Housekeepers and Janitors Need Praise As Unsung but Very Much Important
Remember when the NRA told doctors to “stay in their lane” RE gun violence and #thisismylane trended as a result?
One of the tweets I saw was a surgeon who’d taken a picture of her OR, having just finished surgery on a young man who’d been shot. Blood. Everywhere.
This bloke retweeted her, mentioning that he worked as a cleaner in a hospital and had had to clean up stuff like this and worse.
Surgeon replied to him (and went up *greatly* in my estimation) and, despite living in different countries, thanked him for his hard work.
I can’t find the tweets sadly, but hers went something like;
“Without a clean and sterile operating room to work in, my team, our skills and the best medicines in the world are next to useless. You are doing invaluable work, without which my work would be impossible.”
WITHOUT PEOPLE DOING THE CLEANING, SOCIETY WOULD GRIND TO A HALT WITHIN DAYS
So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom
It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education
and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up
make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll
So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn’t be deterred by the prank calls because they would ‘taper off eventually’. It’d be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇
My queue reminded me about this one as desired. I toddled off to find some reporting about the current state of the AZ hotline, because it’s been a few weeks since March. As of last week, at least one Arizona public education advocacy organization is already beginning to push to kill this thing on grounds that it’s a waste of time asking parents to “snitch on teachers”, and the prank calls and emails are giving her some excellent ammo. As of last report they’d had about 2,000 emails and 600 voice calls, the vast majority of which have not yielded any useful information. The AZ Central is openly calling for citizens to flood the hotline with calls to support teachers, bless them.
I also found this US News note, which mentioned a few similar hotlines:
In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin created a tip line in January 2022. But his office said it was deactivated in September after it “received little to no volume” of pertinent calls, USA Today reported. In 2021, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson established an online portal for concerns about anything being taught in the state’s public schools. Many used it to send in criticisms of him.
It’s looking pretty great, y'all. The Illuminator piece has some incredible ideas for wasting time:
Hundreds of users complained about The Bible, pointing to passages that describe explicit sexual activity, rape, incest and abortion. The complaints say these portions of the Bible are inappropriate for children.
“In 2018, the Louisiana attorney general stated that he couldn’t set up a tip line for people to report clergy sexual abuse because he didn’t have the authority to prosecute them… Clearly the Church has an established history of child sexual abuse, but you have decided to waste funds on a dead-ended search for that abuse in libraries rather than where it really exists,” wrote one user, only identified as John.
Others submitted the addresses of Catholic churches and lists of Louisiana clergy members who have been accused of sexual assault.
Out of the thousands of pages of complaints, only a small handful appeared to be made with serious intent. Upon closer inspection, some comments that initially appeared to be serious were actually against schools, libraries and books that do not exist.
The key takeaway here is that flooding these tiplines works to tie up the hands of the people doing the investigations, makes them ineffective, and wastes the time of American taxpayers. It’s a great thing to do when you’re feeling helpless, however you can muster. The sheer diversity of the calls, letters, and emails presented proves that this is something that millions of Americans care deeply about, and that no one is going to sit down and let these book-burning assholes put their mealy-mouthed, regressive words into the mouths of teachers and public schools.
(And they make mighty good reading for journalists to publish, just saying.)
Update as of June 2023!
The Empower hotline has received about 30,000 “crank phone calls” since March and fuck only knows how many emails. The Arizona Dept of Public Education has had to confess it actually has no power to do anything to teachers beyond maybe publicly shaking its finger at them and yelling SHAME, as well as having to confess that they have been able to launch, um, two investigations in that entire time (both into Mesa Public Schools). Two. One of them concerned the use of the term “white supremacy” in an optional professional development training seminar for teachers referred to the school system by…. the Arizona Dept of Public Education itself, dear oh dear oh dear.
Let’s keep it up, friends! They have one poor fucker whose full time job entails handling this hotline. That means a) they are dedicating a whole ass comfortable salary, AND benefits, to this stupid piece of shit political stunt, and also b) if we play our cards right, we can make this person’s life so incredibly miserable and their job so unsatisfying that they quit.
