Simply The Worst Star Wars Fan

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It wasn’t really the furry causing drama! I mean, okay, he did enter the coffee shop wearing the head and tail of a fursuit, and while that’s unusual, I wasn’t expecting a big reaction from anyone who frequents this particular coffee shop. Personally, I was more fascinated by the fact that he ordered a lemonade because I’m unfamiliar with furry protocol, and was curious to see if he was planning on taking the head off to enjoy his drink or if there was some way around having to do that.

Anyway, he sat down to wait for his order for all of a minute, the barista called out that it was ready, and when he went to the counter to get it, this dude who’d been in the coffee shop a while got up and made a beeline for him, instructing him to take the head off or to not stare directly at him when he got back to his table.

Now, I admittedly was engrossed in writing, so I have no idea if the furry kid was staring directly at this guy, but I have to imagine the visibility in those headpieces is pretty bad. Like, I personally wouldn’t assume anyone wearing a fursuit head was staring at anything in particular because they’re sort of designed in such a way to look as if the person wearing one is staring at whatever is in the general direction they’re looking, right? They’re basically mascot costumes.

Anyway, this guy was unnerved and got kind of aggressive immediately. A lot of, “You need to take that off.” when I do imagine everyone would’ve been a lot less agitated if he’d been like, “Hey, man, it makes me nervous because I can’t tell if you’re staring at me or not.” or whatever. He kept asking if anyone interacting with him had ever been attacked, I think as an explanation for why he was being so intense, and then finally said he’d leave if the barista wouldn’t make the furry kid take the fursuit head off. The barista and another patron sort of diffused the situation(???), the furry kid came back to the tables without the head (though no one told him to remove it from what I heard?) and aggro guy gathered his things and left.

Five years ago, the only people at my company using AI anything would have been data scientists writing machine learning models to help them project the possibilities of different scenarios. That's it. Large language models weren't being used by anyone I knew, and they certainly weren't being shoved down the throats of everyone I knew by our employers. Hell, I finished my bachelor's degree in August of 2024, and I felt like I was on the last helicopter out of 'nam because literally the next term, the school's subreddit was flooded with people complaining about how the school's AI detection software kept flagging things they wrote as AI-generated because they'd used Grammarly or something. I didn't have that issue. That was two (2) years ago.

I only utilize AI at work, and it's, quite frankly, because certain departments have set things up so I literally have to and search engines have become so useless because of the way they've adopted AI, that there are times when I basically have to ask CoPilot for something to get useful information. If AI went away overnight, we'd just go back to doing things the way we did a few years ago. Half of us would be overjoyed that our coworkers can no longer just copy and paste unhelpful responses from CoPilot to us when we ask them a question.

Parent: I want my wife to take one of my infant daughters to the UK and I’ll take the other one and we will never see each other again.

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.