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Saved us from a natural disaster

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they won't tell you this in therapy but sometimes the best way to stop catastrophizing/anxiety is to interrupt your spiraling with "girl what the hell are you talking about"

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ARCANE | Ambessa Medarda Displate Posters

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WIBTA for taking advantage of my boss’ possible manic episode?

I know this already sounds bad but hear me out.

So I (30M) am the sole employee of this guy (62M) who’s honestly just a miserable boss and an even more miserable person. It sucks so bad working for him—the pay is horrendous, he’s verbally abusive, and the working conditions are awful (in the winter I literally have to stay bundled up the whole work day because he refuses to put the heat on in the office). He wouldn’t even give me holidays off if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s basically nothing to do those days because everywhere else is closed. I’m almost positive he unironically thinks poor people should die if they can’t work. His nephew (aka his only living relative and just the nicest guy) came by yesterday to invite him to Christmas dinner and he told him he’d see him in hell.

I cannot stress this enough—it’s BAD. I’d quit, but it’s been hard finding a better job and I’ve got four kids at home, including one with special needs.

Anyway, so here’s where I’m wondering if I’d be the asshole. Today was Christmas Day and he showed up at my house out of nowhere (huge red flag, I know). At first I thought he’d forgotten I had the day off and he was here to chew me out, which was worrying enough, but then his whole demeanor changed and he was super happy and excited and talking about how he was going to raise my salary. He even mentioned possibly making me a partner in the firm.

Now if that was it, I’d feel a little weird about the suddenness of it but it’d be fine. I’m not going to complain about having more money to feed my family. But then he started talking about how he wanted to pay our mortgage off. He talked about wanting to pay for our son to get the very expensive medical care that’s probably going to save his life. He mentioned at one point that he was going to be donating a huge amount of money to charity too—I knew he was rich but it staggered me. All this from a guy who doesn’t (didn’t?) even want to turn on the heat or the lights because it costs too much money.

It was such a sudden and drastic change that happened very literally overnight and now I’m kind of concerned he’s having a manic episode or something. I really, really want to accept his sudden generosity (I probably will; my wife is all for it and thinks he owes it to us), and I would love to believe that he’s truly had a sudden change of heart (an actual Christmas miracle lol) but I’m just worried about the possible consequences of accepting huge financial gifts like this from someone who I believe might be experiencing some kind of break from reality. Even if there’s nothing legally wrong with it, I’m worried about the ethics of it.

TLDR, my asshole boss might be in the middle of a mental breakdown. WIBTA if I accepted his offer to pay off my mortgage and my son’s medical expenses?

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Sometimes I think about how we don't know whether caves actually had any particular significance to so-called "cave people", or whether that's just where their art and culture happened to survive for us to see it, and I wonder what disproportionately durable aspect of our present culture is going to give future civilisations entirely the wrong idea about us. I bet it's going to be something really stupid.

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"That wouldn't be fatal!" It would. "They couldn't survive that!" They could.

If my time as an EMT and Hostile First Aid instructor taught me anything it is that the body is both impossibly resilient and impossibly fragile, and almost any traumatic injury you can think of could either be fine or fatal depending on the whims of the universe.

So use that crap as liberally as you want to serve whatever narrative you're writing.

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One of those goofy maid animes, except the viewpoint character isn't the hapless master or mistress of the house, but a regular-ass janitor who ended up on this crew due to a paperwork mixup at the temp agency and can't figure out what the fuck is wrong with her co-workers.

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Walnut shells cut in half.

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some tiny little guys have established themselves on my car mirrors- first noticed them as little specks this summer, they’re getting to be a respectable size

I love that some lichens are like, highly sensitive habitat specialists that only survive in idyllic, pristine conditions, and other lichens are just like, fuck it. Car mirror.

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i saw a very important tiktok recently and knew i immediately needed it as a gif so here it is in case y’all want it as well

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This week, I read a fic that was around 20 years old, which had originally been posted on the author's personal website and which she added to AO3 a few years ago. She listed her email address with the fic, so after I finished reading, I sent her an email saying how much I enjoyed the story, how much I appreciated the work and effort she obviously put into it, and thanked her for uploading it to AO3. She responded the next day and thanked me for my message, then said she had a few more stories in the same series that she hadn't gotten around to uploading. I checked this morning--she added a 35,000 word novella and thanked me in the summary.

👏 comment 👏 on 👏 old 👏 fics 👏

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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Ambessa sketches I started before I finished the season lmao

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