#mcnamak

[paradoxical-frog-backup]

Hey, this is @paradoxical-frog. Guess who did a little fucky wucky? I broke my phone and sent out for a replacement, and now I'm on my backup phone, which I can't fucking use to log in because it has no fucking text service to get my 2FA codes from! I'm trying to get @staff to help, but until then, I'm stuck here. Fuck my life.

Anyway. Mutuals, come on in. @mcnamak @graylibrary @justaddfiction @kinofourpaws @backupstardust @pendragyn

[gezdrasz]

Quinceañera is serious business for a cat

For @mcnamak

[dshizilla]

@mcnamak

It you!

[wilwheaton]

do you have a "favorite" costume/outfit you wore as wesley on TNG?

When he finally got to wear the same Starfleet uniform as Picard, I was pretty stoked about it.

[justsomerandomletters]

Pass the happy!

“When you receive this, list 5 things that make you happy and send this to 10 of the most recent people in your notifications! ”

@roller-rink-haruno tagged me in this...love the idea, thanks so much! 

(also just found out that my tumblr notifications were being funneled to a separate inbox that I didn’t know about, which is why it’s taken me a MILLION YEARS to finally see this) 

1. My cats

2. The smell of a wood fire

3. Getting new glasses 

4. My friends

5. just a Good Tree

tagging @tadpal @rattle-the-starss @chaoticvampires @a-marvellous-miscellany @mcnamak no pressure tho! 

[princelets]

Thanks so much for the tag!!

@mcnamak @moon-lettuce @shadowplemenc @vloomi @thejoaniebird

You don't have to be tagged to join in and tagged people don't have to do it!

Am I allowed to start a picrew chain?

Picrew

No pressure!

@asexualmisconduct @thegirlwholivesin-delusion @demonicchicken1121 @grapeagata @guess-ill-dye @strongindependenttrash @summerblademoontime @comicbookzombie @chaosgremlinlivinginyourwalls @crewman-six and anyone who wants to

[knitmeapony]

mcnamak replied to your photoset: Can anyone help me identify exactly what the hell...

The little box might be for storing a spice in?

Maybe... but what would you want to have maybe half a teaspoon of on t a table? The drawer doesn’t lock closed or anything.

[silversbananas]

mcnamak a réagi à votre billet : Hypothyroidism means working out 5h a week +...

congrats on the weight loss. That’s great!

Thank you! I’ll keep doing my best, I won’t let my illness get me down anymore

[dshizilla]

10 characters 10 fandoms 10 tags

10 characters you love

I was tagged by @mcnamak, and I’m finally getting around to it. These are in no particular order:

1) Vir Cotto - Babylon 5

2) Bob Belcher - Bob’s Burgers

3) Gurney Halleck - Dune

(I really dislike this version, but it does have the best Gurney by far)

4) Lord Geigi - Foreigner Series by CJ Cherryh

5)   The Weaver - Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

6) Fat Tony - The Simpsons

7) Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life's Rich Tapestry - The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks

8) Dr. Krieger - Archer

9) Tendi - Star Trek Lower Decks

10 Cerberus - Hades

[buttons-beads-lace]

@mcnamak said: please explain! I love lasers

All right! So! As we know, the distinctive thing about lasers, what makes them different from flashlights, is that their light is all synced up. It stays together instead of getting dimmer and more spread out as it travels. When you shine your laser at a wall, it makes a neat little dot whether the wall is near or far.

If you have a good enough laser, you can even shine it at the moon, and across those roughly 240,000 miles it will still hit a... relatively smallish spot, if it's a good laser. That's a long way.

Ok but why would you want to shine a laser at the moon?

Well, when the Apollo missions went to the moon, they did a lot of science, they gathered a lot of samples of moon rock and so forth, and one of the things they did was to leave an array of mirrors on the moon.

The mirrors aren't that big, really. But if you can aim a powerful laser at exactly the right spot, you can hit those mirrors. And if you have the right kind of telescope, you can see that laser light get reflected and travel those 240,000 miles right back to you.

And that is actually how we measure the distance between Earth and the moon!