Yesterday at the yugioh event I was at I was not doing hot so I decided to play an older format, got matched next to a table with a trans girl who won her match in like five minutes.I really wanted to say I liked her pin and eyeshadow so I was like okay time to focus. I can win this one. She started watching just in time to see me make a play so bad that my opponent demanded to see my hand so he could tell me to make a better one
Whenever I see an up-and-coming Youtuber I notice they often make the same mistake. When the time comes to increase production quality, the absolute first thing you should do is invest in improving your sound. Not the camera or the lens or lighting or set design. Audio quality trumps all of that. People being able to understand what you are communicating should always be the highest priority.
And the cool part is you can do this with a cheap lav mic. There are some that can just plug right into your phone. The next priority is learning how to set levels and make sure your voice isn’t distorting from being too loud. You can even record a little quiet and bump up the levels later on. But if you record too loud to begin with, you can’t fix that.
After that you can “treat” your room. Which just involves controlling echo and reverb. Foam acoustic panels are expensive and not necessary. You can do the same thing by just filling your room with stuff. Furniture, books, blankets, pillows. You want to eliminate large flat surfaces. If the sound has to bounce around on 20 different surfaces before it comes back to your microphone, it will have much less energy.
You can also figure out which wall is the biggest echo offender and hang a couple of heavy blankets in front of it. If you can score those moving blankets on the cheap, those work great. And if you can put a gap in between the blankets that will further reduce echo/reverb. You don’t have to cover the entire wall, just the main area in front of where you are speaking. If you can reduce that very first reflection, the sound will have much less energy to bounce off other surfaces.
All that said, sometimes people will go overboard with sound and buy that giant phallic SM7B dynamic microphone. I see those things everywhere. Yes, Michael Jackson used it and it does sound great. But with so many quality USB mics that plug straight into your computer, it is a huge hassle and really overkill unless you just enjoy audio tech and want a cool toy. The SM7B requires extra equipment to make it sound good. It’s XLR so you need a special interface. And most people add a “cloudlifter” because it isn’t very sensitive and can be really quiet without it. Plus, dynamic mics need to be super close to your mouth and I think covering half your face with a giant mic isn’t the best visual. There are lav mics in a wide spectrum of price ranges that can be hidden and sound great. Or you can do a shotgun mic like they use in movies. It can be hidden offscreen and pick up your voice from a distance.
Big dynamic mics are great for people with baritone voices. If you are James Earl Jones and you want to show off your voice, the SM7B or something similar makes more sense. Beyond that, most of your viewers just want clarity. Good room treatment and a $30 lav mic can achieve that pretty well. And if you watch a few tutorials on how to EQ and process audio, you can do a lot to make a cheaper microphone sound great. Reaper is a wonderful audio program with professional features and a reasonable price.
TLDR… fix your sound first!
If I had to pick a second priority, it would be lighting.
Here are the most important things to remember about lights…
The larger the light, the softer and more flattering it is. The brighter the light, the less noisy the image. (Lower ISO) The closer the light, the larger and brighter it is. (inverse square law)
Which brings me to my biggest lighting pet peeve…
NO RING LIGHTS!
Way back in the early days of YouTube when makeup vloggers were trying to show off their techniques and create compelling tutorials, they discovered an old lighting accessory photographers would use for face close-ups. Usually for fashion shoots where they wanted to show off fancy makeup.
They discovered the magical ring light.
People saw them using these lights and noticed how flattering they could be, so they bought their own ring lights. Except they weren’t doing makeup videos. They weren’t shooting close-ups of their face. And therein lies their mistake. A mistake that has caused a cascade effect of thousands and thousands of people buying ring lights just because that’s what everyone else was doing.
RING LIGHTS EVERYWHERE!
The original ring lights looked something like this.
These lights were moved in as close as humanly possible in order to surround a face with light and eliminate nearly all shadows. It is a very flattering look that creates cool ring catchlights in the eyes and gives a blank shadow-free canvas for makeup.
This is how a ring light is meant to be used.
As you can see, light hits the face from every angle to give you that shadow free effect. But look at how close the ring light needs to be in order to have the desired effect.
Also, the camera must be placed dead center. If you don’t put the camera in the hole, why are you using a ring light? The entire point of the hole is for the camera.
