#did somebody call a plumber

[lore-of-the-mushroom-kingdom]

Some Lore About Donkey Kong '94

So Long before Super Mario Odyssey brought forth New Donk City and the Metro Kingdom, before Donkey Kong Land introduced the name Big Ape City, and before Yoshi's Island established Mario was from the Mushroom Kingdom there was Donkey Kong '94.

In this game Mario starts off facing off against Donkey Kong Senior in Big City which would later be known as Big Ape City, and would chase Donkey Kong across many locations. Eventually facing off against a King Kong sized Donkey Kong who had eaten a bunch of Super Mushrooms, this btw could add to my hypothesis there is different species of Super Mushrooms with differing effects. Afterwards Donkey Kong is defeated and the final scene of the game establishes the game ends in the Mushroom Kingdom. This all the way back here establishes that the Mushroom Kingdom and Big City take place on the same planet and not a separate planet.

On a side note there is a few people who think this is where Mario first enters the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue Peach, and that this game is just a retelling of the original arcade game. The first problem with this is there this game is shown to be it's own separate thing and there is no time for Donkey Kong to have done all this, alongside the original 3 games with the third have DK head back to the Kong Archipelago.

In addition Donkey Kong is wearing a tie in this game, and Mario is wearing his modern outfit. When in the original Donkey Kong games and Super Mario Bros Mario was in his Classic Outfit. There is also the absence of Luigi, and the fact Nintendo with Did Somebody Call A Plumber heavily implies Super Mario Bros. takes place directly after Mario Bros. Donkey Kong '94 probably takes place when Mario had already been to the Mushroom Kingdom saving it several times, probably sometime after Super Mario Bros. 3. But also when Mario is still living in Big City and probably still with Pauline.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for leaving an unflushable poo in someone's toilet? ....This one is gross. Sorry.

I have diverticulitis, which is... a bathroom issue. They thought it was Crohn's for a long time, and many incompetent doctors + health complications later, they found out I had an enormous abscess and a golfball-sized fistula growing inside my colon. As you can imagine, this comes with a plethora of issues I am too embarrassed to divulge in their entirety.

This event happened before I had the abscess surgically removed, so I was mid 20s at the time. A friend set me up with this guy I had met once before at a party (J). It was practically a blind date. Things went well and we went back to his house.

Then it happened.

The gurgling. The pain. I told him I needed to go to the bathroom. As luck would have it, this was the WORST bathroom emergency I have ever had in my entire life. I shat more than I have ever shat. I was worried parts of my body would escape out of me and I would somehow reverse-hungry-caterpillar myself into nothingness.

I spent so long doing the deed and trying to clean it up, it must have been around 2 full hours, and we were both reasonably drunk - so when I went to peek my head in the living room, he was asleep. I tried again to plunge this beast back from whence it came. I was crying. It's quite funny in hindsight but as you can imagine, easily one of the worst humiliations I have ever endured. At one point, I had my HAND and FOREARM down this guy's toilet trying to set free the freakish poobaby I had just conceived in his otherwise impeccable loo (a fancy one with BUTTONS instead of a flush handle!). I even took the top off the toilet and tried to... hand-pump the water, I guess? Desperation.

I finally gave up. The whole room stank like sulfur and purse-sized citrus bodyspray so I cracked the window and cleaned up the best I could. I realized that it was, at this point, best left to a professional plumber, or perhaps an exorcist. I was younger and embarrassed and opted to go home, leaving nothing but a foul scent trail and a very small note (Later referred to by my friends as the Ghost Shitter Calling Card) written on a toilet paper square that said "oops" because I guess I thought that would be funny and maybe soften the blow. It was decidedly Not Funny, however, and to my surprise, he never made me foot the plumbing bill, but he did politely tell me that he was uninterested in going out again. Not that I blame him.

Lots of crying and shame later, and after getting my issues fixed via surgery, I am now wondering if there was a better course of action here. My friends do love this story but some of them have mentioned they would be LIVID if somebody did that to them. I know I am probably the asshole for leaving it like that. I really did try my best, and I do believe any people on here with less-than-ladylike health issues will at least partially understand what it's like, and what I was thinking at the time.

TLDR I clogged my date's toilet and left it like that since he fell asleep. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[rex101111]

Ratchet and Clank size matters got added to the PSN store and I got a a major nostalgia pang so I went "eh, why not" and quickly played through it. And I do mean quickly, I know it was a PSP title but dang, last time I finished a R&C game this quick i played Nexus. Anyway, the thing that struck me about this game is that Ratchet is...a bit of an asshole here. And that struck me as odd because for the last few entries...he isn't.

Like this is still early series Ratchet, still on the PS2/PSP, released just before the first PS3 title, which was in retrospect a bit of an incredibly soft reboot. In the newer games, Ratchet is a fairly straight forward protag, nice, willing to help, only a little bit sarcastic if he's really strapped for time or dealing with someone especially annoying. Early Ratchet? Early Ratchet was a jackass, a dick, a selfish, quick tempered loner that only went on this quest because there was a tangible, direct benefit to him specifically. Seriously, in the first game Ratchet couldn't go two sentences without insulting somebody, and that's when he's in a good mood. In act 2 he's even worse, gnashing his teeth at everyone he talks to and threatening to sell Clank for scrap. It takes hours of in game time and half a dozen levels before Ratchet finally chills out, and a few more levels before he actually resolves to act like any sort of hero, and even that only happens after something he personally cares about gets threatened. Ratchet could give a damn, he can be convinced to help people, but he's still a selfish person who needs the situation rubbed in his nose before he realizes how dire it is. Clank having faith in him, throughout the entire game, even when he's being a dick, even when Clank himself is furious with him, meant something. When in the penultimate level he says "that's the Ratchet I always knew was there" and Ratchet brushes him off, you buy it, that beneath this sharp outside there's someone with the capacity to be a hero, an actual hero, a hero who isn't selfless, but one capable of overcoming his selfishness when it matters most.

Back when the first game came out, people complained about this, about their platformer mascot protag being a huge dick, and even the very next game addressed this by toning him down a smidge, but Ratchet in the PS2 trilogy is still very much not a perfect sunshine person. He's very sarcastic, pretty cynical, is very quick to call other people on their bullshit, and still has a very short temper. (Plasma city, anyone?) Ratchet had texture to him, he bounced off the much more straightforwardly nice Clank in a lot of ways, their friendship felt like it had weight and meant something because these two had so many differences between them that the fact they did get along so well and cared about each other so much showed that their friendship was genuine. I like the newer Ratchet and Clank games, played every one of them, but I've never been really happy with the direction they took with Ratchet. Each game made him nicer, friendlier, smoothing down his edges. And the reboot game had it the worst, they retold the first story, where Ratchet was at his worst and a major thread of the plot was him learning to get over his bullshit, but had the sanded down kitty cat of the later games instead of having confidence in their early work. Dickhead Ratchet worked, he had a place and it gave him a place to grow, while still maintaining his inherit sharpness. Ratchet should get to be an asshole again, just for a bit, let him get angry, properly. Sure, he's a hero who's saved two galaxies three times over and then some, but he did that while being a sarcastic little shit who made a joke about a plumber's ass crack showing and fired rockets at people while complaining about how high the prices are everywhere he went.

I dunno, maybe its a bit too late in the game to say this, but something got lost in the shuffle a while back, and getting a reminder of what was simply put it into perspective for me.

[bomberqueen17]

the home stretch

Went over to the house yesterday morning and Jim was there sawing a hole in the exterior wall.

Not alarming at all once I remembered part of this remodel that i'm really excited about is that we're getting an actual exhaust hood for over the stove. Not one of those ones that goes through a microwave either, a real exhaust hood that goes to the outdoors. (The real ones are mounted 30" above the stove top. Microwave ones have to be lower so you can reach the microwave. i can't stand cooking in such a constrained space like that. No thank you. Keep my microwave separate!)

