Writing Jess is a lot like writing Thomas. She tends to deviate into these kinds of “the best kind of correct” thought patterns. A lot of times people will say uniform when the reality is a company has a dress code. Walmart has a dress code whereas Target has something much closer to a uniform.

My local walmarts have all but abandoned any kind of strict adherence to the dress code of 20 years ago. Likely because it’s nearly impossible to find people with no visible tattoos who would also tolerate working in a walmart. Additionally I have seen Furry ears and tails, hair of all colors, and basically anything else you can think of that would make Sam Walton roll in his expensive grave. I find it extremely amusing that Walmart can no longer uphold its standards and also can’t replace humans with machines because no current machines can effectively stop shoplifting. Humans will still have to get paid to work for a few more years, you corporate vultures. XD

At Hastings you could wear a random apron, or order logo shirts and suchlike. I essentially stole an apron for myself because we weren’t supposed to take them as our own, but no one stopped me since there were always enough to go around anyway. In fact I think my apron and final nametag are still in my truck’s toolbox. I pinned mine together in such a way that I didn’t need to adjust it every day. I could just slap it on and go. I actually took my one because before that point people would change it to suit their body and it annoyed me to have to go through that process every day. Especially since I was essentially 2 minutes late every day for seven years. I didn’t return it because fuck them.

Looking back I probably could have continued working happily for Hastings, relatively speaking, right up until they closed had I not been lured away and had they not kept promoting me against my will. I certainly didn’t love it, but it wasn’t the worst job a person could have. EB Games was okay, but when Gamestop took over it was miserable. I regretted my choice to leave Hastings many times after that. Of course all of those things are what eventually landed me where I am now. If I had kept doing retail I’d probably be dead already. The ridiculous choice to try and make webcomics a career somehow earned me 20 more years on Earth, so far. I don’t even know what I would have done if I had stayed with Hastings until the end. The period from the time it closed until Garden started having more places to work was long enough that I’m not sure what I would have had to do to survive. I could probably tolerate working at a Hobby Lobby, or Khols, or something, if I had kept working retail for all those years. Now I’m pretty much committed to riding webcomics to my grave. Hopefully I’ll give out before webcomics do. Ideally I wrap thing thing up and then die the next day. Or wrap this up and start some kind of spin off, or new thing, and then die without finishing whatever that is. That’s the dream anyway. Dying with my stylus in my hand. I certainly don’t like manual labor, but I also never want to stop working. Humans need to be useful, even if their only use is making some small thing that a few people find comfort in.

Anyway, I managed to get this done before falling asleep randomly, so I’m sitting here writing these… morose? things. I’m not sure it being realistic about your eventual fate is morose. I feel like other people will see it that way. Especially if they aren’t at a point in their life where they have internalized the reality that everything ends.
Then again we might be living on the cusp of the merger of machine and man that finally makes death obsolete. I kind of feel like I don’t want to live to see that. If I came along in that era as a younger person maybe, but going on forever after having lost so many… I’m not sure.
I have an ominous feeling about AI and if it will be a boon or bane for humanity in the final calculation. At the moment there’s still a chance I’ll live to find out which way the coin lands and I’m not sure I want to.

Well, anyway, I haven’t been sleeping right for several weeks. Which is why I’ve been randomly falling asleep halfway through pages recently. I kind of thought I had it together there for a bit but I changed something in my situation that threw everything off kilter, I guess.

I stopped using my new pillow and went to sleeping on bare floor again and that maybe helped some? I’m not sure. I’m not getting really good sleep unless I use a little bit of muscle relaxant, which is extremely disruptive to me since I have essentially no resistance to then at all. Even half a pill will throw off my life for a day. It really makes me understand how addicts can just give in to drugs. It’s so tempting to just feel good and start relying on pills to make all your problems go away. I know myself well enough that I can never let pills be anything other than a weapon of last resort.
I’m getting close to a point where I’ll have things sorted out enough to potentially get a small bed for myself. I’ve resisted it for a long time but I think I’m finally getting to a point where I need to lay on something soft sometimes. It’s not something I can just power through endlessly anymore. At the very least I need a place that allows me to roll over without it being a disaster every time because I knock something over or whip something off a shelf with a blanket, or whatever. I hated my previous bed, but at least the frame supported me enough when I was on the floor that I could at least rotate.
I’ve been having enough of a problem with nightmares and stuff that I’m starting to develop a fear of trying to sleep again. That’s always been a thing with me but it was very rare for a long time. Anxiety is probably the main factor in all of this and there’s nothing that really fixes the reality of what causes anxiety other than vast amounts of money. I’m just going to have to cope. Unless I manage to finally break through my limitations and truly get good at what I do. Probably not a good idea to hold my breath for that.
The cottonwood trees are depositing their cotton right now, which might also be part of the problem, since I always get a bit unhinged from the increase in allergens this time of year. It’s been particularly bad this year. It’s not just me getting thrown off this year. Everyone is having symptoms this year.

