Qwertystop

So does Tris mostly accidentally creating a water spout bc she tried to dump water on some dudes about to fight her friends who she didn't even really consider her friends yet

Daja just going 'okay, well, I have a staff and YOU tried to hurt one of my friends' to a whole group of older kids?

Briar turning around for the same fight and going 'oh yeah gotta go back up my sist- I mean these people I totally don't care about'?!

RENT

““My name’s Sandry. Please join me at my table.” Seeing the other girl blink, guessing that she hadn’t understood, Sandry tucked a hand under the newcomer’s elbow and tugged her in the right direction. For a moment, she thought that the Trader might refuse—she didn’t budge. Then she relaxed.

“All right, kaq,” she muttered in Tradertalk. “But nobody will thank you for this.” She let Sandry pull her between rows of tables.

“If thanks was what I wanted,” Sandry replied in the same language, “I would be sad indeed. Since I don’t want it, I won’t miss it.”

The black girl stiffened. Finally she said, “Your accent is terrible.”

Sandry beamed up at her. “Yes—I know.”

“We don’t want her with us,” protested Liesa when they reached the nobles’ table. Sandry looked down her button nose at the other girl. “She is my guest,” she said flatly. “She—what’s your name?” she asked in Tradertalk. Daja nearly refused. When she saw anger on the faces of the other girls, she grinned instead, white teeth flashing against dark skin. “Daja Kisubo.”

“Lady Daja is my guest,” Sandry told Liesa.

A girl nearby muttered, “If that’s a lady, I’m a cat.”

Reaching out, Sandry lifted the pitcher of milk from the table. Cradling it in both hands, she walked over to the mutterer. “I am Sandrilene fa Toren, daughter of Count Mattin fer Toren and his countess, Amiliane fa Landreg. I am the great-niece of his grace, Duke Vedris of this realm of Emelan, and cousin of her Imperial Highness, Empress Berenene of the Namorn Empire. You are Esmelle ei Pragin, daughter of Baron Witten en Pragin and his lady Colledia of House Wheelwright—a merchant house. If I tell you my friend is a lady, then you”—carefully she poured milk into Esmelle’s plate—“you had best start lapping, kitty.”

She set the pitcher down and returned to her chair.

Daja was still on her feet. “You did no one any good with that,” she said in Tradertalk. “Not me, not you, not even them.”

“I don’t care.” Sandry spoke in Common, so that everyone understood.”

You’re going to go on Vinted or eBay and put in “made in Italy”, “moda Italia” or (translation of same.) add the search term “silk top.”

What you want are tops that consist of these really thin jersey vest tops with a floaty pure silk layer over them. You’re looking to spend £8-20. You might need to specify “floaty” or “lagenlook.”

There will usually be a healthy secondhand collection of these online. Try to get a pure silk overlayer if you can - some of them are silk blended with viscose.

You’ll probably find the designs kinda mid or old-lady-ish. Don’t worry too much about this. They’ll actually look pretty cool on, and everyone will be jealous of your freedom from suffering.

Fancy and I lay in the grass near the neighbor's yard at 2:00 a.m. The grass is wet, the insects are loud. I sing a sad song to her but change the words at the last minute.

I'm somewhat hard of hearing. She responds to the sound of a bird's feet as it hops up a branch. I thrive on color, work with it every day, and there's a lot of it she cannot see. Her eyes detect motion faster than the refresh rate of my TV. I can taste sweetness better than she can, but she has a whole wilderness of umami open to her that I can't even imagine. She reads the past with her nose, myriad detailed stories unfold for her in a form of chronological and spatial storytelling I will never experience. I can just ask where Daddy has been. I feel and grasp with my sensitive hands, my skin senses temperature everywhere, but through whiskers and fur, she feels the motion of the air across her entire body.

I can see the birds on the power lines at the end of the street clearly.

I'm guessing wildly at this, but this is the Large Magellanic Cloud, the best photo I could find showing visibility up to magnitude 8.

Then my approximation of a human view at magnitude 6 from a dark sky site.

Then the same for a cat with blurry vision who can't see all the colors.

Worse than napkin math, but resources for this were strangely hard to find, and I'm not an expert, so don't take any of this as accurate.

But any way you cut it, her sky is so bright and everything is soft and blurred together, like trying to concentrate on something in a dream.

The stars don't move or smell like anything. She doesn't look up while we are outside. I'd be kind of spooked if she did. Instead of stargazing, she spends half an hour cataloging various pisses from the strays and listening to what I think is the sound of the geckos that live in the stonework and creepers.

I cannot perceive these things, but they matter to her, and from the way she lies on the needlework I'm trying to finish, I know she cares about my interests also. The geckos, the pissing, the sewing, the stars, it is all equally important. It all merges in a soft, blurry, bright mass.

General information:

Fabric types

Basic hand sewing stitches

Hand sewing needles

Knitting 101

Embroidery 101

Visible mending

Crafting on the cheap

How to fix sewing machine issues

Yarn types

Clothing fasteners

Circular knitting

Tutorials:

How to sew buttons

Disability aid tutorials

How to DIY custom patches

Make some pocket extenders for your pants (by Quixiify)

How to darn holes in woven fabrics (by Delicatefury)

How to mend holes in the thigh area of jeans

How to make buttonholes (machine+hand)

How to make pockets

How to use a seam ripper

Projects and patterns:

DIY cotton rounds

Easy knitted gloves

Free customisable sewing patterns

Easy rectangle skirt

DIY tote bag

DIY delicates laundry bag

DIY hot pads

Easy fleece hat

Fingerless fleece gloves

Apron pattern

Knitted weighted blanket (by Knitboyknit)

