silvegearz

[silvegearz]

so judging by how astonished people are by it every time we explain it to anybody, it seems like my wife and I might really be onto something here

during the pandemic, we invented something we call "astronaut time."

when it's astronaut time, it's like we are two astronauts wearing the big helmets, moving around the station on totally separate tasks. one of us is outside the space station and one of us is inside the space station. our radios do not work and we have no way of communicating with each other. we might see each other through the lil porthole windows, but we ignore each other because we both have different things to do.

"astronaut time" is how we get total privacy when we live in the same apartment. I will pretend you don't exist. You will pretend I don't exist. we have a nonverbal, zero-contact signal for when astronaut time is over (usually "I'll draw a smiley-face on the whiteboard in the kitchen when I'm done"). No talking, stay out of each other's line of sight, we are actively avoiding each other, unless you are currently experiencing a medical emergency goodbye.

it has been. a godsend. imagine living with your partner and being able to close every single tab in your brain related to social interaction. no fear of being interrupted by a "hey, quick question--" or "sorry to bother you, but do you know where the scissors are?" or "did you want something to eat, too?" Once or twice a month, we look at each other lovingly, hold hands, and say "baby I think I need some astronaut time tonight," and the other person goes "okay cool. bye! have a nice night!" and nobody's feelings are hurt and we both go and have a lovely evening completely by ourselves.

like idk it's a small thing but it's made our lives so much nicer, so if you and your partner/roommate are both people who sometimes need total privacy in order to recharge, maybe try it

[silvegearz]

For a while now I've been looking for a setting in FFXIV and I've finally found it. It's not NEW, but I don't think it's commonly known either.

I wanted the setting that changes the player's name color in chat, according to their role. For example, if they are tank, their name would be blue, if they are healer, their name would be green, and if they are DPS, their name would be red.

At first I thought it was this ⤵️

The "Apply colors according to role." check mark option. But what that does, is this;

It may be a bit difficult to tell here because I tried to edit names in the screenshot (attempting to be considerate of people). It's really hard to see the ONE tank in my Alliance (B). But that option color codes the names of players above their head, in your party. And It doesn't effect other players in your alliance. (I have my alliance name plates set to a color very similar to that green apparently... I might change it.)

After learning this (literally today), I went searching again and found the real thing. It's this ⤵️

Found in Character Configuration > Log Window Settings > Button at the top right that says "Name Display Settings"

It'll open a new window called "Chat Log Name Display Settings".

I feel like this is rather hidden tbh 😅. But I was going over this topic with a couple friends in Discord and honestly this find is nice. We're all going to be using it 👌🏻

You can mess with the settings and apply them, and view how they'll look real time at the bottom with the small chat 'example' they provide.

It's just one of those small quality of life things, y'know? It's not game breaking, but it's nice to have 😊

[silvegearz]

So I finally got my water heater replaced after more than half a year of it leaking and nearly destroying my floor, but that's not the story. The story is of the handyman that installed it.

Dude's name is Chris, and he's your typically midwestern schlub - friendly, apologizes too much, really likes the Cardinals, maybe a little younger than my parents. Hella nice tho, gets the heater installed quickly, and even offers to fix the floorboards it warped (after nearly tripping over the hump it made in the floor twice). Overall, a stress-free experience.

Then, as he's gathering up his tools - "So, I noticed your, uh, banner. Over your bed."*

*(The closet where my water heater is is located in my bedroom because I live in a mobile home, dude wasn't just wandering creepily into my bedroom)

He's referring to a giant pride flag that's hanging over my bed, with the words "Sounds gay, I'm in"

My anxiety spikes instantaneously, thinking oh christ I'm about to get hatecrimed or at least microaggressioned.

But then he says "Yeah, my daughter is gay, and I was wondering, like...where do you guys, ya know, meet up?"

What.

"Because she met her most recent girlfriend when she was in jail, and I keep asking why she doesn't just find a nice lesbian librarian or something and she said 'dad I know they're out there, I just don't know where'. So...like...where do you?"

So I ended up confessing to this nice man who installed my water heater that I don't know of any real gay culture in our mostly Baptist Missouri town of about 18,000 that routinely freaks out over pride displays in the library (I'm sure it exists but I'm lazy and haven't gone looking for it). My girlfriend lives in an area with a rather bustling gay community (we just did a face painting booth for their pride festival a few weeks ago), so maybe have her go out there with some friends, and also a lot of queers I know play dnd so maybe find a nice group of them and network. I then apologized that I wasn't more helpful in getting his daughter settled with a nice, wholesome dyke.

On the plus side, he was not deterred at all, and seemed to be very interested in the fact dnd was so popular amongst the el gee bee tees. I told him the names of some dms I know and told him to go to town. I do not know if the names will be given to his daughter or hoarded for himself so he can join a group and play like he did when he was a teenager and not be called satanic for it.

He's coming to fix my floor next week.

[silvegearz]

Astarion: “No one ever cared about me >:\”

Karlach, standing 10ft away: “ME I CARE I CARE SO MUCH”

[silvegearz]

[silvegearz]

[silvegearz]

So I wanted to know what kind of crystal could go in a wizard staff, right? so I googled “big crystal,” as one does, and got an Etsy ad for This

And as you all know I Am currently taking a geology class, so I am probably more emotionally invested in minerals than usual. But that is...very obviously not a natural crystal.

So I did some looking around on Etsy.

Now, these shops all seem to advertise to the “witchy”/“spiritual healing” type of person. And there are a lot of them. Crystals are a Big Thing on Etsy. And ALMOST ALL of them are obviously artificially cut into the same sort of prism with a triangular pyramid top, regardless of the actual sort of crystal it is supposed to be.

Even like, fucking, obsidian. Obsidian is volcanic glass, it doesn’t form crystals at all, it is not a crystal

I’m not throwing any shade at people who are into crystals for like witchy reasons, but it really seems like if crystals are spiritually important to you, you should know what a crystal is...right...?

[silvegearz]

call center representative emet-selch

[silvegearz]

drip "Draw your OC in your friends' OC's outfits."

[silvegearz]

The kids on TikTok think that just because he was a classic country singer, Johnny Cash was conservative??? My babies he covered a Nine Inch Nails song in his seventies.

Classic country singers (the majority of which came from poor roots) were always talking about how much The Man sucked because they were taking money from poor rural folk. You’re gonna tell me that’s conservative?? Get outta here.

[silvegearz]

[silvegearz]

next year james patterson is slapping his name on a book called "the secret lives of booksellers and librarians," which is real bold considering that every bookseller and librarian that i've met in my time as a bookseller and librarian absolutely loathes him. including me.

[silvegearz]

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon

[silvegearz]

This is expected, being human.

[silvegearz]

Concept: a woman is holding hands with a robot, and the woman is wearing a shirt that says "I like my women like I like my keyboards" on the front and "mechanical" on the back, over an exploded view of a cherry mx brown keyswitch.

The robot's shirt says "flesh lover" in the old recaptcha distorted text style. The back has "select all the squares with the cutest girl" and a 3x3 montage of photos of the woman currently holding her right hand.

[silvegearz]

I watched barbie

[silvegearz]

Sick list of symptoms bro. Now try humanizing your behavior instead of pathologizing it.