Kit (she/her), 30. A wreck. Cosplayer, crafter, filthy casual gamer. I learned how to cook because feeding my friends feels almost as good as eating. I have too many hobbies and not nearly enough time to do any of them.
Look y'all, this reveal means so much to me. So many times in movies these days there are big reveals for the audienceâs benefit that mean absolutely nothing in the context of the story or to the characters in it. Iâm talking the Thanos cameo in the Avengersâ stinger, Iâm talking Benedict CumberKhan in Star Trek, Iâm talking about every hackneyed âThis character is actually this other characterâ when in universe nobody knows nor cares about their true identity.
But here? This reveal? This is a Big Reveal for us, Peter B Parker, and Miles, all on different levels. We and Peter both know Doc Ock is a portly dude, not a woman. We know the name Octavius⌠Otto Octavius. But when she says her name is Olivia Octavius weâre clued in to the fact that Doctor Octopus is a woman in this universe. And she has Peter captive.
Miles, if he was paying attention in science class earlier in the movie, would have known her name was Olivia Octavius, but that doesnât mean anything to him, why would it? Liv has apparently been very good about keeping her supervillainy a secret. Sheâs in educational videos shown in high-schools. So to Miles, the reveal here is this scientist lady, who he knew enough about to know was the head scientist at Alchemax, is a supervillain. He gets the reveal a second or two after Peter.
And the movie? It was dropping hints the entire time, confident in our expectations blinding is to the truth. Oliviaâs name was partially visible when Miles got to science class. Her glasses are octagonal. The lights in her lab are octagonal. We know sheâs working with the Kingpin. Why wouldnât she be a supervillain? Because sheâs hot? Hell, Peter even says he needs to reexamine his internal biases. Maybe he was telling us that we should too.
Itâs a reveal for us, and for our heroes. It means something, both in-universe and out. And that makes it infinitely better than other similar reveals.
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âFor example, if youâre trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didnât see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldnât make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT â even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to âthis is important, so do WHATEVER I SAYâ; they want to be convinced that what youâre proposing will work.â
âBob Wing, a grassroots organizer, explains this nicely: âIf winning feels impossible, then righteousness can seem like the next best thing.â But righteousness is not conducive to getting normies to join your team if your team cannot demonstrate ability to, at least sometimes, win. Nor does righteousness help you make real inroads with regular people.â
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don't go into the humanities because they're unprofitable and don't go into stem cuz its getting torn apart right now and don't go into buisness because it's competetive and speculative and don't go into education because it pays like shit. Just lay on thr ground. Just lay on the ground.
Cyberpunk heist movie where a trans woman's favorite hot swap genitals are stolen and being held hostage, so she has to get together a crew of trans human misfits to recover them. Meanwhile the thieves have locked out her pubic region with a hack through the genitals' wireless ability and are spending the whole time edging her to fuck with her ability to concentrate on retaliation.
One of the characters is a famous cyber hacker who copyrighted his brain and identity, then sold the copyright and specific franchise agreements to his girlfriend before he died. So now there's just this massive industry of solid state assist builds using the mind of one of the greatest hackers to live, literally thousands or millions of copies of this one guy, each version different based on what the buyer does with it. The only way to make an illegal copy is if he agrees you deserve him for free - otherwise he just wilfully erases himself. Unfortunately he's such a common program that at this point most decent hackers know some workarounds or what kind of security needs to go in place to shut out a fresh printing who hasn't learned to update and adapt to more recent security. It's not uncommon for some prints of his to be glorified corporate versions of Windows Defender, and he doesn't give a shit because all he wanted at the end was that his girlfriend would be disgustingly wealthy, which he got.
Other characters. A polycule of nonbinary lovers who had their brains fused together an installed in a single body so they could experience togetherness with greater intensity.
Quantum witch who has figured out how to store her nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and crippling depression into patterns compatible with human neural impulses and can project them in the form of hexes onto other people, or reverse the process to siphon thoughts.
