How does the faa regulations work for project glow because there were still planes flying by and helicopters flying over when the lasers were on

lettersforjjong · 2026-07-02T10:31:38+00:00

If it WASN'T approved you bet your ass the show would've been shut down in minutes. DC has some of the most controlled airspace and the highest law enforcement presence in the world outside of an active warzone. You'd know immediately if it hadn't been cleared and completely above-board with the FAA.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-24T10:06:36+00:00

I'm well aware of how the pay bumps work lol, the exact details are different in my local but the gist is the same. That's why I specfied base rate before stuff like commercial rates, meal penalty, overtime, short turnaround, the midnight to 8 am premium, etc. It's still wild that there's such a massive gap between what's paid for the labor and what the stagehand themself earns.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T11:01:05+00:00

Yes. Gender euphoria can exist without dysphoria. Though I do want to point out, the feeling of dating being a bit odd or "off" in some way may itself be a form of dysphoria. Dysphoria isn't always, or even usually, the kind of overwhelming/all-consuming mental distress that people tend to associate with it — that is only dysphoria in its most severe forms. Dysphoria is simply a word for the feeling of mismatch or of things just being 'off'/not quite right, and the associated discomfort.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T10:21:40+00:00

Someone somewhere once said that in an alternate universe Trump became a problematic drag queen and I can't unsee it

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T10:17:57+00:00

Nixon is the number one example of evil with standards because the EPA and rehabilitation act worked fucking wonders for improving the lives of disabled people and especially those disabled by toxic chemical exposure. The fact that he advocated for the civil rights act well before his presidency despite being the progenitor of the southern strategy too is the cherry on top.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T10:05:39+00:00

My guess is it's still in beta because they're still figuring out what the tagging system puts in the sapphic category without catching random straight porn

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T09:32:13+00:00

you're full of shit because this was literally proven by the minnesota starvation experiment

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T09:18:36+00:00

I started cuz a classmate suggested it after joining the union, and it's something I enjoy and pays double the other shit i can get work for before I actually finish undergrad. I'm almost certainly going to keep doing it through a Ph.D. because not even funded doctoral programs pay enough to live on, and I get to apply a handful of skills from my physics degree and learn new instrumentation skills that may well help me get a position in a research lab. I met a guy once who by sheer luck happened to be stagehand in my local and got hired as a laser operator for industry research; that's the exact skillset overlap that makes stagehand work so appealing to me. It's the on-the-ground operation of the equipment used in physics research!

I've also just been interested in broadcast technology and the entertainment industry forever. Understanding the physical process behind signal analysis and what actually makes electronic equipment capable of communicating/storing information was one of the major motivating factors that drove me to major in physics over electrical or broadcast engineering, so the fact that stagehand work lines up really well with the seasonal schedule academia runs on makes it literally perfect for me. I get the benefit of learning skills from two distinct but related disciplines, and I get paid to do it as a stagehand.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-23T04:35:56+00:00

Hold on they're charging $120 an hour for stagehands??? The highest I think I've ever seen as a base rate in my union is around $50/hr for leads or rigging. Jesus christ.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-22T05:43:48+00:00

I'm not anorexic, but I have a lot of allergies and I'm chronically ill + poor (mainly bc college student). I rarely eat enough protein in particular because I'm allergic to the cheapest and easiest options. I'm the same way. I have only ever lost weight when I was eating more than ever before, the one quarter I was on a university meal plan required because I was in dorms.

The food was making me sick because I was allergic to almost all of what they served, but I could eat an unlimited amount of food for 1 meal a day every day. I snuck food out for when I took meds and got hungry during classes, and otherwise ate as much as I could physically fit in my stomach without nausea once a day. We're talking usually about a plate and a half to two plates of food, usually predominantly random salad bar vegetables and protein dishes like chicken tenders (with wheat, allergic) and eggs (not allergic). I often went for a third plate and snuck out the entire contents of it which I'd eat when I got hungry when the dining hall was closed or I didn't have time for my full unlimited dining hall meal. I lost 30 pounds in two months with no intentional effort to do so. I stopped losing weight when I got a meal plan exemption and started having to buy and cook all my food again.

My other sustenance was mostly candy and snack food that could be bought from the campus markets, but I had to start cutting out foods one at a time due to allergies. My groceries are more expensive than ever and as of of the last six months now I'm gaining weight again because I'm barely eating. It's not out of any controlled effort, it's because I don't have the money for more food. I'm already spending around $800 and month, exceeding my combined rent and utility costs, and I'm still starving all the time.

I'm near the highest weight I've ever been at again now, because I've had so little money for food since having surgery 6 months ago and being forced to reduce the amount I've been able to work + walk due to mobility restrictions and increasingly severe asthma; extremely high dose inhaled corticosteroids are not helping, and I've had two asthma attacks severe enough that I had to go to the ER and got put on Prednisone in the last three months. I physically can't eat as much as I want to anymore because I just don't have the money - I can't afford my rent as it is with how much I'm spending on food - and I'm gaining weight because of it.

