So this is just a PSA, y’all should never sign a contract until you read it. I’m talking in rl right now. I just got through reading my employee handbook/service contract and my bosses slipped in a lot of bullshit like telling me I can’t complain about my job on social media, demanding I work off the clock in the name of good service, expects me to show up on time during inclimate weather, and considered disability or religious accommodation a direct threat to the company.
These are all things I took issue with and brought to my employer for further discussion before signing the contract. Most of my coworkers signed without reading, treating it like an internet terms of service contract.
Tl;dr real life is serious shit, lawyers write contracts to protect your employer FROM YOU, read contracts before you sign them – fucking ARGUE about contracts before you sign them
Also important to note, and something my bf has repeated to me many times: a contract is a negotiation until it is signed, and YOU ARE ALLOWED TO AMEND IT. Tech companies often put some bs in there about “we own everything you make while you work for us” which broadly applied also means anything done on your own time. He always ALWAYS does write-in amendments with initial and date to state that they only own things done FOR the company, on company time, because there have been companies that enforced that bullshit when somebody had a personal side project the company decided they wanted to steal. There’s only one company that threw a fit at his attempts to amend it and he considered that a huge red flag and refused to sign, turned down the job.
Never. EVER. Sign shit without reading it. Also: if your prospective employer won’t let you take the thing home to read before you sign it and says you need to sign it then and there THAT IS A RED FLAG. The job I had that turned out to be abusive as shit was like that. Every other job I’ve been able to bring the contract home to my parents to have a more experienced set of eyes on it. It’s also common practice in some fields to have one’s attorney look over it before signing. So never let them tell you that you can’t look over it with someone else. That’s a fat load of shit. For “lower level” jobs they may not accept amendments to the contract but if they won’t even give you the proper time to read it over, they’re trying to pull some bullshit on you and you’re going to regret it if you sign. Even if there’s nothing bad in what you signed it’s an example of how they are going to treat you while you’re there. Take it to heart and run like fucking hell.
Please also tell your coworkers. Inform others. Tell everyone. Please, for the lovee of everything TELL PEOPLE THEY ARE ALLOWED TO DO THESE THINGS.
Companies BANK on the fact you’re not going to read it. Then they slip in shit like ‘you can’t talk about your wages’ because they want you to keep quiet, so thy can pay that guy six bucks, and pay the guy over there fifteen and pay you eight. They want you to accept it all blindly. PLEASE DON’T STAY BLIND.
Yes, I’ve lost out on jobs because I wanted to read it and they didn’t want me to. Or they wanted m to resign and I said no to to the things they added that I pointed out were unfair and borderline illegal.
Read shit. Tell everyone else to read shit. BE INFORMED.
Absolutely 100% good advice ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼
Never ever ever sign shit without reading and re-reading it! Take it home, show it to someone more experienced, if you can, show it to a lawyer. A contract is supposed to work for both sides. A company in Toronto tried to make me sign a contract with clause that in event of me leaving the job I will not work in a similar position anywhere in Ontario. Yeah, right, not enforceable in court, dudes, you can’t prevent me from making a living. Read the shit and don’t let them intimidate you.
The last thing – with stuff being unenforceable by law – is also important! It’s important not to be overawed by the power of the company or other entity.
Also, some liability disclaimers are paper thin once lawyers become involved.
Hell, Target pulls the ‘we own everything you make‘ bull on seasonal workers. It’s very common.
And companies will sue for breach of contract over it.
This also goes for freelance contracts.
I once had a company slide into their NDA, before we had even discussed compensation, that anything I wrote that was “similar” to what I’d be working on for them belonged to them. It was so broadly worded, that anything I wrote with a contemporary setting would belong to these people…including the web serial I was writing and publishing at the time. Full rights.
I told them I could not sign it as stands and attempted to open negotiations.
I never heard from them again. I strongly feel I dodged a bullet.
Never, ever sign a non-compete clause unless it is extremely narrow. “Don’t take our stuff and sell it” is fine.
“We own everything you make” is not fine.
I also had a temp employer try to do a milder version, which was “Anything you write during your commute.” Uh, right. You going to pay me for my commute time then. I refused to sign and did not get the job.
Unless you are literally at the “Can’t pay my rent/food bill” point? It is better not to get the job or gig than to be locked into an aggressive non-compete.
With the legally-required disclaimer that I’m not a lawyer, watch for these in publication contracts and NDAs:
Overly broad non-competes. “Please don’t self publish a book the same month we’re releasing your book” is fine and only good manners. “You aren’t allowed to self publish for the life of this contract” is a red flag.
On the same note, overly broad first refusal clauses. Don’t sign with a publisher who insists that they have to have first refusal on every single book you write for the length of the contract. Often they will sit on your books for months, even if they don’t publish that genre. However, it is always polite to give first refusal on sequels and other books set in the same world.