He had sawed out a big chunk of drywall on the interior too, and replaced it with plywood, which is much sturdier to screw mounting hardware into. At my request, he'd extended the plywood down a couple more inches (it'll be covered by the tile backsplash so it won't even show!) so I can screw a couple of heavy-duty mounting hooks in there and have a place I can hang both my cast-iron skillets when they're not in use. I don't like leaving them on the stove (my mother's approach) or stacking them on a shelf (dude's approach) because one is untidy and the other requires me to lift every piece of cast iron i own at once to access any of them. (I also have a square griddle and a Dutch oven and also a tiny skillet which Dude uses all the time when I'm not around and neither of us uses at all when I am around, because it is very much a Cooking For One mini skillet LOL.)

He paused to show me the deer hunting hut he'd meticulously constructed for himself while he was on Christmas break and then artistically had painted camoflage. ("My friends were like omg how long did that take you? I dunno, I wasn't counting, I had a blast. Had a beer in one hand, spray paint can in the other, I just let it take as long as it took. It's like arts and crafts! Who's keeping track of the time?") It did look great. As he was swiping his finger accidentally slid onto the later bits of the camera roll and it showed me the deer he'd gotten on the last day of hunting season. "Oh! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you look at that," he said, and then looked at me and laughed, remembering I had told him I work in a slaughterhouse. "Right, you don't mind that kind of thing, but still." It was a nice big doe, cleanly felled, nothing to object to there.

I went and called the appliance company, who'd said they'd deliver my dishwasher and vent hood on new year's eve probably. They seemed confused that I'd called, and then were confused when they discovered that indeed both my items were in stock and should have been delivered. I said I figured the holiday had confused things (genuinely, probably the vent hood had come in on NYE like the salesman had thought it might, but I bet somebody had the day off and they weren't on the ball about calling people) so I just wanted to call and find out if anything needed sorting. They told me they'll call me today to tell me the two-hour delivery window. So I'm getting my dishwasher today! Pumped. It's gonna go into the living room to start with but like, y'know, that's fine.

The counters are going in on Thursday. Hopefully, Jim said, the counter people could do it in the morning, because then he could start on the tile that afternoon.

Ah they've just called, my delivery window for the appliances is 11-1. OK cool.

The plumber can't come until Monday. But then once he's been there I'll have my stove and sink and dishwasher. And, Jim says, that means the final, last little button-up details will be done on Tuesday.

"And then," he said, amused, "I can go back to the regular schedule, because the people who refused to have their houses torn up over the holidays will be clamoring to get the work done now. It's good you didn't mind." Which is precisely why we thought we'd gotten bumped up by two months, but it's funny to hear him so directly confirm it.

"I'm the luckiest person in the world," I said, "with my mother-in-law's house vacant walking distance away for this whole time, so it's been genuinely no trouble at all." And I am. She's coming back on Tuesday, so I figure we'll move back into our house over the weekend, and I'll deep-clean her house and (sighhh) put all the beautiful sewing equipment back where I found it. I won't really miss her fancy modern sewing machine (which she just got and is third-hand and I don't think she knows how to use either) but her old workhorse straight-stitch machine is a beautiful, unfussy beast I've really enjoyed spending time with.

OK i gotta get off my ass and go get the grocery shopping done so I can go sit in my house for the delivery window. I saved plenty of things to do, don't worry. I'm starting to put stuff into the cupboards, made Dude come sit with me over the weekend and give his opinion-- he's been busy at work and has had no attention span but I refuse to take his "idk just put stuff wherever" at face value, he spends more time in this house than me and i will NOT have him after the fact annoyed with how I chose to organize things. So he did give opinions, finally. And I need a few more lazy susans and storage baskets and half-shelf-rack kinda thingies here and there but I'm getting there.

[pixeldistractions]

With Maria on the train and dashing back to her daughter, Jordan had a date to keep of his own. He told the boys he’d be a little late for their usual 4:00 chat. 

“Hey guys, I’m here now.” In the background of their image, the normally sterile counters were cluttered with pans and bowls. “Oh, hey, did your mom cook?”

“She tried to make mac and cheese,” Milo said. “But the water kept bubbling over and she almost burnt the kitchen down, so she got really mad and dumped it all down the sink. But then it clogged the drain, and now she has to call a plumber. You should have seen the veins in her head.”

“Oh, no. So what did you eat for dinner?”

“Pizza again,” Milo said. “It’s okay, we like pizza.”

“Ok. Well, sorry I was late. I had a visit from a friend. She just got on the train.”

“Was it Maria?”

“Wait, what? How did you know?”

“Because she’s your best friend. She said so, but she said it kind of funny. And you said she took a train, so it must have been kind of far.”

These boys were too smart.

“Right. She is my best friend.”

“Is she your girlfriend?” Felix asked.

Instant paralysis. “Where’s your mom?” Jordan scanned the background of the video for Colette. He suspected that she often listened in on these calls. And sure, these conversations would have to happen someday, but he wasn’t ready to deal with that now, especially when apparently her veins were already popping out of her head today.  

“She’s taking a bath. She said she needed self care.”

Relief.

“Okay,” Jordan said. “What do you boys know about girlfriends?”

“It’s like, kissing and holding hands and stuff,” Felix said.

“Felix wants Lily to be his girlfriend,” Milo tattled.

“Shut up, no I don’t, you idiot.”

“Felix, no name calling,” Jordan said.

“And Connor had a girlfriend last year. It was Bianca, except she said he wasn’t her boyfriend. But we saw them kissing during recess.”

“Kissing, in fourth grade?”

“Dad! They weren’t in fourth grade, they were in fifth. But now they went to middle school this year. They’re like eleven already.”

“Of course. Eleven.” Jordan felt so old. “But you don’t have to kiss someone just because everybody else is.” 

“Was mom the first girl you kissed?” Milo asked.

“Um, no, it was somebody else.”

“How old were you?” Felix asked.

“I was, uh, fifteen,” Jordan said.

Felix cackled. “Ha ha, that's so old. I better get to kiss someone before I’m fifteen.”

“It’s not a race.”   

“Were you a dork in middle school?”

“Ha. Maybe I was.”

“That’s why,” Felix said, nodding sagely. “Dorks don’t get kissed until high school.”

Jordan was hoping this side track into middle school romantic gossip might make them forget their question, but no, it didn’t. 

“So, is she? Your girlfriend?”

“This is the kind of thing I should probably tell your mom first,” Jordan said. “Does that make sense? It’s the right thing to do.”

“So, she is then?”

“You know your mom and I never got married, right?”

“Yeah, we know.”

“How do you feel about me having a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know,” Milo said. “It’s kind of weird. But I guess she’s nice.”

“She’s very nice. Felix, what do you think?” 

“I never really talked to her before,” Felix said. “I don’t know if she’s nice.”

“You can talk to her sometime if you want,” Jordan said. “Soon. We’ll all spend some time together soon.”

“I guess we could.”

“Your mom is still in the bath?”

They nodded. 

“Are you sure? Make sure.” 

Felix elbowed his brother in the ribs and Milo crept up the stairs and then back down. “Yeah,” he confirmed.

“Okay,” Jordan said. “Yes, Maria is my girlfriend.”

“Oh, okay,” they both said, sitting in that new truth for a moment. 

And then, thankfully, they had other things to talk about. Very exciting things. Like how Connor McCullough got suspended for pranking the school toilets, and how the new Voidcritter movies were kind of dumb, but they watched them all three times anyway, and did he know there was a skate park being built at the harbor? And when he comes back in December, could he take them there? Please please please?

“A thousand percent, yes,” Jordan promised. “No matter how cold, even if there’s snow.” 

They were smart and getting so big. They could walk themselves to the bus stop and pour their own cereal and didn’t need to be reminded to wash behind their ears most of the time. But they weren’t done with their dad. Jordan wasn’t even done with his own dad at twenty-two. And this was special, what they had, him and his boys. Colette had her role, and he wouldn’t call it an unimportant one, but he couldn’t imagine her holding space for them, being open for them, talking with them like he did. Maybe it was a boy thing. Which meant that his leaving left an immense void, and were these video chats good enough to fill that void?

Life was a seesaw—one thing goes up and another thing hits the ground. In one hand an answer and the other hand a quagmire. You might need it all, but you can’t have it all, and there’s the tragedy. Something precious will be lost, and what will it be?