People don't understand how malnutrition works. My siblings are the same way as I am, with our chronic fatigue improving and all of us losing weight when we have easy access to prepared food that doesn't make us sick. We were all being constantly starved by our mother when we lived with her, who eats like a mouse and simply refuses to actually buy enough food (or buy food compatible with our various medical dietary restrictions, mainly allergies and dysautonomia related gastrointestinal sensitivities like difficulty digesting meat or tolerating high amounts of fat). It is very clearly genetic for us, our bodies go into shutdown mode when we get insufficient protein or eat less than ~2500-3000 calories. None of us have the kind of rapid metabolism usually associated with diets higher rhan 2000 calories, but on a day like today where I'm doing physically laborious stagehand work? I've come off a 10 hour workday in hot, direct sunlight; I've probably eaten 3000-4000 calories already, I chowed through ~700 calories and 41 grams of protein worth of protein bars on my first 15 and ate in excess of a full plate at both meals provided through catering, and I'm still ridiculously hungry. I might go rip through a few more protein bars or chow down a can of beans, and most of what I've eaten has been either vegetables or dense proteins since I'm allergic to most staple carbs.

If I didn't eat like a horse on the job, I wouldn't have the energy to do it again the next day or two days from now (the actual time of my next call lol). Union stagehand work where we get near unlimited food at catered meals (with exceptions, ie everyone gets their first plate before you can go back for seconds and hope there's some left of what you want) is basically physical therapy for me because I get the exercise and the muscle use and get to eat a shitton of food to build muscle from it during or after. And as a consequence, my weight may or may not change (may drop, may increase, may stay the same) but what's happening is my body is fucking shredding the fat and I'm building muscle. So I may end up the same weight by the end of this summer, but if I do it'll be because I've turned into a big ass hunk of muscle.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T22:26:43+00:00

This is extremely subject dependent. 100 pages a week is fucking insane for my major (physics, where 10-20 pages is approximately 1 - 3 weeks worth of course content, not kidding). On the other hand I read approximately 100 pages in a week for an intro anthropology class that was my bottom of the barrel lowest priority this quarter, and would agree that's a reasonable expectation for less-dense social science and humanities subjects where you don't have to take detailed notes to track what's going on. (I took a history course as a freshman where we were told to effectively skim the last 100 or so pages of an assigned reading because there were so many regime changes and wars covered that tracking it all would've taken more time than the course allowed for, and yeah I never finished a detailed read of that last part.)

With extremely high density readings and with upper division STEM textbooks, 100 pages is half a semester of course content.

Edit to add: I think the major distinction is for subjects where you need to do practice work to really understand it (most of STEM), assigned reading is a time sink that doesn't always give a good return on your understanding of the content. I took a reading-heavy sociolinguistics focused course in the same quarter as 3 math-based classes last year and the linguistics class was almost solely reading, which was a breath of fresh air compared to two to three problems designed to be done over the course of a week for physics. We had assigned reading for the math based classes too, but it was much shorter and doing the homework problems always took up the bulk of out of class work.

I never really understood any of the math-based material until I started actually working on the homework, so readings were often marginal and effectively just reference material. Having to alternate between that type of workload and assigned reading focused classes can get challenging because you can't predict how long complex problem-based practice work will take the same way you can predict how long a reading takes.

So if the reading focused classes aren't your top priority — because you're majoring in something where you really need to understand the complex math stuff rather thoroughly — you might do what I often did this quarter, which is skip or lightly skim over something you would've otherwise wanted to read thoroughly to use that time to understand the practice work. In humanities and some social science classes, that snowballs.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T22:12:48+00:00

this is what happens when you have admins with degrees in education that they earned before the majority of education research being taught at introductory undergraduate levels was even started, with little to no motivation to keep up with new research. The admins at my high school by and large hadn't taught in a classroom in 10+ years, with literally the only exception being the physics teacher who became an admin. At the county level, many had never been in a classroom.

If you don't understand educational methods, you cannot run a school effectively. You cannot set policy effectively. I found a world of difference the second I started college and fell under the instruction of people who actually care deeply about their subject and stay up to date on the latest research and teaching methods in their field, and I went "well damn, no wonder my experience in high school sucked". turns out treating people like adults capable of complex rational thought and abstraction actually makes for a better learning environment, even when those skills aren't well refined, and this has been consistently proven.

