#and it was relatively affordable for what it was

[brostateexam]

What's your get-out-of-tech fantasy career?

What an amazing question to answer while I am on day 1 of 9 days of time off!

Assuming that I truly, truly have no need of or use for money, there are two things that come immediately to mind:

The first answer, and the one I have been giving since approximately 2014, is that I'd like to return to direct service and be a social worker or therapist. I liked the work of mental health, but the pay and benefits relative to the stress of the work just did not add up. I was so stressed out by the end of my career in mental health that I would get stress hives when I clocked in for a shift, but if I could still afford vacations and going to the dentist, I'd go back to it. I liked it a lot.

The second answer, which is even more self-indulgent and loony, is that I'd love to be a novelist for a living. I don't even think that's really a thing people make a living at any more unless you're like a booktok person or writing approximately 800 books per year with titles like Kidnapped by the Orc Sultan, but again -- if I didn't actually need the money, that's what I'd love to be known for.

[idolsgf]

we found a place we really like but of course an offer has already been put in 😖

[fishmech]

I just don't get the deal with demanding a one bedroom specifically. Studio apartment is more than fine for single person, often even more space for the money in a lot of places.

And if we want to talk about "the point of minimum wage" as originally constructed, well you have to get used to pre-wwii notions of what people would be living in, particularly in cities but also in a great deal of towns. You would be expected to live in a rooming house arrangement, which sometimes were just large houses and other times were even midrise buildings.

You wouldn't have a full apartment, typically just a bedroom with maybe your own sink and faucet. In nicer places you might even have your own private toilet, but usually there were communal bathrooms. And the kitchen was communal too, often with the "house" providing at least a breakfast and dinner, whether provided by the management or made in lieu of partial rent payment by residents. And usually you'd have a shared parlor or living room as well as a shared dining room, meant for socializing with fellow residents or some invited guests.

This whole system made for relative small but also quite cheap living space, particularly for young single people, the elderly poor, and married couples who weren't having kids yet. Making your way up to an apartment where you weren't sharing communal rooms was generally something that took some time to be able to afford. And due to the decent savings you could build up with inhouse meals and all, and the general low price of a bedsit like room , some people who could otherwise afford moving up to the private apartment as long as they could.

As an example, all of my grandparents lived in such accommodations while they were single, except the one who lived with her relatives. It's simply what was done, with my one grandma being in a specialized boardinghouse arrangement for young women working in the city, while my grandfathers were in different mixed gender and mixed age boarding homes.

Minimum wage was founded around that as the basic model for low income worker housing away from family, and frankly has never really been adjusted upward to "distinct 1 bedroom apartment" levels.

To be honest I think a lot of people who struggle now with living on their own, regardless of whether they're making minimum, would be better served if society was more open to boarding house living again, especially to help people stay in their communities - among other things these housing systems did a lot to prevent people from ending up in long term homelessness while still making sure they got to have private rooms and storage that most homeless shelters today refuse to provide - but in a lot of places they've been all but barred from operating. Usually by late 20th century excuses of ensuring urban renewal I might add.

[eliounora]

saw a video claiming that having two cars makes one upper middle class and a bundle of thoughts occurred to me that I'm struggling to word elegantly but it's something about how people can't tell between middle class and the upper middle class and the rich, and therefore don't realise just how rich actual filthy rich people are and how poor actual poor people are. also something about poverty being deemed a virtue, which makes it harder for people to recognise and especially admit their own privilege and luck, resulting in well-off people insisting they are poor and middle class people getting called rich for arbitrary things.

[clonehub]

kinda interested in theorizing how the court system in the republic works. specifically coruscant bc imagine if with a trillion people on the planet the trial and appeal system is absolute shit

[theknightlywolfe]

Reminder to get to know your local farmers markets and learn the seasonality of the fruits and veggies you like. Also what stays longest and how to make them do so, and how to preserve the things that don't last. Because you can expect surge style pricing at the grocery stores when things are not in season. Also, you would be surprised how many "exotic" and out of season things are grown in your area thanks to greenhouses and indoor vertical gardening technology advancements (such as indoor grown tomatoes year round, but they are still relatively small so prices will still be higher).

Unilever and Kroger (who is experimenting with surge pricing anyways) and Conagra can afford to buy themselves exemptions but not all suppliers can. And if Trump's team is savvy enough, it will turn into a bidding war for a limited number of exemptions so only the big guys will get them at a maximum value for Trump.

Trump administration chose to antagonize coffee-drinkers and chocolate-eaters.

Big mistake.

[glittergroovy]

yeah yeah I think about making kink based blinkie templates but they're on a longgggg list of ones ive been meaning to make for years. the being broke and ill and homeless thing hampers the amount of art im able to make as well just a bit

[rotisseries]

opinions about the storytelling of arcane season 2 aside you guys have got to stop saying it's a victim of the too short tv seasons phenomenon. do the math its seasons are about as long as any other cartoon you guys just aren't used to getting that handed to you in 9 40-minute episodes instead of 18 20-minute episodes. if you think it needed more episodes then it needed another season

[figs-oliomedley]

I was completely normal about him from day one

[greatwyrmgold]

Obviously, the power (and even whether this gets bad enough to cause a trigger event) depends on a lot of details that your friend didn't tell us. But that just means we can fill in the blanks in a way that makes the story/powers work better.

