Wehadababyitsaboy

Me, at the time, a 19yo with very little understanding of the law: “I mean…was it?”

Fandom Friend, who was a 40-something lawyer: “I’ll tell you the same thing I told everyone in that bar. No one was violating anyone’s free speech. Bitch was just being rude, and worse, obnoxious about it. You ever act like that in public, be aware you’re not changing anyone’s opinion. You’re just giving them a brand new opinion about you.”

It was a very formative conversation in my young adulthood.

In the scene where Smoke teaches the young girl how to negotiate, they're standing in front of of a cafe. The shot of them negotiating is framed so that you see a sign in the cafe window advertising a Ham and Eggs breakfast - in other words, a full meal - for 25 cents. The editing makes sure to put that sign back into frame whenever the question of the value of money arises in their discussion.

Smoke offers her 10 cents a minute and asks if that works for her. She says yes. He says no, it does not and tells her to negotiate higher. The 25 cent sign is framed in the shot when he tells her no, reminding us *why* it's not a good value.

She comes back with 50 cents - which the sign has informed us is the cost of *two* meals. Smoke tells her that's too much and counters with 20, which is just under a full meal but we now know that's a fairly respectable price because we just got the high/low contrast of 10 being too little and 50 being too much.

The negotiation ends with her getting 20 cents per minute and we now know 1) 25 cents is the cost of a filling meal in this environment 2) This girl only needs to do five minutes of work to be able to feed herself for a over day (20 cents per minute times five is a dollar, which is four meals) 3) Smoke has the kind of money to throw around that over a day's worth of food for someone can be to him - as it is to our modern eyes - mere pocket change and 4) Smoke's the kind of person who can both be a violent gangster but also care about teaching this girl how to look out for herself so that one day maybe she too can throw over a day's worth of food around like pocket change.

Combined with 5) you can now use that 25 cents = a meal to do the math every other time money gets mentioned in the movie to understand just how much cash the Smoke Stack boys are dealing with.

Rocky chose a hand to match Grace's scar!

Just need a look under the hood.

More Tiff & Eve: My Site | Webtoon

Support on Patreon

This headline is missing some important nuance -- it's a headline, there's only so much they can do -- in that the Vatican said "this action you have taken excommunicates you." That is, 'we're not actively doing this to you, you are doing this to yourself, because we told you this was beyond the acceptable boundaries.'

The Vatican went way beyond what most of my Catholic friends expected -- they expected the bishops and maybe some priests to get excommunicated, but the laity and the nuns and... the Vatican has basically said 'bet, try it. See what happens.' (Excommunication, that's what happens.)

If you are on BlueSky and you are not following Claire Willett, you are truly missing out on some good fucking tea. Claire is a lesbian lifelong Catholic from Portland who knows her shit & has been sitting watching all of this with a giant bucket of popcorn and translating for the rest of us: