it’s a tough life for someone like me, who should have been born a muppet

one of the lovely ladies I’ve been seeing got covid & she’s like “maybe you didn’t catch it?” Girl I was not a ‘didnt catch it’ amount of space away when we were- wheres that tweet about the vaxxed guy. you know the one

alpha dave mumbling to himself the collection

original:

this is from a "manipulation advice" video and it's just so fucking funny to me. why didn't I think of responding to insults like this

I can’t remember where I got the information now, but apparently if you stare silently for at least 4 seconds it triggers a feeling of rejection which I don’t have to tell you is uncomfortable and makes most people backpedal pretty quickly and awkwardly.

Immediately going concerned/extremely polite always throws people off their game, it's beautiful.

The Quiet Stare Of Disappointment is also super effective, indeed .

My sister and I were walking across a car park.

Random bloke: Maybe if you walked more you wouldn’t be so fat

My sister stops dead, stares him in the eye and goes: Is everything alright at home?

I’ve never seen a man’s face turn to horror so fast

We just walked to her car and drove off

The silent stare is so effective. I learned about it in social psychology in undergrad, and have often used it to great effect. Probably the best example is when I went to sign the papers on the car I was buying—I had already worked out a price and my trade-in with the salesmen the day before—and they decided they were going to take $1000 off the value of my trade-in. (I want to emphasize that I was buying a 10+ year old car; I ended up paying $8k total.)

"No," I said. "That doesn't work for me. If you're unwilling to honor the deal we made, I'm not buying a car from you."

Well, they talk for a living. So they talked. Here I am, a young woman on my own, and these two men at the dealership are giving me all the reasons they couldn't possibly honor the deal we made yesterday.

So I sat. I didn't say a word. I just stared at them.

They kept talking, trying to get a reaction out of me. After about 10 seconds, they abandoned all pretense of logical arguments and started hammering pathos. They weren't even buying my old car from me for the dealership; it was a personal favor for which they were using their own hard-earned money to help this poor guy at church who just got out of rehab and his house burned down and his children exploded and his dog left him for another man, etc etc

I didn't say a word. I just stared at them.

They began falling apart. They continued trying to hustle me, but their confidence left them. I think they might have been sweating.

Within five minutes they caved and signed the papers for our original deal.

I have been told for years I am intimidating, and by people who had never even seen me angry. Just in general, intimidating. This absolutely baffled me until a friend one day pointed at me and said — “This! Right now! You’re being intimidating!”

Friends, I was staring silently at someone while inwardly flailing desperately to come up with a response to something they’d said that wasn’t overly rude but also was holding my ground. In my mind, I was being hellishly awkward. I couldn’t summon any charm, I couldn’t figure out a sentence to string together. Silence spooled out horrifyingly between us as I got farther and farther away from being articulate and became more and more flustered by this failure to respond. From the outside, I guess, I just looked like a stone cold bitch waiting for them to get their shit together, lol.

I still don’t think I’m intimidating but you know I’ll take it.

People who are hard on yourselves: may I humbly offer you the 100 floors of frights philosophy?

In the SNL David S. Pumpkins sketch, a couple is on a ride called "100 Floors of Frights," where they see a different scare on each floor, and at one point they complain about many of those floors being lame. And then Kenan Thompson delivers this line of deep philosophical wisdom: "Hey look—it's 100 floors of frights, they not all gonna be winners."

My husband and I use this line all the time to give ourselves grace. For instance, I'm a good cook, but when I make a dinner that doesn't turn out well, I will literally say out loud, "It's 100 floors of frights—they're not all gonna be winners," or just "Look it's 100 floors of frights."

It just means when you do a thing a whole lot, there's bound to be some instances that are bad. You don't have to be good at the thing 100% of the time. You can't be good 100% of the time. Some of the 100 floors are gonna suck. It doesn't negate your skill at creating the rest of the 100 floors.

You can use this for anything: art you make, performances, school assignments, days at work, outfits, sex sessions, literally anything that you are too hard on yourself about when it doesn't go great. Listen to Kenan Thompson and remember that it's impossible for them all to be winners, and that's okay.

My husband and I use the phrase this way ALL THE TIME. It's helpful!

DB Cooper mystery solved: he survived and used the money to start the film website "IMDb" (I am DB)

ok. i survived 25 years outside the international space station. who gives a shit

Technically most moss is outside the international space station

Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.

You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.

^^^ This. The COMBINED population of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) is only about 2.6 million. That's not small town numbers, sure, but compared to NYC (20.1 million in the metropolitan area)? LA? (12.9 million "")?

Minneapolis is being made an example of because they're the most bitesized target, and if you're doing a shock and awe campaign like this you need to not choke on national tv.

(And they're still having to fight for it. Minneapolis isn't taking this laying down, and more power to them for their courage.)