My versions are below the cut.

Alex is the stubborn guy, Bob is the rich guy.

Version 1: The Involuntary Hermit

This version paints Bob as a bit of a capitalist supervillain...I mean, more than "deliberately depriving Alex of sunlight to drive him insane" implies.

Construction has already started, and they're laying foundations for a building that will obviously intersect with Alex's property. Every afternoon, when Alex is driving home from work, Bob's construction vehicles and supplies are in the road—not enough to actually block the road, just enough to make it inconvenient to return. There's a crane with a wrecking ball attached, parked in the lot next to Alex's, waiting.

Alex has complained to the police and City Hall and every other authority he can think about, but they say nothing Bob did is technically illegal. He considered suing Bob, but he can't afford the lawyer. He even contacted the news media, but no one with a significant audience wanted to run the story, not with how much hype there was around his new development.

Obviously, there's a Shaker element to this power, but the long-term and institutional aspects make me think Architect Tinker, specifically the terraform subtype. Alex can build megaprojects which reshape the landscape, both as an intentional design decision and an unavoidable side effect.

I've tried to narrow it down from there, but that's already got the Parahuman Knife-Twist. Alex got powers because he wanted to keep his home, but using those powers would destroy his home. (It's not like he has access to an off-site laboratory.)

I guess it needs to be something that Alex could build in his basement, but which can still have that kind of earthshaking effect. Maybe something seismic, Tecton on a larger scale? He can disrupt Bob's construction, wreck his scaffolding, topple his vehicles, but in the process he also damages his own house. And if he wants to use his powers to their fullest extent, he needs to go farther, destroying the entire neighborhood, replacing the house he knows and loves with a bunch of caves and maybe an earthy keep.

Version 2: Bound by Duty

In this version, Alex would have left long before the darkness-wall if it was just him. But it's not Alex's house, it's the house of Alex's aging relative(s); maybe grandparents, maybe parents, depends on how old Alex is. This Alex has to take care of his relatives, because no one else will. And they don't want to leave this house, come hell or high water.

Alex feels trapped, partly by his sense of filial duty, partly by the literal wall being built around the house said duty traps him in. So this feels like a Mover trigger.

Looking at the MOVERS document, I see elements of Takeoff (close relationship to the source of tension), maybe Hurdle (harassment), and Gate (long-term, but not long-term enough for a tinker power, because I don't want to write up a bunch of tinker powers). In reverse order, that's creating something that grants movement (like a launchpad or gate); a power that lets Alex "run, leap, climb and/or bound"; and an effect produced on departure.

There are a lot of ways to mix those ideas; imagine a power that could make boost pads like in racing games, or bounce pads like in platforming games, or...something not from video games. So let's look for the Parahuman Knife-Twist and build a power around that.

Alex is torn between his desire to help his family and the desire to leave. In theory there's a way to compromise those desires; living in a house surrounded by walls and whatever else Bob is building can't be good for them, right? So selling the house and moving somewhere else would be good for them, right? That's just not what they want. So a power that lets Alex move others (whether they want to be moved or not) seems like a good first step.

This Alex also doesn't have any goal more specific than "get away from Bob". He has a place he wants to escape, but not a specific destination. So maybe the movement should be unpredictable; he can decide on a general direction that someone bounces, but it's not precise or consistent.

So I was hanging out with a friend from the west coast today, and he mentioned an anecdote about some rich guy who was trying to buy up all the homes in a neighborhood, but there was this one guy who wouldn't sell no matter what, so the rich guy built giant walls on the edges of all the surrounding properties to try and drive the holdout insane from sunlight deprivation. I told my friend that this sounded like the kind of thing that would make for a fantastic trigger event. I told him I was going to turn this over to the wormblr brain trust to see what all of you would come up with

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[deus-ex-mona]

series i’m gatekeeping from my family vs series i’m ✨ok✨ with my family knowing i’m into:

[izzyspussy]

i think a lot of people have never been in a truly desperate situation but think they have, and this causes them to pass really harsh judgment on people who made bad choices when either irrational or having no good choices to pick instead, and i really wish people could get some fucking self-perception and work on their compassion skills and not fucking do that as much anymore

[zakubabbles]

Thinking about how earlier this year I opened up commissions after people expressed interest and then got yelled at repeatedly by almost everyone for charging too little.

Anyway, I only got one commission out of it haha

[astriiformes]

.

[here-there-were-dragons]

as a general rule, on average, if americans consistently complain about a food being conceptually weird, gross, and scary, then it probably tastes amazing. or at least inoffensive.

this is because in my experience americans for the most part (give or take a few exceptions by region) think eating literally anything other than beef, chicken, bread, eggs, peanut butter jelly sandwitches, ketchup, and disgusting cloyingly artificial brown sludge soda is insurmountably weird, gross, and scary.