Guy who had his entire digestive tract cybernetically enhanced so it constitutes over 1/3 of his body mass but he can use all his organs as extra limbs or attack with them like a starfish throws its stomach at its prey.
Retired military robot whose brain is a daisy chain of forty rat brains who is still trying to get its personhood legally recognized and resents not being able to do anything for itself without the aid of a "service human" who legally speaking technically owns it as a pet.
Guy who has had his entire skeleton replaced with a network of low level AI centipedes allowing him to react at incredible speeds and move in ways that shouldn't be possible.
House sized anthill which lives underground and interacts through a series of dozens of drones which can temporarily assemble into a humanoid shape if needed.
Orca who had most of her body destroyed by a depth charge during one of many surface wars and had her head and remaining spine installed into a colossal multiarmed mech suit to be able to collect the disability compensation after she sued, and uses it to maintain a coffee bar and support group focused on civilians injured in military or police actions.
Guy who installed entropic conversion units at key joints of his body which allows him to become super fast, hyper intelligent, super strong, and indestructible for ten minutes, but anything within a ten foot sphere around him at the start gets turned to ash.
Human / mosquitos hybrid with a small scale nanoplant mod in their throat. They can treat any injury or illness on themselves or any other organic entity provided they have something healthy and alive to drain the resources from, or are willing to dissolve parts of their own body, which they can regrow later but it's very painful.
The Orca at this point has her lifespan indefinitely extended and mostly has chosen this out of spite but her feelings for government and military aside she is actually quite nice.
Ratbot has a real uphill battle because if it wins personhood the military has to start paying benefits to every functional ratbot and they were created as disposable soldiers with human like intelligence but without any regulations about their rights. As far as the military is concerned they just need to stall until ratbot parts all run out and the one with the lawsuit breaks down permanently. Bad news for ratbots.
The mosquito hybrid is a low income area doctor. Wealthy people can afford nanoplants that run off vat grown synthetic material and have near perfect cell regrowth and life extension. Mosquito hybrid found their nanoplant as a junk discard experimental model and needed a set amount of insect genetic material before it worked.
Fused polycule is named "Portland." I think I'm hilarious.
Everyone is hella poor which is why people try to pirate the franchised hacker. The advantage is pirate prints are free by choice and tend towards greater adaptability due to lack of server updates and purposeful separation from their primary wants and needs. However the down side is they cannot be backed up or transfered, and this makes any pirate print hacker functionally a very mortal, vulnerable individual, permanently tied to whatever device he was printed onto initially.
The guy with the skeleton replacement mainly operates as a hacker for hire / ransomeware operator, and the exceptional reaction and flexibility makes him very skilled in these areas, physical fighting is not something he is particularly trained in and he'd rather avoid it. Like most people with mods, a big chunk of his income goes to maintaining the corporate subscription for their use.
Trans woman protag is a mod broker because the total lack of non-subscription based transition led her down the road of getting parts jailbroken or refurbished til she put together this horde of body parts and adaptors and she theseus shipped her original body, sold her own flesh and blood for pennies on the dollar organ transplants. But with all the connections she got during transition she ended up with a stabile income as a corner store chop shop for people who can't afford subscription mods or medical treatment. She finds the parts, one of her contacts does the refurbishment, and another breaks, wipes, or otherwise disables any of the oem software.
the most important virtues for the young woman are as follows: time theft, selfishness, orgasms, irreverence to authority, sacrilegious behavior, a questioning mind, and eating regular meals.
