me to the demon in the corner of my room: ain’t u got shit to do
He’d been lurking about for days now, this shadow thing. It used to scare me, terrify me straight into insomnia. But it had just stood there the whole time. Now it seemed part of the furniture, if I’m being honest.
I started talking to it. Probably not my best idea, I’ll give you that, but it’s not like I had anyone else around. I would tell it about my day as I readied for bed. Jeff was a dick at the meeting this morning. Had the best hot dog off the best cart in the city for lunch. SIX reports due by Friday? Kellen must be trying to kill me. I even wished it good night. And it just stared, with its glowing red eyes.
One night, I had to stay late at the office. Really late. Remember those six reports? They turned into fifteen. And if I didn’t get them done for this major client, it was my head on the HR guillotine. So I stayed late. I ended up crashing on the sofa in the break room and woke up to more work on my desk. That was Thursday morning. I had to get this all done by Monday.
On Friday night, around ten, I decided to go home and get some real sleep before going back to the office to finish this insane task. And then I felt it. Something was here with me and it wasn’t the janitor.
I looked in the corner and there were those eyes again, surrounded by shadow. I sighed. I really didn’t have time for this, not here.
“Ain’t you got shit to do?” I snapped, walking to the break room for yet more coffee. So much for going home to sleep.
A growling sound, then a deep, rasping voice said, “I miss you.”
I stopped. “What do you mean, you miss me? Aren’t you a demon or something?”
“You didn’t come home. I’ve been worried. What are you doing here?”
We’d never conversed like this. It was almost comforting, like a friend would be.
“I’m working, man. I’ve got a big client coming on Monday and Kellen put all these damn reports on my desk and if I don’t get them done, I’m probably gonna get fired.” I ranted as I took off my tie and ran my fingers through my hair.
The demon paused, thinking. It moved slowly around the room, taking it all in.
“Do you want me to eat Kellen?” it suddenly asked.
I laughed, “No, don’t eat Kellen. It’s not really his fault.”
“Then what shall I do?”
I sighed and considered. What could a shadow demon do to help me?
“Do you know anything about graphic design and marketing?”
It paused its roaming. “I ate an artist’s soul, once.”
“Good enough. Just sit behind me and tell me what looks good.”
On Monday morning, the company landed the client, I got a raise, and arranged it so I could work from home two days a week. We moved to a bigger flat two months later. It makes cinnamon pancakes on Saturdays.
Afro-Latinos face many challenges when it comes identity, particularly when people refuse to believe that being Black AND Latino aren’t mutually exclusive experiences.
The Latino identity denotes an ethnicity, which means that Latinos exist in every color and race imaginable – and explaining the difference between race and ethnicity can be quite a cumbersome task to take on on a daily basis. And yet, many Afro-Latinos are often forced to do so after being told they’re not “Latino enough” or being asked to choose between being Black and Latino.
Afro-latin@s struggle with being ignored by the media because for some reason people don’t believe you can be both Latino and Black. This is why there’s so much controversy when it comes to race and ethnicity. People try to paint Latin@s as this light brown or even white skinned when there are many dark skinned Latin@s. They are in all parts of South America, Central America, the Caribbean, & in North America (Mexico). Unfortunately, these folks aren’t represented in the media much and we have portrayed Latin@s in a certain way that has shaped the thoughts of others when they hear that word.
^ Say that. There’s the blatant erasure by the media, as well as the fellow Latinxs who shun blackness. Then there’s the serious lack of knowledge by people who still don’t understand the clear difference between race and ethnicity, and assume Black means “African American” (which it does not), so as a result they question your identity. Race does not denote one’s ethnicity/ethnicities. Latinxs do not have a specific look or skin color. There are sooooooo many brown skin Latinxs out here.
Black and Cuban at the same damn time.
Black and Puerto Rican at the same damn time.
Black and Colombian at the same damn time.
Black and Dominican at the same damn time.
Black and Mexican at the same damn time.
Black and Honduran at the same damn time.
Black and Ecuadorian at the same damn time.
Black and Nicaraguan at the same damn time.
Black and Panamanian at the same damn time.
Black and Peruvian at the same damn time.
Black and Uruguayan at the same damn time.
