Ive said this before but swear the biggest skill to learn as an adult is how to resist high-pressure sales tactics. You do NOT have to answer questions with anything other than "Sorry I'm not interested." No matter how nice they are or no matter how many follow up questions they ask or even how agitated they get when you stand your ground. Just keep saying I'm not interested. Don't answer their questions. Don't give them an opening to try to push back on your reasons. Be a fucking brick wall of I'm not interested.
When we bought our car, I told Sean to let me handle it. I walked in and said "We have X for a down payment and cannot pay more than Y in monthly payments." My Y number had some leeway, but I didn't mention that.
First thing the sales guy did after I laid down the rules was turn to Sean and go, "What's your number?" And Sean said. "Oh, no, you negotiate with Gayle."
So, strike one for the sales guy. Could not divide and conquer us by implying THE MAN would not surprised at what I laid down.
Sales guy then had to confer with his manager and left us at his desk for several minutes. I have a vague recollection (this was 16 years ago) of Sean and I amusing ourselves doing bits about the other people there to look at cars. I am sure we did not give off the stressed or nervous energy they were hoping for.
Guy comes back. His first offer is fifty dollars a month more than I told him we could pay. I looked at him and said "I gave you our upper limit."
"Well, but what's another 50 bucks a month?"
"Something I can't afford."
He didn't know what to do with my open and unashamed admittal that I had a budget because my money was finite.
He went back to talk to the manager again.
It took two more rounds of "I told you what I can afford" before he finally came back 20 bucks under what I'd stated as my max.
The trick to resisting high-stress sales tactics is doing the math at home, knowing exactly what you can afford, and then walking into the room and stating that number minus 15%. Then refusing to budge from that number. Never, ever, meet then where they want. Always meet them where you want. Because at the end of the day, you can walk away and go somewhere else and say "I told the people at Z what my terms were, and they refused to work with me. Here are my terms. Meet them, and you make a sale today."
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So last week we thought our cat was critically ill because he was throwing up and stopped eating/drinking for a couple days (everything came back normal and he seems to be fine now, just had a very expensive tummy ache) and as stressful as it all was, every time a different person brought him back into the room with us they gushed about how wonderful he is and that he's the best cat ever, and it was just so sweet and really helped lighten the mood a little and this is my absolute favorite picture of The Best Boy Ever
If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules
Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u
Congrats to every reply like this for failing to understand the fundamental definition of an accent. Of course you think you sound normal! It's the way you speak!
im sitting on a patio at my favorite cafe rn and im hand stitching them hem of a dress im working on. and i can see why someone would say im being performative by working on something like this in a public space. but frankly theres no element of that. i just want to work somewhere that isnt my apartment. i want to be in public, i wanna chat with strangers, i wanna see the world. it’s nice to hang out somewhere that isnt my home!
what i mean is when you say people are being performative you discourage them from doing shit they love in public. and thats no way to foster the world we want to see.
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I seriously didn't expect this book to be this hilarious cause why is grace thinking that he must be in quarantine and seriously ill and with controlled air circulation and parameters before he even thinks about his name (and the fact that he doesn't remember it). I underestimated you, Dr grace.
Good news, he was not next! In fact, she accepted him as her mate, he learned the crane mating dance and now every year, he artificially inseminates her with crane semen to expand the very endangered crane population. True story.
Sorry, he WHAT? Imagine being this man's boss and having to sit him down like. Listen. Brian. We need you to fuck the bird. You have to act like you're excited about it.
(WalWaPo makes you jump through like three separate hoops before you can read the article, so I will share some of the highlights:
Walnut was born in a species-recovery breeding program in the 1980′s. The program had crane chicks hand-raised by human volunteers, and at that time they did not fully understand the measures necessary make sure that the chicks do not imprint on humans and retain their identity as cranes.
As a result, her keepers believe, Walnut does not recognize other cranes as members of her own species.
It has not been proven that Walnut killed her previous suitors; however, there is a persistent rumor in the white-naped-crane-conservation community that she did.
Because this species is highly endangered, and the gene pool of the captive population is small, it’s pretty important for the survival of her species that Walnut A) mate, and B) not kill a bunch of other cranes.
The actual name of the keeper is Chris Crowe.
They both arrived at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in 2004.
Walnut immediately began paying special attention to Chris--and ignoring the eligible male crane in a nearby enclosure.
Walnut initiated their courtship, performing the opening moves of a mating dance.
Chris realized that if he reciprocated the mating dance, it might be possible to artificially inseminate Walnut with her participation and consent. (The process normally involves restraining the bird.)
It worked!
