#except only one cool dude

[july-19th-club]

our least honorable regulars tend to come and go, and it depends on their age or how many disruptive children they have or if they're just passing through. Map Lady only stayed a few months but she gave us years worth of annoyances. but our MOST honorable regular is easy. he is a man named geoffrey who is sixty years old and deeply deeply deeply autistic and when he comes in the building i know i'm going to have a pleasant interaction and even when i am incredibly grouchy and bitchy i can see geoffrey and its like yippee a real patron has arrived. i love geoffrey. so does everybody else. he doesn't do anything in particular to be beloved but he is the mildest mannered man on the planet with only one flaw which is an unfortunate disdain for kleenexes, although for all the sniffling i WILL say he is a ready hand with the sanitizer. he reads largely music biographies and has a set of about twelve sentences for regular conversation, some of which are just echolalia material. when you chat with geoffrey you know exactly what you're going to get, which is one of the most refreshing parts of having him come in on a busy or unsettling day. the exception to his catalogue of stock phrases is when he is sharing actor/musician birthday and death day trivia. he always brings his books back on time and he always says "i always bring them back on time" and we say thank you we love that about you. and he says "sorry to keep coming in like this" and we say please do not apologize for being the best part of our day every day. we love you. geoffrey <3

[deus-ex-mona]

my five surviving braincells when something remotely good happens:

[crimeronan]

yesterday a guy at irl critique group whose stuff i Really Really Like was critiquing this week's piece, and as part of his critique, he just straight-up said "okay, this is nitpicky and only because i keep writing fantasy stuff about healing myself, but there's a line here about this healing magic making this girl 'whole' and 'as she was meant to be' that reads...... really ableist." & the guy who wrote it was like "oh wow, you're right and that completely blew past me, thanks" & noted it down.

& i was sitting there trying not to visibly perk my ears like a dog like. SORRY TO BE SO SURPRISED I KNOW I'M BEING BIASED AND CONDESCENDING AS HELL. HEY. YOU KNOW THE WORD ABLEISM???

[padfootastic]

Ahaha thank you for the nice comments in tags <3 i love Remus but he seems bit like a spineless people pleaser and after dating somebody who would rather lie about their feelings than have people be mildly upset with them..... I chose violence 🗡

no but ur so right because!!! i’ve been sleeping on this for a while but let’s talk about remus’ personality traits and how they have the potential to make him a bad/absent partner, at best, and an abusive one, at worst. everyone wants to turn him into this image of perfection just bc he’s such an ‘uwu victim’ figure in fanon but that’s SO far from the truth omg

(i am…just gonna put this remus character analysis under a cut bc it got unnecessarily long and i wouldn’t want u to read it if u didn’t want to lol)

so, for one, he’s manipulative. he has no combinations in twisting the truth or dodging it entirely for his own benefit. like, the man could stand in front of his dead best friend’s orphaned son & not even allude to the fact that he knew his dad. he had no problem bringing james & lily up in the most twisted ways possible to guilt/emotionally influence harry. so remus in a relationship would have the capacity to either knowingly or unknowingly manipulate his partner. the definition of gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss except more sinister.

next, his spinelessness. either as a defensive measure to deal w anti-werewolf hostility or as an innate personality trait, remus has the habit of just—not standing up for things. he looks away when his friends act like assholes, even when he’s in a position of authority (which yes, u can argue that he’s afraid of losing them but atp they’ve literally risked life & magic & azkaban for him so either way, he comes off badly—either he doesn’t mind himself, or he doesn’t fully trust their friendship, or it’s just easier to look away). in a relationship, this can manifest as bottling everything inside u until it makes u bitter or u violently unload on the other person in an entirely disproportionate manner. the dynamic would also be a bit skewed. the people pleasing u mentioned is also such a big thing that people usually overlook. when ur constantly trying to make the other person happy and don’t want to rock the boat, that is a cocktail for miscommunication and breakdown of relationships. ur also constantly putting the emotional burden of constructively dealing w issues on ur partner instead of doing it urself.

connected to his cowardice is his habit of running away when things get tough. remus is conflict avoidant; he does not like to put himself in a position where he has to take a decisive stance, especially if it’s against what others around him believe in. he runs away when things get tough, and tbh, for me, this comes from a constant spiral of self hatred & self victimisation, both of which stem from his experience as a werewolf. in every difficult situation, he centres himself & his discomfort and instead of dealing with it and moving forward for a constructive solution, he decides that stepping back from it altogether is better. which, yeah, works well for him bc he can temporarily put a pin in it but it’s kinda terrible for everyone’s who’s left behind. so i also think that remus is a profoundly selfish character who doesn’t look beyond the end of his own nose. u can imagine how those traits might manifest themselves in a relationship.