Black and Venezuelan at the same damn time.
There’s way more to be listed, but I think y’all get it now…hopefully.
I met my best friend this afternoon and then was going to come home and maybe write while watching the US Open (I have a bit of a crush on Juan Martin Del Potro). But during the uber ride home, I fished out my cellphone from my bag and took a peek at twitter. I found out our National Museum, a 200-year institution that is housed in the palace in which our former Imperial family lived was burning and about half an hour ago, people started talking on tv about hoping that the building wouldn’t collapse. There’s no hope for what was inside.
Tonight we lost what I’ve always heard was the oldest fossil of a human being found in the Americas; counteless artifacts of different Native Brazilian tribes; the Egyptian artifacts collected by our Emperor Pedro II (a huge nerd) and a collection of Estruscan and Roman objects brought over by his Neapolitan wife. The museum was managed by the public university I got my PhD at and its Anthropology graduate program just lost its library as well. Some of its zoology and botanical collection are safe because they’re in a different building.
The museum turned 200 this year and the date was mostly “celebrated” with a bunch of articles about how it urgently needed repairs. And of course, our government has been slashing public spending so you can imagine that this didn’t come as a surprise…
It’s not the first museum we lose to a fire, which shows just how broken we are as a country. It’s a perfect metaphor for how our elites treat culture and education. The outlook for our presidential elections, which will happen in little more than a month is not good.
I’m sorry for not being able to write tonight. I have quite a few prompts in my ask box and I’m sure those who sent them are looking forward to their requests.
I just can’t.
So here’s an article detailing what we’ve lost last night, for those interested. The good news is, the meteorite is intact (I mean, obviously), which prompted the sad joke that the only way to survive in our country is by arriving here literally from outer space.
There’s a high school robotics contest called FIRST Robotics where thousands of student teams compete to build and program huge robots to compete in robots sports. Each team (in addition to, y’know, building the actual robot) has to pick a name and develop their marketing brand. This is undoubtedly the most difficult part of the entire competition and I am here to help.
Thanks to Kendra from the Aluminum Narwhals (which is an awesome team name in itself), I had a list of 6,197 names of teams that have competed in the past. I fed this list to a recurrent neural network, which is a type of machine learning algorithm that learns to imitate the examples it sees. I’ve used programs like this to generate new names for guinea pigs, halloween costumes, and pies, so I had no doubt it could deliver a few suggestions to help out future generations of robotics teams.
First, the names that I was actually surprised didn’t exist. I think nobody would bat an eye at these.
Atominators Golderbots ROBSTERS The Attac Kings Rust School DangerBots RoboTippers Wormbots
This next category, though… Eyes might be batted. There might even be a slow blink of confusion. Take advantage of that confusion and CRUSH your enemies.
Panthering Roobodas Bobilian Engineeriators Bagbotics MERM! Power Scare School Eye Knights Meghanic Panthill Green Obscurum Jacket Devils Robo Bots The Junky Doltimes Voltum Beaminators Electric Sunphonge Robot Robotics of the Robotics Combotical Spiderbot Dragon
With a name from this third category, you will strike true fear in the hearts of your adversaries. For who but the most competent, most valiant team would be bold enough to name themselves “CHARD”?
Eagle Slurg Scone Ham & Panthers Thumper Birds Linda Cows Team Squotz The Wolvesdog Planking CHARD Nutcornets Robot Horse Blue Robotics Splord HALAFSS SQLASH Code No Bots
And then, just to see what would happen, I trained a neural network on years worth of Night Vale transcripts and then trained it ever so slightly on the list of robotics transcripts. It shouldn’t have worked. I have no idea how it worked. I think joining these teams is compulsory.
Exists BOOP I am projects The Glow Wingers Station Flynn’s Bears THREAT The Faceless Secretly Robotics Does Bears Team NOT Robotics Some Blinkin Robotics WALKS THE MEATS
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my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.
CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW
Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons
most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs
one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no you didn’t go to med school and I did and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while
but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.
when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”
and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name
“The Heart of The Forest” is a comic I’ve been working on for almost 2 years now. I gave up on it so many times;it was stupid, it was too long, no one would like it, my art wasn’t good enough, and on and on and on.
Rebellions are built on hope 