— from “boxes and squares #4.5: home is wherever you are, part 2” (5/10)

story notes: Jordan always tells his boys first

Next ->

[unhingedtiktoks]

Description: Tiktok from user littlevictorianboy. The caption says "your typical plumber."

Woman (behind camera): The issue is just my kitchen sink. It's still working, it's just- it's draining slowly. Just like a little slow.

Plumber: (moving faucet around) Did it always do this?

Woman: Yeah.

Plumber: Move like that?

Woman: Yeah of course.

Plumber: (dramatically takes drink from the faucet) The water drained fine down my throat so we know it's not a problem with the water. On a scale from 3 to 10, how many times a week do you fill this sink to the brim with like a clam chowder?

Woman: Uh zero?

Plumber: On a scale from 3 to 10. Alright you see that?

Woman: Yeah.

Plumber: That's your P trap. You know what the P stands for?

Woman: No.

Plumber: (whispers) It stands for penis.

Woman: I- no- I don't think that's true.

Plumber: Fun fact we actually used to use real snakes. You got a jilted ex-lover that you chopped up into little bits and fed into the garbage disposal but maybe you kept the head in your closet because he keeps talking to you?

Woman: No.

Plumber: You'd be surprised how many times that's the problem.

Woman: Um I'm sorry you're not even putting that down the drain.

Plumber: It's getting there. What is this?

Woman: Paper towels?

Plumber: Woah! This is like a wizard scroll! (grabs paper towels while screaming and laughing hysterically) Look I can juggle! (drops paper towels) Fuck! I made a goddamn mess in your house!

Woman: You wasted a lot of my paper towels.

Plumber: Okay I'll pick them up. (tries to grab one with a wrench)

Woman: Is that... really the most efficient way to do that?

Plumber: Yes.

Another guy enters and says "Hey somebody called for a plumber?" The woman says "What? Who-" She turns to the "plumber" in a panic and he runs away.

[kariachi]

Who wants more house arrest fic? Mike hasn't killed himself yet- 'yet' being the operative word.

Kevin is not paid enough, and in fact has to live with the knowledge he's doing the funding.

~~

Mike was not a stupid person. Selfish, yes. Persistent, yes. Bit of a drama queen, yes. But not stupid. Once the stinging in his throat became hindering, he took that as his cue to step away and let whatever fumes the cleaning solutions were giving off dissipate from the oven. When it became clear that they were still a problem, he’d opened a window. Of course, while grumbling about the house clearly being too small, certainly they’d never had this problem even back in the guest house. Then he’d opened another window. And another. At which point he’d lowered himself to calling Levin.

So it was that he was sat on the roof when the ‘hero’ pulled up, all but slamming the car door shut behind him.

“How the fuck,” he yelled up to him as he stormed up the walk, “did you manage to fucking gas yourself?!”

“I don’t know,” he called back, “I was just trying to clean up, since somebody decided my allowance shouldn't account for a maid.”

“I don’t trust you with a maid.” Shaking his head as Mike huffed, he heaved a sigh. “How’s breathing going?”

“Better since I came outside.”

“Good. Stay here.” As if he had options. Mike was generally certain the talk of an explosive in his tracking anklet had been a hollow threat, but he couldn’t entirely discount it and didn’t intend to go back to prison besides.

Kneeling, Levin absorbed the concrete from the walkway and headed in the open door. Mike didn’t know what exactly Levin was doing in there, investigating the situation presumably, and he could hear more windows opening, but it took several minutes longer than he felt it should. How long could it take, really, when he seemed to already know what he was looking for.

“First up,” Levin said when he finally exited, as he finally exited, “did your fancy school not teach you not to mix cleaners or did you just not pay attention?” Mike blinked, frowning, and did him the service of at least considering the question.

“I certainly don’t remember anything like that, no. They weren’t exactly expecting us to be doing our own housework.”

“Fucking rich people…” Grumbling, Levin shook his head again. “Second, why the fuck were you scrubbing out the oven, anyway- it’s got a fucking self-clean!” Nose scrunching, Mike glowered at him.

“And how was I supposed to know that?”

“There’s a fucking button!”

“Excuse me for not paying attention to the functions I don’t need.”

“You need it!”

“And now I know.”  The pair stared each other down, eyes narrowed and frowns on their faces, until Levin let out a growling huff.

“If I could trust the Plumbers with a fucking beanbag chair, Morningstar…” he said, all that was needed to get Mike to relax with a huff of his own. He was, again, not stupid, and knew exactly how much work, had an idea of the strings Levin had pulled to keep him out of the Null Void or a cell. The story behind the turnaround was still a mystery to him, would likely stay that way, but he couldn’t be ungrateful for it. “A month and you already burned through three sets of cookware-” Quite literally. “-nearly starved-” A polite way of saying ‘failed to order enough groceries and almost ate me’. “-and now you’re gassing yourself.”

“I always have been an overachiever.” Mike smirked as Levin flipped him off.

“Or you’re a dumbass. Ya know, Ben joked about how I should off you and move on, beginning to think it woulda saved you as much trouble as me.”

“Well, if you’re going to kill me, can it wait for next month? There’s a movie I want to see.” For a heartbeat, they both paused, then Levin snorted a laugh.

“Sure, when’s good for you?” Pretending to mull over it, Mike leaned out so that he wasn’t looking quite as far down his nose at him.

“The next to last Tuesday. Always hated Wednesdays, I’ll avoid one if I can.” With more snorting laughter, Levin shook his head, a small smile on his face.

“Let shit air out for like an hour,” he said. “Already wiped out the oven, when you go back inside hit the self-clean, leave it closed, wipe it out with a damp sponge once it’s cooled off. A’ight?”

“Alright.” With a nod, Levin took a step back, half turning to go, and Mike took less time than normal to stop him with a quick “Thank you, Levin.” Levin threw a smirk back over his shoulder.

“No problem. Try not to hurt yourself again?” Resisting the urge to throw out a quick jab in the midst of what was, for them, as good as a goodbye, Mike just nodded back.

“I’ll do my best.”

~~

Mike wasn’t a stupid person. Yes, his upbringing meant that there was a lot regarding maintaining one’s own home that he didn’t know. But that didn’t make him an idiot, merely uninformed. He was, for a lack of any other options, trying, and with each mistake came a little bit closer to knowing what he was doing. It was a perfectly normal, or at least understandable, situation to be in.

But three days later, when he had to call Levin out again over a dryer fire (“If somebody had said anything about ‘lint traps’ before-”) he was forced to admit that he wasn’t going to be convincing anybody anytime soon.

[correctrvbquotes]

Church: Shut up Tucker.

Tucker: Did somebody call for a really hairy plumber? Bow chicka bow wow!

Church: Tucker. Shut up.

Tucker: I came here to lay some pipe. Bow-chicka-bow-wow!

Church: Tucker!

Tucker: So I hear you got sisters. Bow chicka- who're twins! -wow wow!

Church: Shut up.

Tucker: Hey, are you a model or famous actress? Bow-chicka-bow-wow!

Church: Shut up.

Tucker: Bow chickachicka-

Church: Shut up.

Tucker: -gow wow chicka-

Church: Shut up.

Tucker: -chicka bow bow chickachickachi bow bow!

Church: Shut up!

[lunarsilkscreen]

Minimum Wage, and beyond

Let's use any store for an example:

Minimum wage is set at $15 an hour.

In order to break even, which is arguably the entire point of a business to begin with. You need to pay your employees hours worked.

That means you need to sell 2 $10 sandwiches an hour per employee. You make cost of ingredients AND pay that employee.

Now, back in the day before utilities were a thing: water, power, refrigeration, ectera... You didn't need EXTRA to pay the utilities. It wasn't a thing. That's why bartering worked, because the shopkeep could sell goods to the next sap to walk in the door.

And, besides from the assholes, rent wasn't a thing. You bought a plot of land, took out a loan to hire a carpenter and built your house and business on the same spot, called it a day. (Or got some buddies and some brewskis and did it yourselves.)

