You can survive your childhood and escape the horror of your parents by creating and existing solely in a rich inner world in which you contain all your thoughts and feelings and this will not have any effect on your relationships as an adult
On my first day in Germany I got to my hotel and I couldn't get the lights to turn on. And I was like "Eh, fuck it, I'll just take a shower in the dark." And then the shower wouldn't get hot. I waited and waited and it stayed ice cold.
So I go down to the front desk and I'm like "My lights won't turn on and my shower won't get hot" so they send this guy up with me. We get into the room and I flick the switch and nothing happens so I'm like "See?"
And he goes "You must put your card in the slot."
"I... what? I have to put my room card in the light switch?"
"Of course!"
Now I have been in many hotels in the US and never encountered this concept, but apparently it was something most of their guests already knew. So I'm looking like a fool at this point. I feel like an idiot. The dude is fully grinning at me. I put the card in the slot and voila, the light turns on.
Then he's like "Ok, let's see if the shower works. You know you must wait for the hot water?" and I just know he's thinking I'm an idiot who also can't use a shower. This stupid American can't wait for the hot water! She can't even use a light switch or a shower!
And I guess he was distracted by these thoughts of my stupidity, because this dude fully stepped into the shower. In his nice dress shirt and slacks. He just. Gets into the shower.
And turns it on.
Have you ever seen a playing field get leveled instantaneously
I'm starting to think that the cool internet set are mad about the protests solely because they're populated in great part by middle aged to old ladies and anything your mom does is cringe. There's no actual leftist political justification to dismiss the greatest social movement in fifty years but there's always room to be a massive fucking misogynist
My mistake. Greatest social movement ever.
Tags from @ranmahalf :
#ngl the sheer number of middle class white noitmig normies that turned out for this is ASTRONOMICAL #& helps normalise this movement more than anything else #it makes it LEAGUES safer for the rest of us to continue protesting too #get it the fuck together #we wanted liberals & centrists to DO something & then when they do #folks complain about it?? #no kings #us pol
I think the same people who ignored the posted protest guidelines (wear bright yellow, “commitment to nonviolence and de-escalating conflict”) and showed up in visually escalatory outfits, looking like Mad Max masked cyberpunk cosplayers, were as disappointed that it wasn’t a grimdark Batman-esque spectacle as Fox News was, tbh. Both the revolution LARPers and conservatives get equally turned on by imagining it as a desperate, violent battle.
People have been saying wine moms showed up, but there was a lot of grey hair at the protest I went to, and I spoke with my mom about the protest she and her friends organised in her town, so I can say with authority that wine grandmas showed up. The optics of that are impeccable. (We also have to give it to the Boomers: they protested for civil rights, for women’s rights, for gay rights, for black power, and against Vietnam—and from what I saw, the demographic that remembers getting gunned down at Kent State is still turning out to protest better than the rest of us.)
The less “cool” and less “revolutionary” we look, the better we make our case that ours is the position of ordinary, baseline morality. Which it is. We’re comfortably situated in the unassailably normal, sane, unremarkable position that maybe masked men in paramilitary gear shouldn’t be abducting 13-year old children and sending them to adult prisons where they have to sleep on concrete floors.
Wear your pearls and sports jackets, folks. When you’ve shown up at a protest, you have decided to participate in the visual language of politics. You’ve chosen optics as your medium. You’re no longer dressing for your own self-expression, but for public interpretation. Be savvy and strategic about it.
junk food is always better than no food
I’ve met people who will actually argue against this (and I suggest just blocking anyone who does) but if your choice is between going hungry and getting fast food or snack food….PLEASE JUST FEED YOURSELF. No food is actually bad enough that it’s better to skip eating entirely. Malnutrition is more dangerous, more immediately, and more long-term than any consequences of eating a damn twinkie or a cheeseburger.
At the peak of my disordered eating, I had a nutritionist who was like “milk and cookies is a good snack because fats+sugars+proteins, but more importantly, it’s food that you’ll eat.”
On the bad days where I don’t want to eat cuz food is repulsive, the first thing that doesn’t sound completely disgusting is the thing I’ll eat no matter how healthy or junky it is for THIS EXACT REASON. You can always work out or eat better later, but you can’t do anything to get there if you pass out or worse due to not eating at all.
FED IS BEST APPLIES TO EVERYONE
Dealing with fruit flies makes me sympathetic to how the theory of spontaneous generation held on for as long as it did. Where the hell did you little shits come from. Get out of my fruit
overheard in the coffee shop from a middle aged gay man to his (female) friend: “are you embarrassed? about being foolish? please manage yourself better in this situation. this man is not behaving as if he is interested in you.”