You can look up "lunar laser ranging experiments" on Wikipedia for more info.

Hey speaking of lasers

Do y'all know about how you can use a laser to prove the moon landing was real?

[flyingpurplepizzaeater]

@mcnamak is that relaxing? 

[whyisitfollowthespiders]

“Once you get this, you have to say five things you like about yourself, publicly, and send it to ten of your favorite followers!”

Spread Positivity!!! 💜💜💜

I was tagged by the lovely @mcnamak

1) I have pretty hair

2) loyal friend

3) I can read really fast 

4) I can make cool friendship bracelets

5) I have attracted a whole bunch of really cool people to my friend group and i think that counts

I’m tagging @mostlycogent @fuure @rnoonpie @never-a-clever-username @brendahaiatsu @infestedbanana @samisnotlegend @cantkuro @callowing @nightbringer117

if you want to do this and i didn’t tag you, you are also tagged. if you don’t want to do it then don’t 

[rubyvroom]

the last six months: a summary

* received word that we were losing our apartment in the most roundabout and confusing way possible, by getting a lease six months short of a full year. At Christmas. Nobody wants to explain to us why. We have to track down our building manager and sit her down and ask what tf is up. 

*Turns out we are losing the apartment TO HER. Because she is losing her place, and she is buddies with the landlord, so she talked the landlord into kicking us out and giving it to her. Now, we have lived in this apartment for 12 years and we thought we were friends with the landlord, so this was fairly shocking. Lesson #1 Kids: you are never friends with your landlord. Never. Anyway, I would have been inclined to feel bad for said manager, who is older and her husband is sick and they are clearly having financial issues, but she gave us such an “I don’t have to explain anything to you” attitude that I have permanently crossed her over to Fuck You Forever category. Also she refused to explain exactly when and exactly how all this was gonna go for another bunch of weeks, and also refused to refund us our security deposit and our last month’s rent, because it was ten years ago and we can’t prove we paid it. After, again, twelve years of being perfect tenants and taking great care of the place. Yeah, fuck you lady. Our finances are no picnic either and sadly we are NOT buddies with a landlord to hook us up, as the next six months proved.

*for this reason, we’re gonna neglect to mention that we have had bats in the house again. Yeah, she can figure that out AFTER she’s moved in. Have fun with that. 

*Anyway, cue months and months of looking for a new place to live. Friends, Boston real estate is BRUTAL. There are twenty other people looking at any one place you mange to get in to see and they will snatch it out from under you before you’ve pulled back the shower curtain. Every place wants first, last, security, broker fees, key deposit, your firstborn son, etc. We are used to finding places to live on Craigslist by searching for roommates, this is what we always did in the past before I moved in with Mr. X when his roommate moved out. Looking for a place just for us two, no roommates, involves dealing directly with Real Estate agents, building management companies, and landlords. All of whom, Lesson #2, are not there to help you, each other, or anyone but themselves.

*Whenever we did find a place that was not an actual hole in the ground and put in an application, we would get stone cold turned down. My credit score is shitty, and Mr. X is a freelancer without a steady paycheck, so we might as well have had leprosy. This despite the fact that I actually fully paid off my entire student loan this year as well as ALL my credit card debt, so I actually owe nothing to anybody. We have fantastic references, great rental history, and steady income. Does anybody care? Nooooope. They see that number and our application goes in the trash. Not that anybody would tell us this, mind, without me repeatedly calling to ask if they’d called our references yet and if they needed a paycheck stub. They just stopped calling and wasted our time rather than just tell us we were out of the running. This happened over and over and over.

*Couple other Fun Things That Happened: The place with the american flags and the Mystery Landlord who lived on the third floor but nobody ever saw - we chickened out on applying to that one because it sounds blatantly like Jordan Peele’s next horror movie. There was the place that suddenly was no longer available once we had parked on the street in front of it and texted to let them know we were there. Did he look out the window and see an interracial couple and suddenly go Nope? We’ll never know, but we got enough Weird Vibes at places we looked at to have to wonder. There was a summer sublet that was lovely and belonged to a professor who would be sending the summer in France, and we were this close to signing it but put an application down on a 1yr lease instead, and by the time we got turned down for that we had lost the sublet too. There were more real estate agents than I ever want to see again in my life and a whooole lot of basement apartments with no windows that made me want to cry.