Life of copyright clauses. For the love of little puppies and kittens: Never. Sign. A. Life. Of. Copyright. Contract. (Work for hire is obviously a different situation. I’m talking for original work here). Contracts should have a specified term in years, after which your rights automatically revert if you don’t renegotiate. Automatically. You shouldn’t have to request them.
Signing over rights the publisher doesn’t intend to exercise. Don’t sign over audio rights unless the publisher has a solid record of producing audio books (if they do have a solid record of it then do give them audio rights and make them pay the production costs). Don’t sign over movie rights to a book publisher! Yes, I have seen this. The publisher was Curiosity Quill. They have since imploded. If a publisher is e-only ask about splitting off the print rights.
For work for hire contracts, then you are signing over all the rights in the contract. (Editing contracts are always work for hire). An NDA is standard and don’t be afraid to sign one even if they’re scary, just make sure they don’t hide anything nasty in it. A standard NDA should boil down to “Please don’t share the files with anyone and please don’t talk about the project publicly without our permission.” I personally treat every project as under an NDA even if I haven’t signed one…you’ll see me talk occasionally about “This project I can’t talk about is taking up my time.” That means I’m either under an NDA or I should be if the publisher had any sense.
The “opposite” of an NDA is a required publicity clause. Be careful of these: Make sure you aren’t responsible for the results. Usually they aren’t too onerous, though. It’s more like “Would you please share the kickstarter with all of your Facebook friends.” I also had one which required me to post the release of the anthology to my blog. Usually they’re no big deal, but watch out for pressure being put on you to do a ton of marketing on a small thing like a short story. It can take you away from marketing stuff which really needs it.
Tl;dr:
Don’t sign broad non-competes. Ever. Under any circumstances.
Don’t sign away the rights to something a company can’t use/exercise.
Don’t be afraid to negotiate.
Don’t be afraid to walk away (unless, again, you would end up on the street/without health insurance/etc).
Make sure you double check the numbers. My pay is standardized by the federal government, and every year I get a cost of living adjustment, in addition to a small raise. In my latest contract, the university used old numbers, stiffing me what would have been about 2K over the year. Don’t sign contracts you haven’t read.
Tag: important
On the topic of the “fake fan”
In my opinion, the difference between a “fake fan” and a real one comes mostly down to how much *respect* they show the work in question, its other fans, and its creators. Fake fans will often nitpick a work’s flaws – no matter how minor – and demand very specific changes be made to it. Imagine, if you will, someone coming into your house and complaining about every aspect of the interior (or worse, mocking you for living in a house at all), then screaming obscenities and horrible accusations at you for daring to evict them. This is the Fake Fan, a cancerous tumor in a fandom who disguises itself as a “real” fan despite having no love for the work or its creators, nitpicking every minor thing, making up issues to complain about, and most annoyingly, demanding that changes be made to the work.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean a True Fan is supposed to ignore genuine problems with the work – for example, a game with tight controls having a sequel with floatier, less-responsive controls is a legitimate problem – but “true fans” will often critique objectively major problems, such as continuity errors or poor controls as stated above, and not minor or subjective issues such as representation – which is important, but not nearly as much as some make it out to be. Not all “real fans” are this wholesomely-minded, but as a general rule, fake fans will tend more towards “complaining” whilst real fans tend more towards “critiquing”; the difference being that one side genuinely wants to see the work improve for everyone, while the other wants to see the work improve only for themselves – or in some cases, doesn’t want the work to exist at all, seeing it as a blight on the world for merely existing – and the worst part of it all is: the fake fan will often call the real fan’s critiques the real complaining.
In short, the issue of real verses fake fan (in my humble opinion) comes down to how much respect they show the work, its fans, and its creators, or if they tend more towards complaining about the work’s minor flaws rather than its bigger, more subjective issues.
Also, fake fans tend to lean towards demanding that a certain thing be a certain way (I.e specifically how they want it) while ignoring if something similar already exists even within the same work.
For example, RWBY fans who constantly want Yang to be a lesbian and say that they “need” the representation while ignoring Ilia (who canonly had romantic feelings for Blake) and are viciously opposed to even acknowledging that or outright say that she doesn’t count because she’s a “psycho lesbian”.
Even though she’s not. At all.
You know what OP you addressed this topic far more accurately than i did so major props to you.
Just your daily reminders:
- Racists are a problem
- White people are not
- Homophobes are a problem
- Straight people are not
- Transphobes are a problem
- Cis people are not
- Sexists are a problem
- Men are not
And most importantly,
- Hating an innocent person solely because of their race, sexuality, or gender makes you a fucking asshole
you know, life doesn’t have to be competitive. you don’t have to get in the very best university; you don’t have to get the highest paying career there is. you don’t need to compare and compete with everyone else in the world. you need to do what’s right for you. you need to relax, take a breath, and say ‘what do i want, for myself, to live as i want to’. and, if that involves high ambitions, then that’s fine. because you chose those ambitions on what you desire as an individual, and not on what is expected in order to succeed. let’s be ourselves this year.
disease-danger-darkness-silence:
do u ever remember all the horrible offensve things u said when u were like 15 and u literally feel ur soul detach and turn 2 dust
your fave is problematic: yourself
Basically, yeah. That’s kind of the point – you always have to look back on yourself and be mortified and resolve to be better.