and his people pleasing!! so this might be verging on fanon but his gratitude and/or devotion to dumbledore sets an…interesting tone. it’s also another example of how he cannot conceive himself in any other term except as a victimised werewolf. the marauders did a lot for him, arguably even more than dumbledore’s token representation formula, but he never felt indebted to them the way he did for D. dumbledore also kind of makes him feel needed? validates his feelings? and that just speaks to a very twisted sense of self for me. which, again, won’t bode well for his other interpersonal relations.

also, on a very hc note, i also feel like remus just…does not have any significant capacity to love. he takes and takes and takes but doesn’t give much in return. this doesn’t even have to be an actively malicious decision, tbh, just a very self-centred one. he doesn’t realise how much he’s taking bc he’s only thinking about his own circumstances.

all of these are also just why i can’t see r/s working out in any healthy manner. remus is exactly antithetical to everything sirius is/believes in, and not even in the fun ‘opposites attract’ way. but that’s another rant no one asked for lmao

[platonicallylovesick]

Current brother ranking has gotta be

Beel & Bel (tied for first. NO NOT JUST BECAUSE THEYRE TWINS I just love them that much

Satan

Levi

Mammon

Lucifer

Asmo

[starpros-sunshine]

You know. I'm part of the fraction "to each their own and let people handle their lives however they see best fit". But I do feel the need to say that I have seldom seen such an idiotic assumption as that breaking up with someone four days before someone's birthday when you also want that someone to do something for their birthday even though you know you and your soon-to-be-ex will both have to be there won't end with that person just not doing anything with anyone for their birthday. Partially because nobody wants that kind of awkwardness after a fresh breakup and also because the soon-to-be-ex has the lovely habit of wallowing in self pity and making everything about how they have it so bad. You know I just think in such cases you should've waited a week with the breakup. I don't care how much you want to fuck that other guy but I really think you should've waited a week.

[persephoneggsy]

Sebastian Vael: *had, at the very minimum, neglectful if not outright emotionally abusive parents, was basically kidnapped and sent to the chantry against his will, decided to stay in the chantry bc Elthina actually gave him a choice which no other figure in his life had done to that point, found peace and belonging in the chantry, then found out his entire family was murdered, leaving him with massive survivor’s guilt and a throne he’s not even sure it’s right for him to reclaim, breaks his vows to the chantry to chase revenge which he immediately feels even more guilt about, finds out it was an old family friend that ordered his family’s deaths so that’s a fun betrayal he has to deal with, is torn between the peace of the chantry and his loyalty to Elthina or his duty to his home city and people of Starkhaven, despite all the trauma tries to stay optimistic and genuinely wants to help people, never preaches to a unwilling audience and instead engages in actual dialogue about his faith, seriously homeboy even acknowledges the chantry’s flaws but has hope it could be made better, opts to stay in Kirkwall to protect his pseudo-mother figure Elthina from a potential mage rebellion, only for her to die in a catastrophic explosion along with several of his brothers and sisters in the faith, whom he likely knew longer than he’d ever known Hawke and Co., and the chantry that he called home for more than a decade is also lost, and the guy who did it is literally right to next to him ranting about how he had no other choice but to commit wholesale murder, so he is understandably consumed by rage and grief and isn’t in the best state of mind, but if you kill the guy who murdered his chantry family he’s basically a ride or die no matter side of the mage-templar war you choose*

Y’all: ugh what a boring character. i hate his dumb temper tantrum at the end of the game. wish we could kill him.

[mbat]

i fr need some sort of (probably queer) friend into world of warcraft so that the person i directly talk to about it isnt my brother. cause on my life his opinions suck and his gameplay kills me a little inside

[midnightwind]

I feel like I'm 10 seconds and one bad day of insomnia from shot gunning every single Origin run of BG3 just to write down all the pet names the characters use for each other so I can stop losing my mind while writing

[keeps-ache]

mm i Neeed to go the beach

[vulpinesaint]

absolutely unreasonable over this coworker that i rlly like rn. thank god i don't like men or i would have fucking Lost it by now! as it is i don't even know what has me so dkfjghsdf about him i'm just sitting there with my head in my hands going "he's so normal about trans people..."