There's building codes, and inspectors, and utilities, and you have to worry about termites, carpenter ants, other pests, mold, mildew, ASBESTOS!

You gotta pay all *that* on top of the doctor that owns the business that you manage for him while he's in the Bahamas. He's never there, he rarely checks in, he just wants to foot the bill for a continuous dividend.

And shit if you fuck it up, or the business is in a location with no foot traffic. (And since it's to expensive to go outside, now you only interface with people delivering to other people! And those other people will give you a bad review when they inevitably receive their food cold.

Did I mention it was good for nothing doctors that recommended asbestos in the first place as a miracle insulation?

So how the f* are you supposed to make enough money to pay yourself, your employees, and your boss AND STILL HAVE ENOUGH TO PAY UTILITIES!

And on top of *that* what's the next step since you don't work for a corporate infrastructure that has hierarchy beyond *some doctor who owns this place*?

Unless you manage to figure out how to convince the doctor landlord to pay you a bonus for making astronomical returns, this is it buddy. This is your life.

I hope you enjoy Pizza.

So how is it possible that anybody make more than that? How is it, that somebody can get a loan of A BILLION DOLLARS. Refuse to pay it back, and then not go to jail? Is it because you'd have to be an idiot to loan out that much? Well if you got that much to lend, it must be fine.

In America, "pawn stars" has ensured that bartering is like an old fashioned nearly ancient way to make money. Goods are money, disposable items means you can't sell anything. Hell, I've never seen anything at a garage sale go for more than a couple bucks.

The goods as currency just doesn't work if everybody is just waiting to "storage wars" your old stuff when you can't pay your mortgage anymore. It's not value, it's icing for land owners and banks.

So tell me, how is value store supposed to work for the average person? We need to spend money to eat, and for the economy to work, it's mathematically impossible to make ends meet at a business that sells food if the local population doesn't come eat at your establishment.

On a macro scale, what we have isn't working at all.

It wasn't working when minimum wage was $7 it isn't working with minimum wage at $15. We checked the math twice.

How do you ensure an employee can afford room and board, and still have time to participate in politics to ensure a working government and economy?

That is the questions we're trying to answer as we look at the entire system from a macro perspective.

We have to ensure that the plumbers, and the farmers, and the electricians and the mechanics can all get paid a living wage, but they cannot if there is nobody who can afford their services.

So how do we make sure, that the "dirty jobs" that "nobody wants to do" actually have demand for use, AND return on investment to the individual doing them?

I think, that it should be illegal for a residential unit to be used on AirBnB. I think, that they should have to be zoned like regular inns and hotels. I also think, that if somebody who *owns* the house they're living in, or you know, has a mortgage. Then you should mind your own damn business if they have an OnlyFans. unless they're keeping you up at night, or out in the streets, I don't think you should care.

I also think that rental housing should also follow the same rules for Hotels and apartments. They should be zoned for that, and they shouldn't count towards the theoretical residential housing that the city thinks they have.

At the very least, it'll ensure that there's a supply of people nearby to buy pizza from Dr. Pizza's Pizza and Law office.

And you'll be able to keep track of your homelessness issue.

[icyspicy4u]

take their love and make it burn for you instead (chapter three)

heyyyy. chapters one and two up on ao3. ao3 link!

[REVIEW: How La La Land Fails to Make ‘Contact’ With Reality] Posted 12/14/16 by admin katiehomophobia.

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pinkthingsoterrify: I cannot Jodie Foster this kind of behavior.

katiehomophobia [admin]: @pinkthingsoterrify HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.

Katya invites Trixie motherfucking Mattel into her home and turns her back on her. This is mainly due to the fact that she fears she’ll pop a blood vessel in her eye if she has to feign disinterest directly to the other woman’s face any longer.

“Sorry to interrupt your night,” Trixie says cautiously, followed by the creak of the door opening further—she must have accepted the invitation, then, stepped over the threshold. If Trixie is a vampire, Katya muses idly, she’s fucked.

“Not interrupting much,” Katya replies, still not facing her, electing to stub her cigarette out instead. Trixie Mattel is in Katya’s home. There’s still a fucking movie review with her name peppered throughout it pulled up on Katya’s computer. It occurs to her that she should rectify that, actually. “How can I help you?” she asks as she closes the tab of her broken website.

“Well, my name’s Trixie.” I know. “I’m subletting Kasha Davis’ place for a couple of months. She’s out for the night, so I can’t call her, and, um—” she gives a hissing exhale through her teeth, and Katya finally turns to face her, biting the inside of her cheek to keep herself from saying anything stupid — “my shower is broken, and I really need to fucking shower. She left your number, but I figured I’d just—” She makes a big, sweeping gesture that Katya can only assume is meant to convey come downstairs and knock on your door and absolutely turn your evening upside down because I’m Trixie motherfucking Mattel.

“Oh, the shower’s giving you trouble?” Katya asks, in a voice that sounds completely foreign to her own ears. She doesn’t fucking talk like this, like some extra from Grease. She clears her throat, adjusts her posture. “Sorry. There’s something wrong with your shower?”

“Yeah. Sorry, I know this sounds like an awful porn setup—I just figured I should consult somebody who lives here before I blow a thousand dollars on a plumber or something.” Trixie shrugs, and by god she’s beautiful, standing there in a floor-length gown like it’s nothing.

“I can come up and take a look at it, if you want,” Katya’s mouth says with absolutely no input from her brain. “The pipes can be kind of a bitch in this apartment. I assume that it’s the same story in Kasha’s.”

Trixie’s shoulders sink in relief. “Jesus, really? Thank you, I’ll owe you a meal or something—your name is Yekaterina, right?”

The full name makes Katya blink rapidly like she’s been struck across the face. The butchered pronunciation falling from Trixie’s mouth doesn’t carry quite the same weight as it did when her father yelled it in gruff, fluent Russian at her across the house, but even watered down, it has the same immobilizing effect.

“Katya,” she manages. “It’s Katya.”

Trixie nods, and although the twist of her lips tells Katya that she wants to interrogate that reaction, she doesn’t say a word about it. “Okay,” she says instead. It’s far too gentle for her to handle right now. “Katya.”

Instead of standing there dumbly for one second longer, Katya decides to grab her toolbox. It’s an old gift from her parents that she has never touched before, but by God, she will fake being butch for Trixie Mattel. She shimmies into some gym shorts and tightens her bird’s nest bun into something approximating secure, appraising herself in the mirror.

“Passable,” she says aloud.

When she strides back into the room, trying to project confidence and an intricate knowledge of shoddy California plumbing, Trixie’s standing where she left her in the living room. Her eyes are glued to the John Waters movie that’s still playing.

Katya allows herself a brief second to take it all in: there’s a gorgeous woman in a perfectly-fitted blush-pink gown standing at ease on Katya’s area rug, her mouth moving along absentmindedly to the filthy lines that Divine is spouting up on the screen, and she’s likely going to be nominated for a Golden Globe in a few hours.

“You a John Waters fan?” Katya asks loudly, startling Trixie and effectively shattering the beautiful, pink-edged peace of the moment.

“Oh, he’s my president,” Trixie says emphatically, to her credit seeming unbothered in the wake of Katya’s outburst. “I met him once at a film festival a couple of years ago and lost my mind about it.”

“Oh my god, shut up, oh my god. Shut the hell up. Really?” Katya asks, giddy and disbelieving.

Trixie grins, swipes her phone unlocked, and after a few navigational taps on the screen pulls up a photo of herself and motherfucking John Waters. Trixie looks young, wide-eyed and stunned by the flash but clearly over the moon to be standing next to her hero.

“I’ll be damned,” Katya says, shaking her head, and then grins toothily up at Trixie. “Nice peace sign.”

“Okay, whatever, I was nervous and—”

“You were a very entrepreneurial young woman making her way up in the world through the power of peace and excellent snuff film,” Katya says sagely, shifting the toolbox to the other hand.

Trixie rolls her eyes, which delights Katya to no end. She’s easy to needle, but is just as quick to give it right back, a relatively novel and exciting concept.

