So I’m a trans guy and as a kid I was very obviously masculine, stereotypical tomboy. One of my aunts that married into the family gave me, maybe around age 5-7, a toy makeup kit. To this day I don’t know wtf she was thinking, because it wasn’t like she never met or saw me. Was it thoughtless or passive aggressive? Who can say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t live anywhere cold now, but when I did it was in an urban area. Urban snow is pretty for a couple of hours max before the cars, people, pollution, shitting dogs, etc give it a disgusting tinge. It was also miserably cold to me, regularly getting down into the 10s and 20s F (-12 to -6 C).

I wouldn’t say I was dreaming of a green Christmas necessarily, but a white one isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you’re not living in a cottage in the woods!

Did you talk to whoever picked up the phone or a manager? A manager should be able to deal with the code issue, while a cashier probably couldn’t. If it was someone that could fix it and just refused or didn’t care, that’s indeed infuriating

Even just doing this on the portion of the wall directly behind your computer will help, if you don’t want to/can’t afford to do all your walls.

Anyone who wants to see everything Musk owns crash and burn?

While law enforcement does not believe Thompson’s killing is part of a trend targeting health executives, the attack underscores the vulnerability of these high-profile executives.

As a trans person in the US this sentence makes me want to scream. Can’t imagine what it must be like to be vulnerable to being murdered 🙄

Dress decently and bring a book or some other way to entertain yourself, you should mostly expect being bored. Most cases plea out so they wind up not needing most people they call in, so you might not even make it to the selection process.

It’s basically the same tactic, convince them that you’re too much of a pain in the ass to deal with and they should just give you what you want to get you to go away. Only it’s for accessing your own fucking healthcare that you pay them money for and not, you know, avoiding paying child support or truck payments.

And the people that run those companies, should they kill people depending on their company for healthcare if it makes them money?

Where do you think they got the $10 million/year to pay this man? Who do you think instituted a policy to use AI for approvals/denials, which resulted in a 90% false rejection rate? What’s crazy is acting like the murder of thousands of people through denial of medical care for money, if done from a sufficient distance, is somehow less abhorrent than doing it up close and with a gun.

Expecting people who have either been directly impacted or had family medical care impacted by the policies of this man to show sympathy for him isn’t just unrealistic, it’s deranged. Considering United is one of the largest insurance companies in the US, that’s a lot of fucking people who are at best apathetic about the whole situation.

Obligatory ‘I suspect some people who can’t read might reply to this’ disclaimer: obviously you shouldn’t murder people. Including if you’re a healthcare CEO and it’s done by setting policies to squeeze the maximum profit out of people before they die.

The children of today have no idea what it was like to go into a McDonald’s and see used ashtrays on the tables. And good for them. But holy shit, how did anyone ever have an appetite?

That’s a reasonable concern. For context, from their 2023 financial report, they spend $391 million on everything they do; even if you add all those salaries you posted together, that’s still about 99 cents out of every dollar going where you want it to go.

I don’t disagree that it’s an obscene salary, but for the most part that’s how the big charities work in the US. You have to either go with small, local charities or shrug and accept that around 1% of your donation will go to someone getting overpaid. It sucks!

This is why Melon and the AI chud brigade are so obsessed with having a chatbot (sorry, “AI”) that always agrees with them: a stupid number of people think LLMs are search engines, or worse, search engines but better, some diviner of truth.

A large portion of my TL on Bluesky is people fundraising for specific Palestinian families. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You see what you follow

Possibly having my ID documents reverted to the wrong gender at the federal level, losing access to HRT, my marriage being dissolved by the federal government, being excluded from public life… Just normal trans stuff 😔👍

Yeah, definitely depends on how much/if they care about randoms moving about the scene.

This is probably dependent on location, but IME they close street parking for filming.

If you don’t already have an audience you should try to establish one before doing commissions. Furries generally don’t want a Walmart that just has whatever commission is cheapest, they want to commission an artist that has a style that speaks to them and they enjoy.

You don’t necessarily need to have your own fursona or do porn, but both help.

If you can crank out high quality drawings you can earn a fair amount. The fewer people are willing to draw it (weird porn) or the higher quality* the art is, the more you can charge.

Whether or not you can live on it is something you’d just have to sit down and do the math on. With rent/taxes/expenses/savings, how much do you need to charge per page or per hour of work? If you’re doing it as anything other than a side hustle DO NOT skip this step, or you will be working below minimum wage.

* subjective, but you probably have an idea of what a potential client would mean by that

Edit: realizing I assumed this was asking for advice on how to be profitable with drawing furry stuff and not a general inquiry, lol. It can be profitable, but you have to be good at self marketing and not be shy about charging an appropriately high rate for your art.

I thought this said far right activist TONY Robinson and almost had a heart attack, lmao. But he’s still a socialist 👍

My husband finally bit the bullet and upgraded his computer. I’m planning to upgrade my phone before the year is out, because mine is 6 years old and probably not getting security updates for another 4 years.

Not that these things didn’t need to happen, but having it forced on us last minute has sucked.