Shit, the stuff I said just five YEARS ago (and I’m almost 33) makes me cringe like a motherfucker.
Burn in mortification. Rise from the ashes and be better. Lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of your life.
This is why purity culture doesn’t work!!! We’re all shit! We can all grow and do better!
No joke if youre a young American with a job go open up a Roth IRA and start saving money
My first day of classes, my professor doesn’t even hand us a syllabus. He begins instantly talking about retirement accounts. We were all a bunch of history-loving college kids who probably wanted to go into academia and we were the perfect audience for such a talk. He specifically told us to open a Roth IRA. We were young, low income, and probably all unmarried.
A Roth Individual Retirement Account (Roth IRA) is meant to hold post-tax income and accrue interest tax-free. It’s meant for young lower-income workers looking to invest early and its most effective when done then – Anyone who has made income from a job can open one (which includes child actors apparently). Roth IRAs have eligibility requirements. if you are single or the sole head of your household and your Modified Adjusted Gross Income (google that) is less than $120,000, you can put in the maximum of $5,500 a year (although you cannot contribute more than you earn if you make money below $5.5k). Married couples and old people have slightly different requirements and outcomes.
This is an example they give on the Roth IRA website (https://www.rothira.com/what-is-a-roth-ira):
“… if a 20-year-old puts $5,000 a year into a Roth for 10 years and then stops contributing, … the 10 years of Roth contributions and growth – let’s say about 8% interest a year to age 65 – could total about $1,070,944 tax-free dollars [for retirement].”
I’d read more about it to see if youre eligible and if itd right for you but pretty much any high school and college student with a job will benefit from one. If you think you’ll need money later in life after retirement, you need to open one of these.
It’s also worth noting that in order to comfortably retire it’s recommended that you contribute at least 10% of your income and try to begin by age 20.
Many workplaces (even shitty retail jobs if you jump through enough hoops) will match your 401k contributions. My workplace (a factory), for example matches 100% for the first percent and 50% for the next 5%, meaning by contributing 6% of every check, my employer will contribute a total of 3.5% of what I make, but out of their own pocket. Make sure to find out about and take advantage of any such program you can find
How to Get Over Past Mistakes
1. Remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes, does things wrongs, and has moments of regret. There are no perfect people out there. In that sense, you are just the same as everybody else.
2. Remind yourself that “that was then, and this is now”. You can’t turn back the clocks and change what you did, but you can be a different person in the future.
3. Allow yourself to experience and name the feelings you are struggling with (regret, guilt, shame, disappointment, embarrassment, sadness, etc.) – then make the decision to let those feelings go. In the end, it’s unhealthy to become attached to them.
4. Ask yourself what you can learn from the situation. What would you do differently if you found yourself in that situation again? How can it change the person you are now (so that you feel better about yourself)?
5. Recognise that failings are mistakes are part of the growth process. It’s inevitable that you’ll encounter obstacles, challenges and failures throughout life. Don’t let that stop you from really living life.
6. Remind yourself that “it was what you did, it’s not who you are.” Don’t allow any single event or experience to define you. You are more than – so don’t let that become your identity, or your destiny. 7. Give yourself the gift of a new day and a new start. Forgive yourself, let go of the past, and with confidence move on with your life.
when rape is the girls fault
- when she is the rapist
when rape is the guys fault
- when he is the rapist
Always reblog this
thank god for the mythbusters though because it used to be that whenever i knew i had insomnia i’d just kind of accept it and stay up doing whatever until my morning classes and spend the day feeling like shit
but then they did an episode where they established that even just fucking laying there for a half hour, not even sleeping just laying there and not even for an hour, makes a significant difference and you’ll feel way better
it has made a huge difference in my life to know that it’s okay if i can’t fall asleep, it takes a lot of the pressure off and ironically helps me fall asleep better
…i did not know this, thank you
If anyone wants to look it up, the episode was specifically the Deadliest Catch crossover ep, and the myth was that it’s better/safer when working a 30 hour shift to take a 20 minute nap every six hours rather than try to power through. They did an obstacle course test, one without naps and one with, and even though they couldn’t even sleep half the time the naps resulted in their scores doubling.
So actually I undersold it, even if it’s 7:40 and your alarm goes off at 8 just lie down and shut your eyes and it will still be better than nothing
This was immensely huge for me as someone with anxiety issues. I used to drive myself delirious trying to ‘calm down before I went to sleep’ by staying up and just working myself into a panic. Having this knowledge and knowing that laying down and closing my eyes is a better option and counts as rest was way more helpful, eased my mind and actually sends you to sleep faster.
ifesbob 