Chris and Walnut have had five children, who were raised by other crane couples at the facility--sometimes the biological dad and his mate--both because it’s unclear whether Walnut would accept the chicks as her own, and because Chris is not equipped to be a Crane Dad.
However, the Institute provides her with artificial eggs to sit on, and Chris takes his turn looking after them. (This would not work with real eggs because he can’t sit on them properly, but Walnut seems to feel that he is on the job if he just stands over them.)
Chris accepts that he is pretty much married to this bird. White-naped cranes live to be about 60, and they mate for life, so he knows he can’t retire while Walnut is alive. (At the time of the article, Walnut was 36, and Chris 42.)
she has not been PROVEN to have killed her exes, but there is a PERSISTENT RUMOR (really officers she's simply DEVASTATED, she sobs, wearing a new feather boa unfortunately resembling her most recent deceased husband)
His name is Chris CROWE. (Mrs. Walnut Crane-Crowe?)
the mental images of a whole human man learning and performing the crane mating dance, and "sitting" on artificial eggs so she thinks he's performing his duties as a husband and father (and apparently OBJECTS if he does not?)
"chris, buddy, you gotta marry the possibly-murderous crane lady for the GOOD OF THE SPECIES." (alternately: "chris, my man! good news! we found you a very interested lady! She's 36, she's very spirited and independent, she holds a very important and rare status in her society! ...Is there a downside? WELL...")
chris sits any potential human partners down, like "my love, you must understand before we wed,,, i am already... Attached" (camera drifts wistfully to the above photo) "Lady Walnut and I have an,, Understanding... the relationship is open, but very committed"
Not only is he 'married' to walnut, this has apparently happened SEVERAL times, so he has MULTIPLE crane wives, none of which know about any of his other crane wives. This man is, for some unknown reason, irresistible to cranes
the “this content has been removed for violating Tumblr’s Community Guidelines” notice really adds a lot of flavor to this post and somehow makes it MORE obscene than whatever that actually was
I regret being the bearer of bad news, but I thought it should be shared that Walnut passed away in January of this year (2024). There's a lot of mixed info about the lifespan of cranes (due to people misunderstanding what a median is...) but the average for most species I know of is 20-30 years (in the wild if nothing eats them/they don't die young), and 30-45 in captivity, with the oldest known white-naped crane having loved to be 46. Given that she was 42, this old gal did good, and I'm certain she will be missed by folks here.
Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
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Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.
He said the exact same thing, which I did not know before that, so spreading this knowledge.
You can make a movie with where the only white character is a man named Ray Cism whose one line of his 16 seconds of screen time is “I seriously hate women and minorities.” and you’ll find fifty bajillion reader x Ray Cism fanfics and renaissance style drawings of him with a halo of golden light
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
You know, as the concept of “zombifying fungi” becomes more and more popular, I notice it still referred to everywhere as like a “brain parasite.” So I guess a lot of people overlooked or forgot how in 2019 it was discovered that cordyceps and other similar fungal parasites leave the brain and nervous system completely untouched. They only control the muscles. They use chemical signals to make the muscles flex in real time where they want to go :)
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so my highschool was huge, and for god knows what reason, cross country was super popular. at my highschool of maybe 6000 kids we have close to 750 cross country runners. we needed four or five busses to take us to meets. it was absolutely fucking insane.
anyway, i have this core memory of us running as this big, thundering herd down the main stroad of my hometown, and this one car had inched up pretty far past the stop sign to try and see around the car, and the guy leading our group decided, for god knows what reason, to open this big car's passenger door, scooch across the back three seats, and pop out the other side.
but then the guy behind him did the same, and we all just decided, why not, so we all did, and there was this old guy yelling at us but he couldn't just pull away because there was this unending 750 person long conga line of overheated hyperventilating sweat slick scrawny mormon kids slithering all over his leather seats and if hed tried to pull away at any point after the first guy he'd have kidnapped at least three of em.
for bonus points this guy lived in the area, and every time we ran past him he'd just lay on the horn, but to get back at him wed run into neighborhoods that we saw him enter and wed make these giant congo lines at crosswalks and shit just to fuck with him. we tormented that man.
so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.
at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.
he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?
and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.
but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.
i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?
(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)
and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.
i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.
that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.
i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.
anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.
i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.
we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.
he was okay at it.
eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.
soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.
realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:
"i can't get pregnant"
which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.
still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"
and then i was in my car, and i drove away.
if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.
and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.
WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.
we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.
do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.
and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.
then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.
and then they started making out.
i was close enough to hear it.
i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.
so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.
now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.
so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.
about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.
my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.
my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.
they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?
and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.