A lot of the time, Katya feels like she has to tone herself down when she first meets someone. Ease them in slowly to all of the barbs and the references and the flailing. Trixie is right there with her already—there is something wildly intoxicating about it.

“You got the tools,” Trixie notes, cutting a glance down to the rickety toolbox. “Instead of commenting on who I was meeting five years ago, did you perhaps want to actually do something with them?”

Katya snickers, but turns and lets Trixie lead her up to Kasha’s place, swinging the toolbox casually in her grip as they walk and trying not to objectify the next great star of America’s silver screen.

Because, well, wow. Mathematically speaking, Trixie is all curves. Bhaskara would go nuts if he saw the pink-clothed goddess his theories of sines and cosines had conspired to create. Her ass is at eye level as Katya follows her up the stairs, and she forces her gaze to her feet as her mouth goes dry.

She’s just here to fix a fucking shower (that she doesn’t know how to fix). She will put her metaphorical dick away for five minutes and muddle through this, so help her God, her unintentional months of celibacy and resulting pent-up arousal be damned.

Trixie swings the door open easily, having left it unlocked in her journey down to Katya’s place, and she holds it ajar so that Katya can follow her in.

Katya’s only met Mrs. Davis—Kasha, apparently—once or twice, but the interior decor of the apartment immediately makes sense with the personality she garnered from those brief meetings. It’s all extremely dated, gaudy pieces, once saturated with color but now more muted with age. The aesthetic of Kasha’s space seems like a hand-me-down sweater for Trixie—it doesn’t not fit her, with the blush pinks and ‘60s prints, but you can tell that it doesn’t belong to her.

She looks just a little out of place as she walks in ahead of Katya, sticking herself firmly by the pile of pink suitcases that must be hers. She points a finger over at a door with a big, garish LADIES sign on it, quintessentially middle-aged woman couture.

“That’s the bathroom,” she directs, shrugging. “I don’t know. You can give it your best shot.”

“I surely will,” Katya says, and turns her best, most winning grin on Trixie, just to see what she’ll do. She blushes a very pretty shade of pink and turns around, mumbling something about needing to find something in the myriad of suitcases.

Well. That’s an interesting response Katya doesn’t have the time to address right now.

She salutes and pushes through the door with the terrible sign, setting her toolbox down in the tub and flopping down to take a seat alongside it. She stares up at the showerhead. It doesn’t look like anything’s wrong with it, so that’s Katya’s first plan of action foiled, and when she stands up and taps it with her hand nothing magically starts working, so her second one is shot, too.

After about fifteen minutes of Katya engaging in a one-sided staring match with the faucet, Trixie shows up in the doorway sipping from a glass of wine.

“How’s it going?” she asks, her tone a little too amused for Katya’s comfort.

Fearing the jig is up, Katya purses her lips and decides to sell it even harder. Blaze of glory, and all that. “I’m going to be frank, this is worse than I thought,” she says seriously, pushing her glasses up her nose.

“Really?” Trixie asks, the teasing dropped from her voice as it’s replaced with real concern. “Fuck, did I do something to it?”

She looks genuinely worried, her brown eyes wide and fearful, so Katya gives herself a nice pat on the back for her own theatricality, which is rarely serviceable, and then drops the act to avoid fraying Trixie’s psyche further. “No, not really,” she says. “It’s just not working.”

“Jesus, don’t scare me like that,” Trixie says, grinning. Her tensed shoulders have gone slack in relief, but then she starts working her lip between her teeth as she realizes something. “I’m kind of fucked, then, aren’t I?”

“My shower’s open,” Katya offers, and then cringes a little bit at how that sounds. “I mean, you can borrow my shower tonight and I will make myself scarce when you do. If you want.”

“If I want?” Trixie parrots, mocking her with a wonderful, sly tilt to her mouth.

“I just figured you might want a chance to rinse off this cotton-candy coating,” Katya tells her, grinning at the banter, gesturing to the pink gown and pink earrings and pink detailing in her hair. She looks rosy and sugary-sweet in the lamplight of Kasha’s place. Delectable.

“Mm. You would not be wrong,” Trixie says dryly, cracking her neck to one side. “I… okay. If you’re serious, and you’re sure you don’t mind.”

Katya nods. “Wouldn’t have offered if I did,” she says cheerfully, because it’s true. “I’ll head out to the courtyard while you’re indecent, give you some space. Just stick your head out the window and shout when you’re done. Should be open.”

“I should ask you if you’re a serial killer, but you clearly are,” Trixie says carefully, and sure, Katya’s only known her for a little while, but she likes to think she can hear the edge of a smile in her voice.

She smiles back, the one that shows all her teeth, and cranes her head at a disturbing angle. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Tritzie,” she coos, and Trixie’s face scrunches up in disgust before she barks out a real laugh.

Katya hasn’t heard it before in any of the interviews she’s watched—this laugh is screechy and grating to the ears as it rises and falls like a wave. It’s such a perfectly distilled sound of human joy that all Katya can do is break right along with her, her awful smoker’s wheeze of a laugh folding in to Trixie’s scream.

“You’re a psychopath,” Trixie pants, catching her breath, holding her index fingers under her eyes to catch her tears from laughing. “Jesus Christ, oh my God.”

Katya, a little out of breath from laughing herself, just grins at her before hopping up out of the shower. “Come on, I feel like you might calcify to the floor if you stay in one place too long,” she tells her. “What’s all this for, anyway?” She gestures to the pink opulence Trixie appears to be draped in from head to toe—except her face, which is mysteriously bare.

Trixie was leading the way back out the front door, so when she stops in her tracks at the question it means she bumps into Katya. “Sorry,” she says automatically, reaching out a hand to steady her. It’s unthinkingly sweet. “Um. It was for a photoshoot.”

The walls that Katya could instantly sense when she opened the door and saw Trixie have clearly been thrown back up. She’s disappointed at first, but then a shiver of self-revulsion creeps up and down her spine at the uneven dynamic at work here, one that Trixie isn’t even aware of. Katya spent the whole day researching Trixie Mattel for her article—Trixie met Katya minutes ago, and has no idea who she is.

“Oh, cool,” she says simply, hoping the enthusiasm in her tone doesn’t come across as desperate, and drops it immediately, resuming the walk back to her apartment. Trixie will tell her if she wants to. If she doesn’t, that is none of Katya’s goddamn business. Katya already knows too much.

“Hold on,” Trixie says strongly, and it’s Katya’s turn to pause, keeping her feet rooted where they are as she turns her head around slowly like she’s in a screwball comedy. Her heart pounds. Does Trixie know too much? Did she see Katya’s computer? Does she know who she is? “Slow down. I need to find my shower stuff in these bags.”

“Oh,” Katya replies, more than a little stupidly. “Yeah, duh. Sorry.”

Trixie digs out no less than five different hair care products from one bag, then yanks a towel out from another, and then stands there working her lip between her teeth again until Katya figures out she’s probably trying to remember where her pajamas are.

“I have shirts,” she volunteers easily. “And pants, too, if you ask really nicely.”

Trixie snaps her gaze up, like she’d forgotten Katya was there. She laughs (not the same full-throttle cackle as before, which is extremely disappointing) and then releases a big sigh.

“Yeah, that would probably be easiest,” she says, pressing the heel of her free hand into her eye. “Thanks. I fucking hate moving.”

Katya almost decides to regale her with the tale of the time her mom had to move a sex doll out of her old Boston apartment, but then just as quickly decides against it. Probably not the time.

“Okay, here’s the shower,” she tells Trixie once they’re back in Katya’s apartment, the John Waters movie in the living room paused on a truly excellent expression on Edith Massey’s face. She points to the faucet, points to the showerhead. “It’s exactly like Kasha’s, but it works.”

“Mm,” Trixie says dryly, nods. She’s running out of humor, but so would Katya, if she had come out of a photoshoot of the caliber Trixie’s gown suggests and had to contend with herself to be able to take a shower.

“I’ll leave you be,” she promises, brandishing the pajamas she agonized over selecting for just a few minutes too long in her room.

Trixie snorts at the illustration of the Pan’s Labyrinth hand-eye monster over the front of the shirt Katya chose.