[aprillikesthings]

in which I am a petty bitch

There's all these women on youtube and tiktok who talk about interests of mine like ADHD and historical costuming and fiber arts and I know some of them make a living off their content by now, but every time they mention their husbands etc. part of me assumes it's a situation where her share of the household income is like, part-time job level, and he's the one actually footing the bills behind the scenes for things like their house.

I know, I know. If you get a big enough following, making online content can actually pay a LOT now, especially when people diversify it a lot--youtube and tiktok and patreon, doing ads in their videos, etc.

And I also know that the reason I am Suspicious is because of The Toast--I assumed the folks running it were like, maaaaybe middle-class. But after The Toast closed and Nicole Cliff started posting in other places I realized--her and her husband are actually rich as fuck, and as far as I can tell the money is from her husband. A huge home in suburban Utah, horses, she has a favorite aesthetician and gets botox and just...yeah it's not so bad to run the kind of site that will never entirely pay for itself (The Toast was never going to make anyone wealthy lol) when you're not worried about what you'll do if it doesn't.

And I'm not saying I don't think she should've started The Toast! It was an amazing website with articles I *still* sometimes link to people, even though all the cultural references are dated now, and at least half the images aren't working. The Toast paid their writers, and that allowed them to publish a shit-ton of amazing content.

But it always felt (to me!) like she portrayed herself as the kind of city-dwelling nerdy feminist librarian type that was a lot of The Toast's readership...not someone in a McMansion.

And there's some folks on youtube where I'm just....you do not have a high enough follower count on this incredibly niche material for you to be paying for that nice place I see in the background of your videos, plus all the cameras and lighting and mics and editing software.

It must be nice, to have that kind of financial freedom. And I'm glad their spouses are willing to support them like that.

But I wonder how many possible content creators are out there whose amazing stuff we'll never see because they're too busy trying to pay rent.

[stellarwaffles]

Plot twist: there are more fics on ao3 including Kataru than there are blue archer fics

[deepspaceclawstation]

I have to visit the great uncle (grand uncle technically but english kinship terms are weird that way) who doesn't like me (and once tried to convince me (a 25 year old) that a high-pitched sound has a low frequency) today so wish me luck I guess

[nexus-nebulae]

cruel prince really has me thinking a ton now abt which fantasy/scifi species has the ability to birth twins (especially identical ones). like apparently the Fae in that realm just do not have a concept of bearing twins (let alone triplets or more) so when they meet a pair of identical twin humans in the book they have no idea what to do abt it

[elisamaza]

Pizza delivery drivers of Reddit, what are some of the craziest reasons people have ended up on the “no delivery list”?

gameryamen

I worked for a pizza place that was near a very large software company. Deliveries to the neighborhoods or offices where all the tech workers lived was usually pretty awesome because they'd tip rather well. But there was one apartment that started to become a concern for us drivers. The man ordering was always polite, always paid, always tipped $4, and he would have been a perfect customer. He'd order breadsticks and a salad twice a week, and sometimes he'd include a bottle of root beer. Except when he opened his door, you could see an alarming amount of our breadsticks boxes stacked everywhere inside. Not like a few on the counter and a couple by the trash, stacks and stacks of them. Even worse, it was only our boxes in there. He wasn't just ordering from us often, we were the only place he was getting food outside of work. Now, I've worked in some of those tech offices myself, I know that there's enough decent food options just hanging out in the break rooms that this guy was probably not malnourished, but the way his living space was a shrine of greasy cardboard was a clear sign that this guy didn't have a healthy relationship with our food. Our manager was a really cool dude though, and he heard the drivers joking about the boxes and asked a couple of us "Is this like a messy guy or a guy who needs help?" We agreed it was probably the latter. So on his day off, the manager went to the guys apartment with an envelope that had gift cards for several other restaurants that delivered in that area and chatted with him. Manager found out that the guy was an immigrant on a Visa who was struggling to find American food he liked, and too socially awkward to ask anyone. So he talked with him through a few menus and helped him with some recommendations. Then he helped the guy load all the old boxes into his truck to take to the dump, in exchange for a promise not to order from us more than once a week. For a little while, the manager had a note on the calendar showing the last time the guy had ordered, and a couple times he had to hold his ground and refuse the guy's order. But after that chat, I never saw the stacks of boxes again, and the guy would boast about the different meals he'd had.

what the fuck dude, this is so sweet.