How to make a custom dress form

Thing #1 is that a bunch of Tumblr users have decided that they support the murder and want the murderer to get off, so they’re basically just repeating crap like “Luigi is innocent, he was at my place the whole time *wink*” and it’s kind of weird and gross

OJ did it. He killed those people. There was ample evidence. But the LAPD was so corrupt, so routinely racist, so accustomed to simply dictating the terms of a case, that instead of simply collecting the evidence that proved his guilt and letting the prosecution take it to court, they framed him. They fabricated evidence, broke chains of custody, tampered with witnesses, lied under oath, to make sure the guilty man looked guilty. This was how they typically treated Black men they wanted to pin a crime on, guilty or not. But OJ was rich and famous and could afford a legal team that fought back and exposed the corruption to the jury —a jury of Angelinos who had witnessed the LAPD's lawlessness during the Rodney King beating.

So the jury, correctly, found him not guilt. Not because he didn't do it, but because corrupt officers of the state made it impossible to prove his guilt.

Even if I didn't hold that opinion, there was reasonable doubt and then some, and the cops were doing their best to either get the case thrown out (which is possible but unlikely) or to frame him, in which case the law can and should toss out anything they may have planted, which is exactly what happened.

And frankly, the amount of people acting like they know he did in fact do it are buying into copaganda, because we have insufficient proof!

Do we know he did it? No.

Do we care if he did? Probably not. Mostly because the CEO had it coming as far as the general populace is concerned.

Imagine if people kept starting every conversation about Kimberly Long by opining on whether or not they thought her boyfriend had it coming. Imagine if in order to talk about the Central Park Five, we first had to go through a pantomime about sexual assault statistics in relation to the crack epidemic.

Not only does none of that matter with regards to the central point of police and prosecutorial malfeasance, but it is completely weird and tasteless, and yes, actively harmful to a potentially innocent man’s ongoing legal case to bring it up.

Let me be very clear here: OJ’s “not guilty” verdict had fuck all to do with what we as a society should or shouldn’t think about domestic violence. No part of that case was about whether or not the murders were justified, or whether or not we should hold sympathy in our hearts for Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and their families, or anything else about the actual crime.

Do I personally feel that if Luigi Mangione actually killed that CEO he should walk? Completely and totally irrelevant! Nobody cares! Why do you need to start with that, when you even go on to outright state that it literally does not matter???

Bluntly, it’s exactly crap like this that is leading to people like OP having reactive takes based on not understanding that there are actual real problems with the case against Luigi Mangione.

Let’s imagine a counter-factual for a moment. Let’s imagine that @azarias-everywhere-else had opened that very succinct and well-written summary of the OJ Simpson case by saying “Now personally I do think that Nicole Brown was racist and was physically abusive towards Simpson, and her claims of domestic violence were probably exaggerated because she knew that no one would question those sorts of allegations against a Black man.” Would you have believed even a word of what they said after that about the cops framing the guy? No, right? Because that would indicate that they had an agenda, and it would make every allegation that followed suspect to the tune of that clear agenda.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

Colors are kind of the opposite. We try very hard to make colors stick to clothes, but they get unstuck when bright lights hit them too hard. Fortunately this is a slow process and you can enjoy your colors many times before they come unstuck.

It is unclear whether clothes can gain or lose taste through exposure. Most of taste is mediated by smell, and clothes tend not to be exposed to sweetness, sourness, bitterness or umami, and even if they did, they would not give up this taste in turn unless consumed, which one does not do with clothes. We'll call this 'not applicable'.

It's like how a bunch of celebs were big on body positivity and fat liberation...until Ozempic dropped and it turns out no, none of them ever believed any of that! They just pretended to bcs up until now healthy, long term weight loss was impossible so they had no choice but to cope by learning to love themselves no matter how they looked...but now that it's here we can go back to the truth! Being fat is ugly and gross and unhealthy and you should starve yourself and take experimental meds right now so you can be skinny which is what ALL humans are clearly supposed to be!! Yeah that body positivity stuff was fun, but come on. We know you actually just wanna be skinny and think being fat is a fate worse than death.

That's what it feels like to me. Every single time. Honestly in a lot of other areas too, one of the big issues with the left is that they really do seem to think that Republicans are right about how things work and should work but we just pretend otherwise because it's the right thing to do and it reduces suffering. Which seems fine, but you cannot be an effective leftist like this. You do actually have to deconstruct your beliefs and biases and world systems, you can't go around like "well yeah we aren't gonna kill disabled people that's eugenics and it's wrong" when you clearly don't actually think it's wrong. You think eugenics would work but implementing it would be uncivilized, and it shows. You have to actually understand that racism and ableism and all other forms of bigotry are not just cruel, but entirely incorrect.

I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor. 

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.

The Danish language used to have a formal register, like Japanese and German and lots of other languages. You used a whole different set of grammar rules when you talked to a superior, and they’d get upset if you didn’t. It was still a thing in my parents’ generation, but these days it has almost entirely disappeared. It’s only used when you’re communicating with an unspecific person, like in “please insert your card in the slot”, where the receiver could be anybody at all - and even there, it’s on its way out. It’s also used when addressing the royal family.

Nobody else - ever - warrants this form of address in 2026. If you use it, you sound robotic at best, acerbic at worst.

We do the exact same thing as Australians where the more deferential we are, the less respectful we are. Even addressing someone by their last name is considered depersonalizing, and generally only something you do after getting permission. And you’d NEVER use the Danish equivalent of ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ out loud, even when you’re being formal - that is used in the military, and that’s most people’s only frame of reference for those titles. If you use them, you sound like a soldier.