“Comfy,” she snarks, shakes her head, but a smile tugs at her mouth. “Thanks again, Katya. For all of this.”

“Oh, of course,” Katya says, waving a hand. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be in the courtyard.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder towards the window that looks out onto the pitiful little square of dehydrated grass. “Give a shout out the window when you’re done.”

Trixie nods again, then closes the bathroom door behind her. As Katya heads for the courtyard with her keys and a fresh pack of cigarettes, she hears the water start up, then the screech of Trixie’s voice: “Are you kidding me? It’s that easy?”

Katya smirks, shakes her head, then jogs down the stairs out to the front courtyard.

Sitting in the lone chair out here, lighting up a cigarette in the still of the night, makes it finally set in how fucking bizarre this all is. Katya feels like a witch. A soothsayer. She called out into the universe for Trixie, and now here she is.

She drafts a text to Willow.

So, a newly A-list Hollywood celebrity is using my shower, she types, then deletes it.

Trixie Mattel is in my home. Delete.

My pussy’s summoning powers are getting stronger, Mother… delete. She kind of stares at that one for a while, though.

She shuts off her phone without sending anything and takes an especially long drag on her cigarette. Telling anyone else about this moment feels like it’ll break it, somehow. This feels like a story to be savored, one that she should bring up on her deathbed at the last possible moment, having held it to her chest for decades but needing it to be spoken out into the universe. Once, oh, marvelous once… Trixie Mattel knocked on my door, and I lied about having plumbing expertise because I didn’t know what else to do…

Her first cigarette is dead, so she throws it to the ground, extinguishes it under her heel, and then lights another one.

The strangest part of all of this, really, after her obvious initial shock, is that it honestly doesn’t feel weird having Trixie in the apartment. She fits somehow, an impossibly tall Barbie that wound up among Katya’s матрёшка dolls and carved out a space for herself. She strikes Katya as someone who is used to that. She seems like she’s had a lot of practice carving out space for herself, in this world that doesn’t quite deserve her.

Everyone else in Katya’s life, when she first meets them, always feels a little bit like an invader. She spends so much time in her own head that real people take some adjusting to. But Trixie hopped over that hurdle easily, as if it didn’t exist, and now she’s occupying space in Katya’s head like she’s never not been there.

Is this comfort something to be concerned about? She pulls her legs up to her chest and crosses them at the ankles, puffs around her cigarette.

Addictive personalities are no joke, Mary. It’s something she has to be constantly careful of, lest she pull someone into her orbit and be unable to let them go. To extend the metaphor, it would only end in cosmic disaster—planets colliding, black holes being created, blah blah blah.

There’s a banging sound behind her that interrupts her thoughts, and when she turns instinctively she sees her window fly open to reveal Trixie. She’s lit from behind by the lamps in the living room, so Katya can’t make out her facial expression when she shouts, “Your water pressure sucks.”

“Yeah,” Katya yells back, not arguing. “Sorry.” It seems like the right thing to say, but she sees Trixie’s posture flinch.

“No, you don’t need to—that wasn’t a real complaint,” Trixie says hastily. “I—Jesus. Come up here, I hate yelling like this.”

Obediently, Katya stubs out the cigarette, wasting a couple hundredths of ounces of tobacco, and jogs back up the stairs.

“I was trying to be funny,” Trixie says petulantly as soon as Katya comes in the back door.

If seeing her in the gown, a red carpet glamoured vision, was a mindfuck for Katya, seeing Trixie Mattel in Katya’s Pale Man t-shirt that’s just a little too small and Katya’s flannel pants that are just a little too short is something else entirely. Something that hits her more squarely in the chest.

“Oh,” Katya says, intelligently. “I should’ve laughed.”

Trixie snorts, then. “You’re weird,” she says, uncrosses her arms and then starts to move before pausing where she stands.

Katya would like to kiss her, she thinks. Or ask her if that would be something she would want. She’s old, now, or older, and her methods of beguiling have dwindled to just point-blank requests.

Miss Mattel, care for a fucking?

That’s too much to say to Trixie, though, even for Katya, so instead they both just stand there, each seemingly biting something back.

“Do you like Pink Flamingos? I didn’t, really, the first time I saw it,” Trixie volunteers, still not having moved from where she’s standing by the kitchen table. “Too gross. I think I’ve only seen it the once.”

“Yeah?” Katya says. She feels stuck in a low gear, only able to supply simple one-syllable words. She clears her throat. “Wanna stay till it’s over?”

Trixie’s eyes widen. She smiles a little bit.

“Yeah, all right,” she says.

It goes back to being easy, after that one charged moment in the kitchen. Trixie sits on one end of the couch, both legs tucked under her primly, and Katya sits all splayed out on the other end. Divine stands disgusting and beautiful on the TV and bathes them in a blue-screen glow.

“Kill everyone now. Condone first-degree murder. Advocate cannibalism. Eat shit!”

Trixie mumbles the lines along with Divine from the other end of the couch, her eyes locked and unblinking on the screen. Katya giggles.

“So you said you don’t like this movie?”

“It’s fucking abhorrent,” Trixie tells her, shaking her head. “But you can’t deny that Divine kills.”

“Well, yeah, she condones first-degree murder. I know the line too,” Katya says with a smirk, dodging out of reach of the kick Trixie attempts to land on her. “How did you even find this movie? Film class?”

“No, no, there’s this film critic I love—”

Trixie sits up eagerly, her eyes alight, and hives instantly begin to prickle over Katya’s chest.

“She writes these reviews every week. Sometimes they’re for blockbusters, sometimes they’re completely off-the-wall hidey-hole flicks, and sometimes she just goes on a multi-day rampage where she watches movies by the same director for days at a time. Sometimes even the same movie.”

“What’s her name?” Katya asks, hoping her voice comes out right. She can’t really tell.

“Oh, the site’s called I Like To Watch, but she posts under Katie Homophobia—” Katya’s hives instantly get worse, she can feel it, and her cheeks flame. “Nobody knows her real name, though. It’s crazy. She’s bigger than the New York Times some weeks, and she’s completely anonymous.”

“So she’s, um. She likes John Waters, then?” Katya asks, nodding at the screen.

“Yeah, she loves the original Hairspray. She watched Pink Flamingos, too, but that one she branded as disgusting. Good, too, she gave it a good review, but disgusting—I was intrigued, so I watched it, and I agree with her. Still do,” she adds, flicking a look back up to the screen.

“So do you borrow all your film opinions from, um. From Miss Homophobia?”

Trixie scoffs. “No.” She smiles then, pleased with herself. “Just most of them.”

“I don’t really watch many movies,” Katya says abruptly, some dumbass part of her trying to push herself as far away from I Like To Watch as possible with maybe the stupidest excuse ever fathomed.

“Oh?” Trixie asks, amused, and Katya realizes that she’s looking around at all the vintage theater display posters, the original film reel of Silence of the Lambs, the tall stack of film books on the coffee table.

“New movies,” Katya amends, sort of desperately. “I don’t go to the theater much.”

“Mm,” Trixie replies, apparently satisfied with that. She opens her mouth, but then closes it immediately—something shifts in her expression, and she says nothing.

They settle back into mutual silence for the rest of the movie, Trixie occasionally making retching noises at the dog shit scene and Katya staring blankly at one part of the screen without really blinking.

Trixie Mattel is an avid reader of I Like To Watch. Well. That’s certainly something.

It’s obviously kind of terrible, another card on top of the rapidly growing stack of Things Katya Knows That Trixie Doesn’t Know and Maybe Should Share With Her, but all Katya can find herself thinking of is if Trixie has ever commented on any of her posts. If they’ve ever interacted before today.

I would’ve known, she thinks vehemently to herself. I would have felt—something.

Pink Flamingos ends, and the TV segues right into Hairspray on autoplay after the credits roll. Katya looks over at Trixie, who looks right back and shrugs before settling back into the couch cushions to watch the movie.

After Hairspray’s over, of course it’s Female Trouble up next, and then at some point while Divine is strangling her daughter onscreen over dressing like a nun Katya falls asleep.