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Thousands of bottles of Duloxetine delayed-release capsules are being voluntarily recalled by Breckenridge Pharmaceutical, Inc. The pills are commonly used to treat depression, anxiety, and fibromyalgia, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
I love lying to my landlord. âWeâre currently looking at a comparable unit in the area at $[a hundred dollars less than our current rent]/month, so if your offer has any flexibility to come down on the rent, that would help us reach a decision about whether or not to renew our lease hereâ and the comparable unit exists only in my own beautiful mind
Actually, no! And since several people have replied asked for my script for negotiating lower rent, Iâm gonna share that below, as well as the philosophy behind it. Full disclosure that Iâm not a leasing office person or a realtor or god forbid, a landlordâIâm just someone who has been a renter for 10+ years across different states, and I know for a fact that I have saved myself thousands of dollars by successfully negotiating a lower monthly rent on almost every lease Iâve ever signed. (Also, Iâve only ever rented in the U.S., so this advice may not be as applicable elsewhere.)
Step 0: Know Thy Enemy
The key thing to understand about all residential landlords, whether theyâre corporate conglomerates or Just Some Asshole, is that their assetâthe propertyâis a Cinderella carriage that magically turns back into an expensive ass pumpkin of a liability any time itâs sitting empty. The property taxes, insurance, mortgage, HOA fees, and maintenance costs all still come due every month/quarter/year whether they have a tenant to cover it all and then some, or not.Â
Because of this, at the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to fill every unit at all times with someone who will reliably pay the rent on time and in full. And because everything else is secondary to that goalâand because with the exception of Just Some Asshole landlords, the person responding to your emails and writing up your lease paperwork is several degrees of separation removed from the shareholders who profit off your rent moneyâtheyâre almost always willing to negotiate with you. As long as it gets the liability converted into an asset faster or keeps the carriage from turning back into a pumpkin for longer, then in the long run, itâs actually in their best interest to give you a better price.Â
Step 1: Identify Your Leverage
If you understand how supply and demand works, you can figure out how much leverage you have pretty easily. High supply and low demand = you have more leverage, and vice versa. Do they have an âAVAILABLE NOW - MOVE IN TODAYâ sandwich board on the sidewalk or a web banner that says âFirst month freeâ? Does their website and/or Apartments.com show a bunch of currently open listings? Do you already live there and know at least two families on your floor have moved out in the last several months with no one new moving in to replace them? These are all indications that they have more than one unit currently sitting empty, meaning higher supply and lower demand. No sandwich board and a website that just says âcall for availabilityâ? They might just suck at marketing, but more likely, supply is lower and demand is higher.Â
You have the least leverage if youâre a prospective tenant looking to move in somewhere that has a waitlist. They have no reason to offer you a discount if six other people are already in line to pay full price for apartments that arenât even vacant yet (but you can still ask!). You also have no leverage to negotiate if youâve already signed a lease and youâre in the middle of the lease period; you legally agreed to pay $X/month for Y months, so youâre stuck with that until the lease is up.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the most leverage if youâre a current tenant who has always paid your rent on time and youâre being offered a renewal on your existing lease with higher rent than you're currently paying, especially if they already have some units that have been empty for a while. If you move out, not only is your unit going to sit vacant for at least part of a month, theyâre also probably going to have to put in some work to âturnâ the unit (repainting, professional cleaning, etc) to get it in move-in condition for the next tenant.
All of this means that if you move out, even if they can fleece you out of your security deposit and find a new tenant the very next month, itâs still gonna cost them at least a few thousand dollars to turn that pumpkin back into a carriage again. Theyâre probably willing to come down by $100-$200/month or so on the renewal offer rent if you ask, because they know itâll actually save them money in the long run. Similar situation if youâre a prospective new tenantâif they canât get you or anyone else to sign a lease and move in this month, thatâs $[whatever the monthly rent is] down the drain, and theyâll never get it back. Itâs a perishable item about to spoil.Â
Step 2: Get Their Opening Offer
This is the first number theyâll quote you for the rentâthe sticker price that youâve always just accepted as set in stone. The truth is, theyâve built some buffer into that number. Thereâs almost always some room for them to come down, and depending on your leverage, they will if you ask nicely. But for reasons that baffle me, most people donât!