*We got down to one month before we lose our current place and had already had our application rejected multiple times. We looked at an apartment right on my birthday that was beautiful, just down the street (so still in our neighborhood), and right in our price range. Put in the app, talked to the landlord, had long conversations with the landlord, landlord called all our references who gave us glowing reviews, were discussing move-in dates, and then she ran my credit report. Literally asked me to explain individual items on my credit report to her satisfaction. Then wrote us an email (after all this talk on the phone) to say that the place was no longer available because someone decided not to move out. 

*I lost my shit. I cried. I am not a crier. We talked about moving into separate apartments with roommates again. We talked about putting our stuff in storage and couch surfing. We talked about me going out to North Carolina to live with my parents and him moving in with a friend (this to me was NEVER an option, but it was raised). Then we buckled down and went back to work. Entire days surfing the 18 different apartment listing sites. Contacting real estate agents. Me pleading for help on Tumblr. Making appointments on the phone and checking them separately to cover more ground. Pretty much around the clock stress and work.

*Lesson #3: After all this, it became clear to me that anyplace I get to live with Mr. X is gonna be home. Everything else is bonus. So we were gonna make something work, no matter what.

*Two weeks before d-day we put out three more applications on places we could easily see ourselves living in. By then we’re so pummeled by the process that we were totally prepared to be rejected again, but wouldn’t it be funny if the one time we put in multiple applications several of them were accepted…?

*It was. It was funny. All three places wanted us. On one we got the hook-up from a real sweet twentysomething real estate agent in a managed building with a good commute, another we met the current tenants who were doing the searching for their landlord and hit it off, and the third we went out to see on a whim right after it was posted and it turned out to be gorgeous. So then we had to decide, in really short order, what to do. Still scared of losing all three of them and ending up with nothing, I had already put a deposit with the real estate agent on the managed building apartment. So if we didn’t take that one we would lose a month’s rent. But the last place, the afterthought place, really stuck in our minds, and in the end we ate the cost of the deposit and took that one. 

*SO. Our new place. It is the best place we saw anywhere this whole time. The BIGGEST place we saw this whole time. 3+ bedrooms, y’all. A dining room. New kitchen. New bathroom. I am pinching myself. I was trying not to jump up and down while we were looking at it. Landlady was doing up the place herself, showed the place herself, lives in the building herself, was cool as shit. We got on that fast. Applied that night. She accepted, we’ve been over there, signed the lease, it’s all set.

*Two more things fell into place: we got an extra week at the old place, because building manager does not have her shit together to move in yet. They were actually hoping to get a whole other month’s rent from us, but happily, we are outta here on Saturday after pro-rating a week of rent. This allows our new landlady to finish painting the last room, and also we don’t have to move on the first of the month which is always madness. 

*Last thing? Astonishingly enough, after preparing ourselves for six months for our rent to go up several hundred dollars a month and have to tighten our budget and give up things, and after getting rid of a significant proportion of our belongings because it looked like we would be living in a basement 1-bedroom for the forseeable future? And after Mr. X pretty much gave up on the idea of having a home studio for his freelance work? Our new apartment with room for an art studio is CHEAPER than what we pay now. 

*Holy shit, right? Lesson #4: Sometimes a few ulcers later it all works out. 

ps. THANK YOU to all my tumblr buddies who supported me during my crazy stress over all this, and particularly the people who offered direct help and advice. @undeniablyotiose @liaratsoniii @mcnamak, other people who I’m probably forgetting, people who sent videos and supportive messages, bless your souls, thank you for the help. 

[beckettsthoughts]

Rules: Answer the 20 questions and tag 20 amazing followers you would like to get to know better. 

I was tagged by @astro-ocean, thank you so much! I’m sure it’s common knowledge now I think that I love these kinds of things, and I appreciate every single one that’s sent my way :)

Name: Beckett

Nicknames: Becks, B, Crow, Pilot or Ghost. Some people call me Bucket or Pineapple, both of which I also love. 