If you back the light up even a little bit, or put the camera off to the side, all of the ring light magic disappears.
It then turns into… a normal light.
A normal light without any light coming from the center.
Which means it is not as bright and it is smaller. If the ring light isn’t right up in your face, it is even dimmer and smaller yet. And if you remember my rules, bigger and brighter is (almost) always better.
Do you see the mistake now?
People are buying a light specifically designed for tight face close-ups and the majority of them are not using them for tight face close-ups.
If you want something just as compact, you might consider an LED panel.
Look at all that extra light you get by not having a giant hole in the middle! And by putting the light off to the side, you actually get a more dramatic lighting effect. You can even get two or three of these puppies and create all kinds of different lighting setups.
And if you have a bit more space, just get a traditional softbox kit. You can get two giant lights for the price of a decent ring light.
Look at how big and bright those bad boys are!
Do your research. Check out video lighting tutorials and find a style that you like. There is Rembrandt lighting, 3-point lighting, edge lighting, clamshell lighting… all kinds of neat effects to choose from. And based on the style you prefer, make your lighting equipment choices from there.
Get cheap lights to start. Experiment and learn how to use them. And once you have a decent understanding of lighting, then consider getting the more expensive lights that can accept various modifiers.
It’s always interesting how trans people see their transition. Some people are like “I was a boy now I’m a girl” and some are like “I was always a girl” and every once in a while you get a fun one like “I used to be a boy but the girl won”
This vessel used to belong to a young man but he had a weak will and gave in to my dark influence
One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed about non-natives appropriating our stuff is they never want anything but sage, smudging, and feathers.
Native people will share: our food, our music, our dancing, our art.
But no one is interested in those. They don’t CARE about our food and music. We never see those things in popular culture. Non-natives just want to take our religious items, because they feel entitled to the things people don’t want to share.
A Tribe Called Red (techno Native beats):
Taboo #noDAPL protest music (Native Hip Hop):
Supaman (Prayer loop song, Rap)
Check em out. Add on. Support Native Artists. Spread the love y'all
Good musical options. 🙌🏼
I FRICKIN LOVE A TRIBE CALLED RED!!! Seriously, listen to their stuff it’s so good!!!
Adding to this:
Music!
Snotty Nosed Rez Kids (”I Remember My Name” Native hip-hop)
Frank Waln (”Wokiksuye” Rap)
JB the First Lady (”The Most Unprotected Girl” R&B)
Clothes! There’s also a lot of Native designers doing amazing work blending old and new styles. These are two of my favorites
Sean Sherman - maybe one of the most famous Native chefs. There’s a great little video on him here and his website is here!
Dance! This one is a little trickier because no, you, non-Native person absolutely should not dance at the powwows unless it’s an open dance AND you’ve been invited to do so. (And if you have, please don’t do the white hippie dance. Please.) However, you can and absolute come out and support the circuit & the dancers. Some of my favorite dancers/competitions:
O.B. (Ohh Bizz) who mostly does grass dancing. (Yeah, I know he hasn’t updated in forever. the #NoDAPL protests derailed a lot of people’s lives.) He’s a lot of fun to watch and a complete sweetheart.
FNUC Powwow 2019 (also, yes, the announcer is pretty much typical for a powwow. You want a person who can roast literally everyone in a 10 mile radius? A powwow announcer can do that.)
CBC (Canadian broadcasting corporation) has native music show called reclaimed. You can stream it online anywhere from their website. And I think you can even make playlists.
The ancient world was full of textile masterpieces we can only imagine… but most of them have rotted away. So few of them have come down to us in these days that we think of metal and stone as the primary mediums for the oldest artworks. But there were tapestries and fabric work that would have rivaled the finest wrought gold and iron and the first cave paintings.
This is a incredibly rare find. A ball of yarn made from stinging nettle fibers in the Late Neolithic (5900 years old) in what’s now Marin-Epagnier in Switzerland. The thread has been preserved by being carbonized. Look at how much thread that is! And how fine and even it is spun! The skill going into this is absolutely incredible. Imagine the incredible textile work that must’ve been made with that. For a reference here’s a ball of nettle yarn I managed to make with a drop spindle. That took me 300 hours of work.
ALT