“he’s evil. like jeff bezos. Do you understand.” and she’s just nodding with eyes downcast in shame
meanwhile some influencer is filming a mukbang three feet away. he’s wearing a domo hat exactly like this one but it’s neon blue and he’s slurping loudly over the idiot sandwich lecture happening nearby
i forgot to add this until now but after the gay guy was done scolding his friend and they left, their table was taken up by an aging european twink telling a wealthy-looking bubbe with increasing distress about how much cold cut meat he’d eaten the night before and the funnier she found it the more distraught he got about his nighttime deli frenzy
he was like [completely unidentifiable european accent] after you went to bed. i ate ze ham. and ze mortadella also… and. also the prosciutto. no stop giggling at me zis is not funny it was 500 grams each. i ate 500 grams of ze ham and 500 grams of ze mortadella and 500 grams of ze prosciutto and that is ONE POINT FIVE KILOGRAMS OF MEAT !! I ate so many meats!!! Stop giggling at me i am going to be fat!!!! I even ate ze cheeses!!!
extremely cool that the removal of wolf protections in europe are being driven by an eu official having one of her horses killed by a wolf. literal cartoon villain shit
if you own horses you should be disqualified from participation in government
and after this happened, they put that specific wolf on a kill list and then proceeded to shoot the wrong wolf. geniuses
For anyone who thought this is too stupid to be real, I'll remind you the year is 2025. The EU official in question is Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. She is the latest in a long line of idiot Germans to think the CDU disguises her evil.
If you are in Europe, for the love of god, please reblog and sign - these are a keystone species
331,604 out of 500,000 signatures as of October 7, 2025.
it fucken WIMDY
At some point will I be banned for the crime of becoming a girl. Then wimdy shall be no more.
@voidmenace thank you! I forget to mention it much. I have been a girl for 17 months now, it’s the best and most clearly correct decision I have ever made.
I really need a feminised edit of Wimdy Fox but… I don’t think foxes have any visible secondary sex characteristics. Hmm.
oh fuck yes
Real
Once knew a guy from LARP who told a story about when he had first gotten his hands on chainmail and was getting used to wearing it and maintaining mobility and balance with the weight of it (it was heavy stuff). So he started wearing it under his clothes when he was out running errands and stuff to practice for when he had to wear it in mock combat.
Then one night he was coming home late and got mugged by a dude with a knife.
Apparently the look on the dude's face was amazing when he went in to gut the guy for his wallet and found out he was wearing medieval armor under his hoodie.
So, you know. Pretty good argument for wearing it under streetclothes!
so maybe my type isn't totally unrealistic
Fun story, i talked to two people who worked at a convenience store in the Kingdom of An Tir (SCA medieval society, An Tir's territory is WA, BC, northern ID, and OR, and in the past included AB and SK).
This convenience store was notorious for getting robbed in the evenings one or two times a month, so nobody wanted to work the night shift. The one fellow, he desperately needed a job, but he was also learning how to be a heavy fighter (sword & shield) in the SCA, so he had just finished a chainmail shirt, and asked if he could wear it under his uniform shirt, so long as it didn't show. The manager was just happy that he had someone willing to work nights, and said yeah, sure, so long as it doesn't show.
Guy starts working the night shifts, things are fine, he's getting used to everything, then late one night, a guy in a hoodie comes in, and asks for a pack of cigarettes. Our guy turns to get the pack, and feels a thump on his back. Turning around, scowling, he demands, "Did you just hit me??"
Guy in the hoodie widens his eyes, goes ash-gray, and faints. Clerk can't budge from behind the counter in case this is an attempt to distract and rob. But the guy remains out coold. Confused, our clerk calls the emergency services. EMTs come along and start checking out the patient, who is still out cold on the floor. While they're doing that, one of them comes up to the counter and asks what happened, exactly.
Our man tells the EMT, "Well, he just came in, looked around, came up to the counter and asked for a specific pack of cigarettes, so I turned to get them--"
And he demonstrates by turning his back to the EMT, who suddenly starts shouting, "--Sir! Sir! Are you okay? Don't move!"
Our man feels the EMT groping his upper back, and then the EMT asks,
"What the hell are you WEARING?"
"A chainmail shirt. I have to get used to the weight of it, so I wear it a lot. Why? Is something wrong?"
"You have a KNIFE in your back!"
"Uhh...no, I don't? I mean, I don't feel hurt? He only, like, punched me or something. There's no knife back there--I mean, I'd KNOW if there was a knife back there, right?"
EMT grabs the knife and pushes on his shoulder, yanking it out. "THIS knife! I'm going to need to examine your back!"
So they manage to get him out of his uniform shirt and out of the hauberk and out of the linen shirt under it (because chainmail bites suck, plus it's not nearly as fun as a Brazilian waxjob, because my SCA friend was hairy)...and it turns out he only had a very small scratch from the tip of the knife...which had gotten lodged in the riveted links.
...That was why the guy fainted. He'd stabbed the store clerk, who had turned around angrily, knife still lodged in his back.
Manager was so happy to have hired the guy, as that was the first time in like eight or nine months that the store hadn't been successfully robbed.