Just as a side note, ICE raids are currently also happening in Columbus OH- which is double the size of Minneapolis but still much smaller than Chicago or LA.

something i've noticed that has become really annoying in the past 10 years or so is this fad of what i've been calling, for lack of a better word, "structural whataboutism." it's that thing where, when faced with a concrete, resolvable problem in your community, your answer is to blame it on a vast, unsolvable issue of structural inequality and then throw up your hands. "there's trash all over the ground in this corner of the park" becomes "well, that's where MEN OF COLOR congregate after their 12-HOUR GRAVEYARD SHIFTS and i'm not going to support a CARCERAL SOLUTION to a CAPITALISTIC PROBLEM. WE NEED TO ELIMINATE POVERTY AND THE SUBJUGATION OF THE WORKING CLASS" and it's like okay but sis. someone still has to go pick up the trash. we don't need a carceral solution, we need more trash cans. you're not going to eliminate poverty and the subjugation of the working class and even if ya did, there would still be trash on the ground. how any of this passes for radicalism within their peer groups i simply don't understand. it's radical laziness more than anything else

I was on a canoe trip once with a river biologist who worked for the county. After we found and removed a car tire, she started talking about the annual river cleanup her department organized. From a water quality or ecological standpoint, removing shopping carts, car tires, and other macro trash from the river really wasn't that important, she said. The real threat to the river was industrial and agricultural runoff.

"But!" she said:

People who see a clean, trash-free river are more likely support laws to curb more harmful "systemic" forms of pollution. People who participate in river cleanups take pride in their work--their river!--and become evangelists for protecting it.

Immediate action leads to systemic awareness, which leads to systemic change.

DO NOT CALL THE REGULAR POLICE.

they are not on your side.

Very explicitly, in the video, the regular police straight up lie to the couple, telling them they will go to jail for harboring a fugitive if they dont hand the doordasher over, and that it doesnt matter if ice has a warrant for her arrest. NEITHER OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE. You CANNOT be harboring a fugitive if the person you are haboring doesnt have a warrant out for their arrest! The warrant is what makes them a fugitive!

If ice wants access to someone on your property, do NOT hand them over unless you are shown a warrant signed by a judge! Make as much noise as you can to attract bystanders - it was the fact that a crowd gathered and started yelling at them that made ice leave in the video. And DO NOT expect the regular police to help you - they are just another arm of the state and will only do or say whatever they think is necessary to make you comply.

And make sure you film everything so you have evidence of what really happened if ice tries to enter your property illegally.

queen shit (and she was right)

I have to say something about how to approach fiction, because while I think I've always done it automatically, judging by online discourse this is not universal: when engaging with fiction you should just accept the premise and in-universe rules.

For example, you reading a story set in the past and the main couple are 17 and 25. Does everyone in the story treat this as a totally normal age gap? Okay, then for now, put your 21st century morality in a little box and label it "real world morals" and then put this couple's age gap being normal in a box called "in-universe/historical morals" and accept that you can store both boxes in your mind without exploding because you are are thinking, rational human being. Because it's driving me straight up a wall that people can't seem to do this! "He kills people, what a red flag!" "Ma'am, that is a magical warlord and if he stopped killing people they would kill him. He doesn't have an office job."

"That was very dubious consent. I can't support this ship." "Sir, she grew up in literal hell, I doubt they had comprehensive sex ed there. Also, she might learn and grow?"

"She's only sixteen, he's a pedo!" "If society at that time says that sixteen is the marriageable age, then no, he's not. That is not how any of this works."

"They grew up together and their parents want them to marry? Gross." "Yeah, it would be weird today, but everyone is treating this as normal. I guess it was A Thing."

Sure, in a modern, non-fantasy story set in your country, judge by your moral code all you want, but if you want to actually enjoy a story that isn't written with your exact morals, you need to accept the premise. Step back later and do some analysis, think about how society has changed (hopefully for the better), but keep in the mind the intent of the author in that time, culture, genre, or universe.

Yeah, Marianne Dashwood & John Willoughby are a creepy age gap today, but Jane Austen thought it was normal so while you read Sense & Sensibility, you can do that too. I promise it will make your reading experience 1000% better and you won't go straight to hell or anything. If you can't handle that, I banish you to the non-fiction section of the library.

This is called SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF and it is in fact crucial to be able to do that if you want to read fiction

Every time I'm forced by circumstance to hand-sew something, I remember a fairytale I once read. There are lead-up shenanigans as the humble protagonist helps small animals and meets the princess and all that, but in the climax, the princess rigs a contest for her hand by setting her own task: sew her a dress in a single night.

The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.

The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don't tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.

I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.

I then ignore that piece of wisdom passed down through who knows how many years and proceed to cut the longest damn length of thread I can manage because I hate tying off beginning or ending knots and I will not subject myself to more of that even if it does mean more tangles along the way.

if you wrap the end of the thread around the needle several times you can slide it all the way down the length of the thread for a super easy beginning knot