When she wakes up, her wall clock reads seven in the morning, barely legible in the low light of dawn, and Trixie’s snoring on the other end of the couch. She looks sweet, Katya thinks drowsily.

A noise is blaring from somewhere. It’s loud enough that it makes Katya clap her hands over her ears once she gains enough consciousness to hear it and figure out where it’s coming from: the pink phone on the coffee table, presumably Trixie’s.

Trixie’s phone is doing that thing that phones do when you get so many texts that your phone can’t possibly make enough noises to notify you of them all. It’s ringing, it’s buzzing, it’s chiming, all at once, and Trixie is sleeping through the whole thing.

Katya glances over at Trixie, snoring like a train, and then it hits her.

The woman sleeping on Katya’s couch has just been nominated for a Golden Globe.

Nominations started just before six, the Best Actress category would be happening around now, it all makes sense.

Katya should wake her up, she should hold the phone to her ear, she should at least plug the phone in before it dies.

All she can get herself to do at this moment, though, is just kind of sit there in the knowledge that everything is about to change. The feeling of standing on a precipice that she had last night when Trixie looked her right in the eyes and told Katya about her own film site returns full force. It makes her dizzy.

She shakes her head in an attempt to physically rid herself of the feeling. It doesn’t work, but it loosens something enough that she reaches over to the other side of the couch and shakes Trixie awake, hard.

“Trix,” she whispers as Trixie’s eyes peel open, the nickname coming far too easy, “Trixie. Your phone’s been ringing.”

Trixie’s eyes fly wide as she scrambles to sit up, and Katya knows she figured it out, too.

“Oh, shit,” says Golden Globe nominee Trixie Mattel.

[lore-of-the-mushroom-kingdom]

Mario Timeline Part 2

Part 1

Time Skip At some point in time the Bros. and their family migrate out of the Mushroom Kingdom and into the Metro Kingdom. They live in the new and still under construction Big City which would eventually become New Donk City.

Before Super Era

Game & Watch: Mario's Bomb's Away Mario fights in an unnamed war, given Mario's stated age he's probably barely over 18 in this game. Due to the presence of palm trees this probably takes places in the Kong Archipelago.

Game & Watch: Mario Bros., Mario's Cement Factory, and Wrecking Crew Mario more than likely hopped job to job with Luigi before they landed on their main job. These games have no exact placement, so they could go in any order.

Game & Watch: Donkey Kong Circus Mario goes to a circus and watches Donkey Kong Senior perform an act. This probably where Mario met DK Snr. and would go on to befriend him, and buy him as a pet.(Yes pets are weird just look at Chain Chomps and Mona's pets).

Game & Watch: Donkey Kong Hockey Mario and Donkey Kong play hockey together. This is probably when DK Snr. is still living with Mario, so it probably takes place before Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong Arcade Donkey Kong Senior decides to prank Mario and try to get a rise out of him by kidnapping Pauline. These events would later become a festival for the New Donkers, and even in a musical titled Donkey Kong played by DK III the grandson of DK Snr. Mario might be a carpenter in this game, though this might have been retconned because Miyamoto implies he was already a plumber in this game. Mario is still wearing his Classic Outfit.

Donkey Kong Junior Mario cages Donkey Kong Senior after what he did in the previous game. Donkey Kong Junior is trying to free his father, thus Mario takes on the role of the antagonist.

Donkey Kong III Sometime after Donkey Kong Junior, Donkey Kong Senior probably decides to head home. On his way home he comes across Stanley on one of the islands in the Kong Archipelago, and decides to mess with Stanley.

Mario Bros./Did Somebody Call A Plumber One day Mario and Luigi get a call to deal with pests in the sewers of Big Ape City. In the sewers they fight Sidesteppers, Shell Creepers/Koopa Troopas, and Fighter Flies. As they go deeper they fight Spinys, Goombas, and Piranha Plants. Eventually the Bros. turn up in the Mushroom Kingdom, and the events of the next game begins. Bowser probably having heard of the prophecy from Kamek and maybe even remembering the Bros. from the past, sent minions into the pipes to prevent the Bros. from returning to the Mushroom Kingdom. But said actions would only lead them right back to it.

Part 3

[clatterbane]

Yay, time for a little near-crisis cleaning today! 😵

It's not actually terrible in here, at least. (And I am pretty determined to keep it from getting that way!) But, there is some stuff that needed taken care of before somebody comes around in the morning to mess with the plumbing. The basically condo association has somebody scheduled to flush the building drains, and they apparently need direct access to everybody's apartment drains in order to do at least part of that.

Hopefully that will actually help with the periodic drain problems that have started up here, but yeah. Of course we had a kitchen sink full of dishes, which I need to finish clearing out before bed. And both the bathrooms needed a clean, because of course they did. (Even though the fixtures may well need it again after the plumber is done! 🙄)

I did at least manage to get some of it done yesterday, but we've both been working on the bulk today. Admittedly more on my end, since he was doing the usual actual paid work until this evening. Plus I can actually see what needs cleaned (and decluttered), and get embarrassed at the prospect of other people seeing it too.

We are both pretty shit at actually getting--much less keeping 😬--on top of this stuff for various reasons, though. Especially with needing to take lengthy breaks, I've been going at it on and off basically all day. Going to call it good enough after finally getting those last few dishes out of the way and everything cleared from around the sink!

[secretcircuit]

ok so. i have a confession to make which is that my combined Fears of Outsiders Coming Into My House & Executive Dysfunction led me not to call my landlord about my slow-draining kitchen sink for a long time. perhaps months. and when i finally asked her about it, she sent her husband, who told me to put extra-strength drano down the drain. which did nothing. so i asked her again if she could send somebody and today two very kind plumbers came & HAD TO REPLACE A PIPE BECAUSE IT WAS BAD LOL ?????? to be clear my confession isnt that it was because of me (i sincerely doubt a metal pipe disintegrated because of anything i did) but that it took SO long to call that i feel very embarrassed. but im glad i did because NOW MY SINK DRAINS AND I CAN WASH DISHES?????

[drewoclock]

Roller Skates Turned Into Silverware

Originally published April 12th, 2015

It had everything a kid could get excited about: A roller skating rink, an arcade, prizes, contests, a big jungle gym, multiple ball pits, hit songs blaring overhead.  And one day my parents read something in the newspaper saying that the owner of that place was closing it.  And instead, he was going to move somewhere else and open up a restaurant.  That was somewhat of a shock.  I initially pictured the restaurant being exactly like the last place, but they also served you pizza.  Turns out I was wrong; it was going to be a fancy adult restaurant.  Which meant there probably wouldn’t be any ball pits.

I was bummed that one of my favorite places was disappearing, but I wasn’t even able to focus on being upset.  I was too intrigued by this owner.  I couldn’t believe that somebody could want two totally different things.  I just assumed people had one ultimate dream that they spent their whole life going after, and yet, this guy crafted a one-of-a-kind empire to stimulating the imagination and thrill of small children everywhere and decided that he also wanted to make a restaurant for adults that like to be fancy.

The world stopped being a place where people just had one dream; where they were either living it or had to settle for something else, and I would want to go up to that plumber and say “If you always wanted to be a yo-yo entertainer, you should go do that instead!’ and the plumber would cry and break his plunger in two and pull out from an old dusty box his sacred yo-yo and jump out the window and grab onto a bus that was heading to the world yo-yo competition.  Now, people could have more than one dream.  Somebody could like being a birthday clown AND a porn star.

This really changed things.  It's awesome, but when you have more than one dream, it’s very hard to make time for both dreams.  Sometimes, you have to pick between the two.  And then you have one dream that isn’t being realized anymore.  For a while, I just thought of myself as a drawing/painting guy.  My parents, teachers, and peers all encouraged me to keep up with it, and I did.  But I haven’t painted anything for years now, and you know what?  I miss it.  Sometimes I just want to stop what I’m doing (which may or may not be trasitioning into a bird person to be among my avian friends) and paint.  It’s just not that easy, though.  Birds don’t usually paint.