Zodiac sign: Scorpio 

Height: Somewhere between 5′7″ and 5′8″

Orientation: Aromantic, asexual

Ethnicity: White, British and Jersey by ancestry. 

Favourite fruit: Apples, I guess. I like a lot of fruit, though, so it’s hard to decide. Plums, raspberries, blackberries, mangoes, peaches. If I can get my hands on some fresh Normandy cherries, though, those skip straight to the top of my favourites list.

Favourite season: Spring! It’s not too hot, the plants are all bright green and happy-looking and I love the feeling of sitting and listening to the heavy spring rain.

Favourite book series: The Raven Cycle, I suppose. I prefer individual books to series, but The Raven Cycle is high up on my favourites list.

Favourite flower: Begonias, or maybe marigolds. I really love bluebells, too, when they’re in season.

Favourite scent: Rosemary 

Favourite colour: Uh, is black an acceptable answer? I like a lot of colours, though, like greens and dusty pinks, pale oranges or strong, rich blues. It really depends on the situation.

Coffee, tea or cocoa: I don’t like hot drinks, but if I did I think I’d like hot chocolate the best.

Average sleep hours: Four or five hours, if I have to get up at a reasonable time. I have delayed sleep phase disorder, so if I’m able to sleep in without negative consequence, then I can get the recommended eight or nine hours. That happens mostly during the holidays, or at weekends.

Cat or dog person: I love both, but I’m allergic to cats. So dogs, I suppose. I used to be scared of dogs and I still am scared of a lot of dogs, but my best friend owns the most adorable little puppy I’ve ever seen and she couldn’t hurt a fly. 

Favorite fictional characters: Aziraphale and Crowley, from Good Omens. Also, Guzma from Pokemon Sun/Moon. Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray, in the original stories and also in certain adaptations. David Tennant’s Doctor in Doctor Who is a favourite of mine. Lastly, the Marquis de Carabas from Neverwhere, for being generally glorious and also using the word “widdershins” perfectly seriously. 

Number of blankets you sleep with: One. It’s a winter-weight duvet and it stays with me all year round. I also have a weighted blanket, but I don’t sleep with that. 

Dream trip: Go back to Los Angeles! I’d love to go back, to stay with my family again and explore some of the many things we couldn’t fit into our last trip. I want to get ice-cream sandwiches on Manhattan Beach, I want to explore the tacky seafront of Venice Beach, I want to watch the sunset down on El Matador after driving up the Pacific Coast Highway. Visit Palm Springs, or maybe Santa Barbara again. Go to gigs. I’d love to do what my brother does and spend a week in Los Angeles and then a week in San Francisco, because I’m constantly jealous of his San Francisco trips. But, yeah, I want to go back to California.

Blog created: February 2017, I think? It might have been January. I’m pretty sure I’d had my old blog since at least 2012, though. I’ve been on here a surprisingly long time, given my track record of short-lived social media efforts.

Number of followers: 210

And to carry this on, I’ll tag @skyward-sheik, @shark-myths, @toadstoolfuel, @inadragon, @baz-pitch-is-alive, @heardyouloudandqueer, @littleduckalex, @murdereratthematinee, @majesticspaceprince, @eclectic-thoughts-and-talents, @dubious-cactus, @etherealloser, @cause-kid-course-charm-curse, @transstardustt, @queerdeerboi, @maskofmemories, @lordphoenixfanwrites, @ye-lost-bard, @mcnamak, and @clarinooty!

[aggressively-precious]

How to Flirt

“fucking mcnamake your mcnamove, you mcnabitch”

[buttons-beads-lace]

@mcnamak ok I finished that application so now I can Explain. (And thank you!)

For me, going straight from a blank page to a full sentence that makes sense and has the vibe I want it to is very difficult, so this is what I do instead.

When I've read a job posting and decided I want to apply, I start by making a list of qualifications and things from the job posting that I have / can do, just a list of words or short phrases like

customer service experience scheduling microsoft office

Then I go under each of those list items and make it into a full sentence.

customer service experience: I have five years of experience in customer service.