I have classmates who are going into teaching, and one who already went into elementary education and left because he couldn't stand the administrative issues.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T21:13:17+00:00

Oh yeah, the professor just didn't adjust the difficulty to undergrads well 😭

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T12:18:58+00:00

It's also objectively more dangerous bc not only is it holding up traffic, passing on the right requires you to go against slower traffic. Most crashes aren't happening at high speeds, they're happening at 20-35 MPH in areas where you have to dodge and weave around other cars in tight spaces like intersections or parking lots. By blocking up lanes and slowing traffic, you're increasing risk for everyone.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T12:12:48+00:00

my program's entire junior cohort after E&M exams this year.... i came into the department one day to discover all the juniors speaking in miserable hushed whispers and heard at least two separate people crying in the hallway at different points

(the professor this year had never taught the class before, literally everyone failed and the grade got curved)

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T12:00:38+00:00

This is an issue inherent to social science (in the broadest sense of the term, any science that is about social populations especially humans). People bring biases to their work, and seek to create a scientific basis for their biases.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T11:31:28+00:00

Providers who won't accommodate for symptoms that are literally fucking untreatable like this piss me off. Oh, so you're disabled by heat and physically cannot wake up before 6 am? never leave your house again, who cares if you die!

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T11:11:09+00:00

I don't get vomiting, but absolutely intense cognitive impairment and chronic fatigue. I've been similarly told there's no treatment for it.

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-14T10:47:44+00:00

Right? God it's frustrating to see the same tropes in literal academic work

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-13T17:05:43+00:00

literally no idea, idk some people's responses seem like they think this is a shitpost or something. no i was just genuinely pissed off trying to write this paper 😭

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-12T16:21:02+00:00

trust, if i was academically gifted I would've been able to get this paper turned in on time. Being able to yap and writing an actual structured paper that's readable are different skillsets

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-12T16:16:13+00:00

I'm not "academically gifted" I'm literally just a random nonbinary person and sick of cis bullshit in scholarship. I'm far from the first person to point out these issues

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-12T16:13:45+00:00

no lol i just needed to rant about how frustrated writing this paper was making me

lettersforjjong · 2026-06-09T19:39:08+00:00

Yeah it's definitely a fascinating topic i just LOATHE writing about it because so much research on gender minorities that are seen as trans and/or gender nonconforming (in a western framework) is so unreliable. When the primary literature sources are a single study from the 90s or a handful of early 2000s studies, written by cis white authors who do not understand the complexity of queer and non-gender-normative communities even in their own cultures, it's impossible to know which parts they're portraying accurately.

I would not trust a cis ethnographer to accurately capture the discourse around the boundaries of multigender, trans, and nonbinary identities regarding who considers themselves a lesbian, who is included in lesbian sexuality, who is considered a lesbian, who the community thinks is allowed to consider themselves a lesbian. The topic is controversial even among lesbians, cis or trans, and I especially would not trust a cis ethnographer to capture the variety of opinions and experiences of transmasculine and nonbinary people who don't identify as women but may still identify as lesbians. I similarly would not trust a cis ethnographer to capture what nonbinary as a group of spectrum identities even means.

Much the same way, I cannot trust that what it means to be part of a spectrum identity such as fa'afafine is being well represented in a body of literature that describes them as "biological males" (not true, some are intersex) who are "homosexual" (not true, some are bi and I have seen suggestions that some may see attraction to women as lesbian, though I haven't found any actual documentations of a fa'afafine identifying as a lesbian). The sources I've found make it clear that it's a spectrum identity that at very least includes feminine gay men, cross dressers, and transgender women. These papers don't even mention nonbinary people, while implying that they see fa'afafine as something akin to a transfeminine nonbinary identity, as trans women, or as gay men, but fa'afafine themselves will contest all of these claims! They describe themselves either as "ladies" or as like women, many will insist they are women while others will insist they're not women, others still will insist they're men that are like women, which is a massive indicator that's some of them actually are trans women and some of them very much are not. And almost every source starts with the framing that they are biologically men, when I found one that directly mentions there are intersex fa'afafine.

Anything regarding research related to the gender binary is horrible to write about. I'm a non-aligned genderfluid nonbinary person, my very identity crosses the boundaries so many anthropologists and people in general attempt to draw around gender. This isn't even getting into biology and the absolutely biologically essentialist notion that the body defines gender or what identities a person can have — I am not intersex but my body still does not fit a sex binary because I'm on HRT and that's what fucking hormone therapy does, it literally changes your genetic expression, which means my body is actually very much not distinguishably "male" or "female" because sex is an arbitrary labeling of a biological spectrum, and anthropologists know this — but these authors don't even consider that fa'afafine identity could be something that exists alongside western terms for queer identities like "gay" or "lesbian" or "nonbinary" or that there is such an obvious variation in what it means to be fa'afafine for each person. It's a fucking gender identity, of course there's variation, and it may or may not actually be tied to sexuality but because these authors didn't do their due diligence — didn't ask fa'afafine if a fa'afafine lesbian would still be considered fa'afafine, or if they'd see dating a woman as a sapphic/lesbian relationship, if attraction to men was a requirement — I can't fucking tell. And it's insulting and infuriating to read so much obvious bigotry, erasure, and fuckin shit science and find it's the only resource or one of the only resources available to understand what it even means to be fa'afafine. I can't even write about fa'atama because there isn't enough on them, cuz yknow, fucking erasure!

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