted to carpool and a list of which city buses served the location, if I could figure it out (not always the easiest, in this town) 5. Contact info for the meeting facilitators, in case people had questions

Goodness knows it’s not everything. But new folks have told me that having even that much additional info available right there in the meeting listing helps them feel more assured that they won’t just be left to founder their way through the “everybody knows” all by themselves.

If you have information, share it. Activism and community engagement shouldn’t be activities of knowledge hoarding.

No way out

PLEASE DO NOT THINK FOR EVEN A SECOND THAT YOUR VOICE WILL NOT HAVE AN IMPACT THIS IS LITERALLY THE BARE MINIMUM

I'm sorry for putting this in the BLM and stop Asian hate tag but in the last few days posts tagged with "Palestine" have not been showing up.