Unrelated to all of that, we have a racoon and a turkey living around the house right now. All the other regular animals are around too, but racoons and turkeys don’t usually stay close to the house. Now that Ilene has died they aren’t getting to eat any of her cat food. My guess is that if new people move in to her house they won’t be as generous as she was either. The deer seem to still stick around her tree line though, since they aren’t fans of cat food. In any case it’s always neat to see new wildlife. Even though it’s important to be wary of letting racoons get to comfortable with you. Eating some bird seed is one thing but getting into trash is not acceptable.

Well, I’ve said more than enough to make up for the several sparse days. I’m starting to get loopy enough from lack of sleep that I’m going to have to give in and at least try to nap. I super don’t want to have another nightmare tonight though so maybe if I go in easy I can mitigate the risk. In any case i hope you have an nice weekend. I also hope to see you again on Monday. Until then, if you can’t be good, be good at it.

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typo in panel 2, “Megatinment” instead of “Megatainment”

(unless I’m misremembering the name of the store lmao)

Regarding uniforms, I’m kind of glad CompUSA folded since their uniforms were close to what I generally wore when shopping there. I am already obviously an IT guy from my appearance, wearing anything similar to their uniform had customers seeking me out for help and advice. I usually did what I could, wanting more people knowing how to use computers (it was a long time ago), but it could get pretty wearing.

Thinking of the Wal-Mart dress code reminded me of the second best panty flash I ever saw. A couple of employees in the early twenties were flirting with one another. It’s fair to say they were distracted with one another. She was sitting on a counter while wearing a relatively short skirt. I’m pretty sure that their supervisor would not have been pleased.

…honestly, I do not like the idea of living forever as machine code either. Way WAY too much risk of that going terribly wrong in reasons I can’t ever consider.

For one possible outcome, consider the 1994 PC game “Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller.”

You’d need a built-in kill-code of some sort. Same with organic immortality as well; gotta have a way to end it in case you’re trapped underneath a landslide or something. But I would like to live a while longer, frankly. Just to get a sense of history. I’m always intrigued in media by the character who lives 1000 years and gains a form of perspective no mere mortal can truly appreciate.

It’s terrifying to consider zombies that can break though a coffin and six feet of packed earth by themselves could easily break down a barricaded door and walls. You are not safe in there and we are hungry.

Jess unwittingly hit the nail on the head. A uniform is indeed part of a dress code, but not all dress codes require the wearing of a uniform.

A uniform is exactly what it says it is. Everyone looks exactly the same, because it is uniform – identical.

A dress code merely details what attire is required.

The GBWB shirts aren’t really uniforms. When I worked for a tree service, we were required to wear a shirt with the company name and logo on it. There was a very wide range of company shirts available from the company store, but you could actually wear any kind of shirt you wanted to (subject to the foreman’s approval, or rather, his disapproval), and simply attach a small patch with the company name and logo on it, also available from the company store. So I just bought a handful of the patches, and put them on my regular clothes. The patches were only $10 each, and when the shirt wore out, I could just take the patch off and put it on the next one. That was a whole lot cheaper than buying a whole new company wardrobe.

Yeah, I once had an argument with a very unpleasant man about whether “garb”, “uniform”, or “costume” was the best term for people working at a renaissance faire. A band I follow made a post on their fan page referencing their garb, and this dude made a super rude comment jumping down their throats for calling it that because he claimed that because they wore them for their jobs that meant they were uniforms and that calling them garb somehow diminished their work or something. I pulled out the dictionary definitions of uniform and garb and pointed out that uniform implies uniformity and I’ve never seen two ren faire workers dressed in identical outfits, meanwhile garb is literally the term for an outfit that suggests group membership without being a uniform (“clothing or dress, especially of a distinctive or special kind” -Oxford Languages). Both costume and regalia could also be argued to apply, but garb is the most common term used in this context.

At some point the word “uniform” became synonymous with “the clothes I wear for work” whether there was uniformity or not, at least so long as those clothes differed from how they dress in their daily life outside of work, so I don’t normally take issue with people choosing to use the word uniform in this way since language evolves over time, but this dude was correcting people who were using a more accurate term and telling them to use a less accurate one, and did so in quite a rude manner.

Honestly, I find it interesting that people would be resistant to calling a business suit a uniform, even when it was required by a corporate dresscode, even though there is way less variation between business suits you are likely to see in a board room or whatever than most dress code compliant grunt level outfits.

I do feel uniform is appropriate when the company provides you with clothing that has the company logo on it and requires you to wear that, though, even if there is variation, as technically the definition of uniform doesn’t require that the entire outfit be the same, so having one element be consistently identical across all employees would be uniformity in wardrobe.

What percentage of the way are we through the story now I wonder?

2836 We Are Not The Same.

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