It doesn’t just affect you, either.  Several creators on YouTube that I love have moved on to do other things.  The lives of those creators are definitely changing, but so is mine.  The type of videos I watch has changed.  The things I’m being inspired by has changed.  The things that I miss seeing?  That’s changed.  Will I ever get to see the last episodes of that web show about telekinetic cats?

With multiple dreams, you see a lot of things that end up getting abandoned for a while, and sometimes forever.  All I want to do is watch these things grow and flourish when they often won’t.  But isn’t that urge a sign?  Having that urge means that something’s there.  That somebody managed to put something out there for a while.  And isn’t it cool, that I can have this urge in the first place?

Who knows where that roller skating owner is now.  Maybe he’s making just the best salads.  He owns the finest salad hut in Fancy Town.  And right now, he’s thinking “It’s been a real wild ride galavanting with all this lettuce, but it’s about time I moved onto my true calling: saving people from quicksand.  I’ve just always wanted to wait around quicksand in case some traveler falls into it, and then I’d rescue the traveler with my quicksand savior skills.”  And maybe when the restaurant closes, some customer will go “What buttshit!  I loved his salads and now I can’t have his salads anymore!”  And I’m right next to him, and I go “Yeah, and I wanna cool place to roller skate again!”  And there’s another guy that says “I can’t believe he stopped saving people from quicksand to go build a giant balloon castle in the sky!” but that guy isn’t able to say that because he’s in quicksand.

What a load of things to cause, huh?

[billconrad]

Pet Names

    We named my first (and only) cat Sophie, after a friend’s turtle. Oh, wait a moment. I wanted to discuss invented terms for things in our lives. Humans are quirky and come up with various ways to amuse themselves. One of those ways is to devise a funny name for things.

    This differs from a widely accepted alternative name for something like a beer is sometimes called “brew.”  Sometimes, these terms are a mild putdown or a way to express frustration. They are also used to add a bit of joy to our lives. So, I thought it would be amusing to write down my list of pet names and explain their background.

    Chadwick Time

    In college, we had a friend Chadwick, who was always 10-15 minutes late. So, whenever somebody was late, we always said, “They are on Chadwick Time.”

    Salad Problem

    There used to be a great restaurant chain called Pat and Oscars that changed to Oscars that changed to O’s. They went under during Covid but had a quirk when they first opened. As part of their initial promotions, they would drop off an extra salad, and by the end of our meal, we would have a mountain of leftover salad bowls. Hey, want to go to Salad Problem tonight?

    Expensive Sandwiches

    There is a small restaurant at the San Diego Glider Port. It is a fun place to eat with a fantastic view, but there is one problem. They were super pricy. A sandwich costs $15.

    Time-Waster 2000

    My boss once tasked me with writing a design checklist to remind him of the steps. (We had wonderful memories and did not need this silliness.) This list insulted us so when I told everybody about it, I called it the Time-Waster 2000. Yes, this got back to him. Yes, I got in trouble.

    Fiction Writers Anonymous

    I coined this term for the marketing department at a former company. They invented all kinds of wild lies to promote our products.

    Hair Dryer

    My mechanic invented this term to describe turbochargers. My first car had one, and when I drove fast, I would say, “The hair dryer is doing its job.”

    Christmas Tree

    One of my high school friends was a plumber’s assistant during summer vacations. Sometimes, he would run out of fittings and have to get creative. The senior plumber called the resulting Rube Goldberg creation a Christmas Tree.

    Target Makers

    This is what the mechanical engineers called civil engineers at my college. It was also a popular term at a defense contractor I worked for.

    Dingy

    My mother invented this pet name for the television remote control. “Where is dingy?” was a common phrase in our house. Side note. We now call it “remoteee.”

    Friskies

    This is a pet name my mother invented for pet food. It applied to cat, dog, bird and guinea pig food. It was funny to watch her ask the dog, “Do you want Friskies?”

    The Pool

    A pet name my wife invented for the toilet. For some reason, sexual organs and toilets have the most pet names.

    Good Gary (AKA Less-Evil Gary) and Evil Gary

    In college, I had two friends, Gary Rush and Gary Mah but we could not call them Gary, so we had to come up with nicknames. Good Gary (Mah) and Evil Gary (Rush). In time, the nickname evolved, and Good Gary became Less-Evil Gary.

    Waffle Stompers

    This is the name my father invented for hiking boots.

    Snail

    Since the invention of email, people have called postal mail “Snail-Mail.” When I walked to the mailbox, I would say, “I’m getting the Snail-Mail” which evolved to “getting the snail.”

    Using pet names is fun, but a writer must be careful. Invented terms need to be fully defined, put into context, and used sparingly. For example, in an upcoming book, I wrote: Fortunately, I had my “waffle stompers” (a name my father invented for hiking boots) in my backpack, and I put them on. The pet name in this context is amusing and brings a bit of joy to readers. However, if a character kept feeding their dog “Friskies” without an explanation, it would be confusing.

    Hopefully, you had some fun reading my invented terms, and perhaps you will incorporate them into your own life.

    You’re the best -Bill

    November 07, 2023

    Hey book lovers, I published four. Please check them out:

    Interviewing Immortality. A dramatic first-person psychological thriller that weaves a tale of intrigue, suspense, and self-confrontation.

    Pushed to the Edge of Survival. A drama, romance, and science fiction story about two unlikely people surviving a shipwreck and living with the consequences.

    Cable Ties. A slow-burn political thriller that reflects the realities of modern intelligence, law enforcement, department cooperation, and international politics.

    Saving Immortality. Continuing in the first-person psychological thriller genre, James Kimble searches for his former captor to answer his life’s questions.

    These books are available in soft-cover on Amazon and eBook format everywhere.

[plumbergilbert3]

What Zombies Can Teach You About Plumber Gilbert AZ

There's a story that the person's name was changed due to his similitude in appearance to Nintendo of America associate Mario Segal. Anything course he took to his name, the Mario we see and love today is a similar one from 1981, short overall, Italian and mustachioed.

Plumber Gilbert AZ

In 1983, Mario returned in his own experience. After somebody brought up that he resembled a handyman than a craftsman, his calling was as needs be changed and Mario as we probably are aware him today was conceived.

Luigi likewise showed up here as Mario's sibling and opponent in hopping unloading and taking out koopa, goomba, and other miscreants for greatest places. The first arcade Mario Brothers. appeared in arcades hot off the impact points of Jackass Kong's prosperity, however didn't have a remarkable same achievement itself.

It was truth be told a phase in which video it was biting the dust to game itself. Atari's home control center were overrated and not creating and the possibility of arcade gaming was being segway for these at home gaming endeavors. Organizations bankrupted and nothing was seen for right around 2 years therefore.

It was Nintendo itself that would effectively break the boundary between the arcade and the lounge once more, without any assistance resuscitating the perishing business and saving video gaming as far as we might be concerned.

With the send off of the Family PC Plumber Gilbert AZ in Japan in 1983, Nintendo leaders concluded that they required a stellar piece of programming to sell consoles. They turned around to Miyamoto and his ridiculous handyman for another beginning and he conveyed. Delivered in 1985, Super Mario Brothers. was an insurgency in home gaming. It re-imagined the innovation in home gaming at that point made the Mushroom Realm as we actually know it.

The ridiculous thoughts that drifted Jackass Kong and Mario Brothers a couple of years before were delivered vigorously in Super Mario Brothers and conceived was the mushroom eating, pipe distorting shenanigans of Mario and his sibling Luigi.

The innovation of the platforming sort as well as the extended at home, plunk down gamin console made Super Mario Brothers one of the top selling rounds ever, sending Japan and the US into Mario franticness, making an air able to acknowledge and uphold Nintendo regardless of what. The video gaming age was not dead, it was recently conceived. What's more, Mario drove the way.

Super Mario Brothers 2 was brought into the world as an immediate spin-off of the main game with a whole new bunch of levels, poison mushrooms and wind blasts. The game never saw discharge in the US however as it was viewed as excessively hard for whimsical US gamers. The game did ultimately see discharge in 1993 in the Mario Elite player Assortment as Lost Levels.

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