Once I have the most basic version of that sentence, I think about details that I can add to it. The point of a cover letter is two things-

1. to summarize the things from your resume that are relevant to this job, so the person doing the hiring doesn't have to read the whole thing and connect the dots themselves. 2. to add details and explain things that might not be in your resume.

So some details that I want to add here are that I didn't just talk to customers myself for five years, for part of that time I was a manager responsible for training other people to give good customer service. And I was good at that- we always got good results on our customer surveys, and we also always hit our goals for stuff like signing people up for the loyalty program. So now I've got a second sentence:

As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

Another thing from the job posting that I want to address with this bit is that the job I'm applying for involves helping people over the phone a lot. So I want them to know that even though my experience is in a different environment (retail instead of an office front desk) I did still have to answer phone calls and help people over the phone. This is the type of detail that's not in my resume and that someone wouldn't necessarily guess, but I really did answer a lot of phone calls working in retail.

I also added a little bit of Flavor, so it's not just assisting customers, it's "welcoming, respectful assistance". Yes, I did try like five different words there before picking these ones. Usually I look back to the job posting and pick something that relates to what they've said they want. But I find it a lot easier to figure out details like this after I have the basic structure.

This is what I ended up with for my Bit About Customer Service:

I have five years of experience in customer service, providing welcoming, respectful assistance to customers over the phone and in person. As the [job title] with [company], I trained our entire team on how to best serve our customers and helped ensure that my location had the best results in the region for customer loyalty.

If I really wanted to add a lot of detail, I'd put numbers in here- how big "our entire team" was, what the "best results" were and how we were measuring it. But the position I'm applying for is with a small organization, and probably doesn't involve measuring sales in the same way, so I decided not to add that. If I was applying for another retail job, I'd include those things.

I repeat this same process with each of the qualifications from my list, copy-paste each of those bits in order of how important they are, and then I need an opening and a closing. For the opening, I start by stating the obvious.

Dear hiring manager, I am applying for/interested in/etc. [this position]

and then I apply my school-essay-writing techniques and do a one-sentence preview of the qualifications I just got done writing about.

I am confident I have the customer service skills, computer expertise and organized mindset to excel in this position.

For the closing, this job posting specifically mentioned putting your contact information in your cover letter, so I did that, and then I like to thank them for looking at my application because that's a nice polite note to end on.

I can be reached at [contact info]. Thank you for taking the time to consider my application, and I look forward to hearing from you. [signature]

Extra Bonus Brownie Points:

Go to their company website and add something that shows you have looked at their company website. Like yes, the main reason you're applying for this job is it's available and you need money, but besides that, there's gotta be something at least a little interesting about this company that might be cool if you get to work for them. In this case they had a whole big section about charities they donate to and how they get involved in their local community, so I added this right before my closing:

[this company's] contributions to charities such as [things from their website] are truly admirable. I've grown to love [this city] since moving here, and I would be honored to be part of an organization that does so much to contribute to the community.

Now wait before you go here's the important part:

I don't delete any of this stuff.

I copy/paste out the finished bits into a new document to send in, but I keep that list of qualifications with sentences under each one.

Now I have a document with a list of qualifications I have and nice professional-sounding descriptions of those qualifications, and the next cover letter I do, I can reuse them if they're relevant so I don't have to redo all this work of making words make sense. If I decide to change them a little bit for the next job, I'll keep the new version next to the old one under the same heading. I also keep my openings and closings.

I used to have a big file like this but I apparently didn't back it up before my old computer died, so I'm having to re-create it, but you guys this saves me so much time I would otherwise spend staring at a blinking cursor. And it's easier than saving the full finished cover letter and trying to pull sentences out of it, because all the Bits are already organized by topic. (And it lowers the risk of accidentally copy-pasting the wrong company's name.)

I <3 my cover letter sandbox.

I'm at the point in cover-letter-writing where my emotional state flips over from "ugh I hate this process" to "yess I'm good at this and I will be good at this job"

remains to be seen if they will agree but fingers crossed.