Stickers like that don’t bother me much, as people often get them for free and naturally sometimes feel an urge to stick them on something.
What blows my mind are the douchebags who pay a premium to buy some t-shirt or cap that’s essentially a walking billboard for fashion brands.
Here’s the top 3 things most people in the US have not heard about:
You have good intentions, so that’s a good starting point. I think the trick is to not overthink it to much. You don’t have to overtly prove that you are safe and supportive. And as you already realized, you don’t need to call attention to the person being trans.
I play tabletop games at a local gaming store at least once a week and there are often a half dozen or more trans people there playing games. My friends and I just talk to them the same way we would talk to anybody else in the store. That doesn’t mean we’re all exactly the same. Some of us are bubbly and extroverted, some of us are more reserved and introverted. But the key thing is: we don’t change to some other “mode” of interaction when the person we’re talking to is trans.
So if you normally casually compliment people on their fashion choices, etc, and you can do it in a nonthreatening socially smooth way, sure, I think that’s fine. But if you are being “extra” just because the person is trans, and doing some kind of role play you normally wouldn’t…don’t do it.
I hope that helps.
Fair, but I did try for a while. Lemmy has a lot of “snipers” who don’t contribute anything more than condescending AKSHUALLY “corrections” or pure snark. You go into their history and that is 90% of what you see. I have blocked several. I think it’s leftover baggage and trauma from reddit. (I don’t consider your meme reply to be a snipe, hopefully that was not implied.)
The lack of active niche communities is frustrating.
I speculate it’s mostly Ouroboros style funding and phony metrics. Bots selling “engagement” to other bots is pretty profitable, I guess. At least for now. The only person I know who still openly uses reddit is an obnoxious drunk white woman in her 60s.
Sorry I wasn’t more encouraging. I guess I have become a bit jaded regarding overly extroverted coworkers over the years. I do think going to management would probably do more harm than good. Only you can judge how obnoxious the gossiping folks are, and your own tolerance threshold for it. I’m just some rando on the internet. But I do completely empathize with your situation.
“I get my socializing exclusively at work. I actually enjoy meetings that could have been an email.”
Some extroverts assume quiet people are “weird and creepy”. They gossip and pry into your business to test you, to see if you’re “safe” to work with. It’s a common form of hazing. They are filtering for who they think they can trust.
If you want the job: try to “gray rock” them until they get bored with you. They’ll never trust you, but they might leave you alone or assume you’re a harmless boring weirdo. Or they might decide to make your job a living hell until you transfer out. Depends on how vicious they are.
You can’t control them, but you can refuse to engage at their jr high level.
MS with that “hello, fellow kids” energy.
Don’t use your connected devices for 24 hours day.
This is not an ability the Jedi of Lemmy will ever teach you.
And if you confess suicidal ideation in the US, the authorities rush in to “help” you by taking away your agency and giving you even more crippling debt.
I wince whenever people trip over their keyboards to post those “helpful” 800 hotline numbers. Most of them have good intentions, but the end result is never about really helping the person. It’s about liability coverage and enabling the system to extract maximum value.
I have no clue what it will look or sound like, but my guess is it will be a massive artistic rejection of AI generated content.
“Hi there! It looks like you’re trying to summon Jeebus!” --Fundy Clippy
The meme I keep seeing in regards to nVidia and the LLMs Ouroboros structure is: Company A pays Company B $100 to dig a hole. Company B pays Company A $100 to fill it back up. Both report $100 of “revenue”.
I have a few friends at work where we’ve learned to trust each other over many years and many conversations. We enjoy each other’s company and are comfortable joking and talking shit about the job and bosses.
Outside of that very small group I practice “gray rock” tactics with all of the rest of my coworkers, especially people in management. I just act as boring and uninteresting as possible, so they don’t see me as any kind of threat and it greatly limits the “attack surface” they can use against me with others. Outside of my inner group of friends, my coworkers have almost zero knowledge about my family, my hobbies, my pets, anything at all.
This is not a good way to be if you are ambitious and want to climb the ladder. But if you just want to clock in, do your job, and clock out (like I do) then gray rock is the way to go.
Consumers could fix it by boycotting them until they cease to exist, meanwhile buy merch from the artists you like.
But this requires people to temporarily sacrifice their desires and experience some FOMO, so it’s unlikely to ever happen.
Reminder that the oligarchs want us divided and fighting each other.
The way some people pronounce jewelry and realtor makes me wince. I never say anything, but I feel a secret burning rage for people who add a non-existant syllable to the middle of those words. (Which is, unfortunately, most people where I live).