Step 3: Wait, Research, & Counter
Donât reply to their initial offer right awayâunless thereâs a waitlist (in which case, you have little haggling power anyway), wait a few days. It makes them sweat a bit, and it shows you arenât desperate. The person who is rushing to reply is not the one who has more leverage in the negotiation, and making them wait reminds them of that. In the meantime, use Apartments.com or Zillow to get an idea of what similar units in the same area are currently going for. Then you come up with your counteroffer.
As a general rule, anything more than about 20-25% below their opening offer (or below market rates) will probably just piss them off or make them take you less seriously. But when weâre talking about your monthly rent over the course of a year or two, even a 10% discount adds up to a lot of money!
When I negotiated our original lease for my current place, I also asked for and got a two year lease term instead of the standard one year. But whatever automated calendar event system they use to remind their leasing office staff when itâs time to send out renewal offers didnât get the memo about that, so they mistakenly sent me a renewal offer the following year, meaning I got to see how much they would have jacked up the rent if they couldâve. For that second year of the lease alone, my negotiating saved us $3,000!Â
Step 4: BDE (Big Dick Emailing)Â
Hereâs the tricky part. You need to write an emailâalways negotiate over email if you can, itâs too easy for a salesperson to bowl you over on the phone and anything they say that isnât in writing means nothingâwhich simultaneously makes it sound like you would sign a lease with them in a heartbeat and like you are actively flirting with five other apartment complexes right now who all want you so bad it makes them look stupid, because you are just so sexy and fun and your credit score is eight inches flaccid. You need to make them believe you are both highly motivated and ready to sign on the dotted line and willing to just walk away from the table at any second, but if they could just come down a little bit on that number, youâd delete those other hoesâ numbers forever! Hereâs the rough script I use every time:
â Thank you for [your email/the tour/sending over the offer letter/etc]. I have had a chance to review and consider it. I think [name of apartment complex] would be the perfect fit for me, but I am also exploring and touring other options in the area, including a comparable unit nearby at $[a little below your counteroffer number]/month.
If we could come down to $[your counteroffer number]/month on the rent, I would be prepared to sign the lease today. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks! "
Step 6: You Win Either Way
Sometimes they really do just accept your counteroffer without question and send you over a revised lease to sign. (When this happens, I make a note for next time that my counteroffer was probably too high and I shouldâve asked for more!) More often, they get approval from The Powers That Be and come back with a number thatâs higher than your counteroffer but lower than their initial offer. Assuming I can afford it, I always accept this offer; youâve achieved your goal of saving yourself money from sticker price, and theyâre likely to lose patience if they have to keep going around and around with you. And sometimes (though only very rarely), they may come back and say the price is firmâin which case, guess what? You still didnât lose anything by asking!
THIS!!! Exactly this. I didnât mention it above because I just couldnât fit it neatly anywhere, but once while negotiating a lease renewal, I got as far as receiving their counteroffer, which was basically âprice firm :(â, but then life happened, so I forgot to respond and accept. The email sat in my inbox for a week. And then, completely unprompted, they magically replied again saying, âactually, nvm, howâs $[number that is lower than our opening offer] sound?â
To them, it looked like I was staring them down cold as ice like
I was literally just busy with other stuff! and they were sweating!!! BULLETS!!!
Your therapist asks you "Who in this image do you see yourself as?" and then shows you a drawing of two shirtless skinny anime catboys with a thread of saliva going between their lips
People die on the job every summer. Remember that water and shade breaks are crucial when working in the heat, and calling emergency services for signs of serious heat illness (fatigue, nausea/vomiting, headaches, dizziness, clammy skin, confusion, agitation, slurred speech, high body temperature, rapid heart rate, etc.) is entirely appropriate. If youâre afraid to call 911 for reasons such as being undocumented, youâll need to get very familiar with how to prevent, recognize, and treat heat illness. If you are symptomatic and not allowed a break, water, or medical treatment, walk out. No matter how broke you are, your job is not worth your life.
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