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#anecdote
leidensygdom · 2 months
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i love finding poetry in the mundane, and yesterday i stumbled upon something that just hits that spot
So, my partner has an old phone- It served them for many years now, but it has one issue: Charging it is hard. Their current charger is hanging on by a thread (literally), and can barely do its job. The phone and the charger came together: They've never used another charger for said phone.
Now, they've tried to replace the charging cord several times. But it doesn't matter how much they've searched what damned specific charger the phone uses, none of them work. They finally decided to bring it to a phone shop and ask what should they use.
The guy at the shop looked at the phone for a bit, and explained: "The port itself is broken. The charger you have works with this phone because they've mutually broken each other into the same shape, in a way that no other charger is shaped. The port itself has corroded in a way that only accepts the charger that shaped it like that in the first place."
And while this is of course a frustrating situation for my partner, I feel like there's a metaphor here. I could write a goddamn story about this. These two half-broken old things have been together for so long they've destroyed each other in a way that keeps them from working with anything else. They've hurt each other in a way that barely keeps them functioning together, and have been rendered useless with literally anything else.
This too is toxic yuri to me-
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thefloralmenace · 3 months
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You all know from the big anarchy post that I don't like the stereotypical anarchist activities that involve blowing stuff up and burning stuff down both because they're impractical in a surveillance society and because there's always a risk of innocents becoming collateral. Ex: Even if you made sure the building you were going to explode was empty, maybe some 5-year-old kid gets away from his mom, chases a butterfly into the parking lot, and ends up in the blast radius - there's just no way to make sure that everyone will be clear of the area unless you tell everyone what you're doing, and if you do that, you will not be doing it lol.
But I also want to give you all an example of collateral and how to think about/minimize collateral in nonviolent activist situation.
So this is a story from my final year of high school. We had one particular teacher who was very abusive to us. Unfortunately, she also taught five classes, so it was VERY hard to avoid interacting with her at some point. She assigned massive workloads, tasks designed to be impossible, and she had frequent mood swings that she took out on us. If you confronted her about it, she'd just blink and be like "Well I didn't know I was stressing you all out," fake apologize, then go right back to doing it. The general consensus was that she must have some form of mental illness or a medication imbalance because she'd go from bringing us snacks in class and letting us watch a movie as a surprise to ranting and raging at us unprovoked.
She was specially HORRIBLE about workload. Two major projects per week that required massive amounts of time and effort and group coordination. They were also frequently juvenile and completely unrelated to anything we needed to learn (for reference the class with her I'm talking about now is AP Gov). Presidential paper dolls comes to mind. But here's the thing, we had to abandon studying for the tests, which were based on the textbook, because none of us had time to read the textbook to study for the tests because if you got a bad grade on one of your average 8 projects per month, that was worse than completely bombing an exam. My test average couldn't have been above 60, but I made it out with an A because I nailed every stupid project. Unfortunately, the textbook is what the AP TEST is based on, which is what determines whether or not we get college credit for the course. So not only are we losing sleep over 8 intensive projects per month for one class (for me, out of the EIGHT classes I was taking), we're all mortally terrified we're going to bomb the AP exam.
Aside: Also in class, sometimes she'd come up and yell at one of us for nothing just to personally victimize us individually, and some days she'd assign double digits of electronic readings that we had to take quizzes about immediately afterward, and if we couldn't get them all done in class, we got zeros for what we couldn't do. She assigned homework over the weekend (i.e. after we had already left on Friday) to be done on Monday, and you got a zero if you didn't check Canvas all weekend to make sure she didn't assign anything. Some kids in the class did not have internet at home btw, so we had to team up to text the people we knew couldn't know about the assignments, send them the readings, and help them get to internet sources to complete assignments before Monday.
Anyway! I did not like her. She filled me with rage. But I also knew her more personally that I would've liked to. She was the faculty sponsor for one of the clubs I was in, so I had, in fact, been to her house before for a charity activity on the weekend. I met her husband. Icolored with her toddler-age son. In early high school, I also spent a lot of time with her as the coach for another extracurricular. She drove me home from a meet when my parents' car broke down. We talked. Against my will I knew her pretty personally, and I knew 1) she was the breadwinner, 2) her husband is an asshole, and 3) her son, who she really did seem to love, was an unplanned pregnancy.
Fast forward to April of my senior year: I have all of her projects under control through the end of the year, but I am fed up. I gather all our previous projects into my backpack, and I march myself down to the guidance office. I ask for a meeting with my counselor, and I tell her what's been going on - the mood swings, the abusive homework, the crazy ass projects that only vaguely relate to AP government. After I dumped out all the projects and went on my rant, my guidance counselor looks at me and says, "I can't do anything to help you this close to the end of the year."
And I say, "I've got the work handled. This isn't about me. This is about me leaving here in a month and knowing she's going to do this to everyone who comes after me. I cannot, in good conscience, let her do that unchallenged."
Administration at my high school knew I was one serious 17-year-old, so the guidance counselor pauses then says, "What do you want done about it?"
And here's where the calculation about collateral comes in:
Me: "I don't want you to fire her. If you fire her, she'll just go somewhere else and do the same thing [collateral calculation: another whole body of high schoolers at a school that doesn't know what she's like]. Also, she has a young son, and I don't know what's going to happen to him if she loses her job [collateral calculation: the kid], and her husband is a jerk, so I don't know how he'll react [collateral: her. I don't want her abused as punishment, just stopped from doing what she's doing]. I want you to reign her in. I want you to watch her and limit how much and what kinds of things she's allowed to assign."
Counselor: "Do you think other students would tell me this if I asked them?"
Me: "Yes, but only if you push and make them understand that it's okay to tell you how they really feel. You can tell them I started this to make them comfortable, but don't tell her [the teacher] it was me directly until after I graduate. She's going to know who it was anyway, but I don't want her to know officially. Otherwise they're [the other students] just going to laugh uncomfortably and say 'Oh, it's fine' because they've been trained to minimize their issues with people in authority."
Counselor: "Okay."
And then that's what happened. I watched them interview all my classmates one at a time at lunch, and then I got it confirmed from a rising junior the next year that they'd reduced what she could assign. Eventually she found the restrictions so stifling that she left on her own and went into online K-12 teaching. I don't love that for the reason I said before - new people don't know what she does - but at least the kids can shut the laptop or fake a faulty internet connection now.
The major point of this story is that this is how I started developing a concept of "ethical revenge." This is one facet of that idea: Minimizing collateral damage, even in a situation that didn't have very obvious collateral like exploding a building does. I could have gone full fire and fury and protested to have her fired. That would have hurt her more than I intended and put other people at risk (unacceptable collateral for me). No matter how much I might have hated her, I did not hate her 3-year-old son, and I did my best to take firing off the table for him, because I didn't know what her husband would do if she got fired (I wanted her to stop victimizing students; I didn't want her hurt or verbally abused in return), and because I didn't want to improve life for people at my high school at the expense of a whole other group of students at whatever school she went to next. I thought long and hard about this before I went into that guidance counselor's office and devised a plan that would only affect her.
So in short, any time you're going to act against something or someone that is a problem, think about who else might get hurt as a result and try to move those people out of the range of the consequences that could be brought by what you're doing.
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incorrectbatfam · 2 months
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I haven’t seen the post about peeling skin but I have a moral; never buy socks at Universal Studios
Pre-COVID my family went to California and did all the fun stuff. AKA stuff I don’t find fun but who gives a shit whatever. We went to Universal Studios first, and back then, they had a store dedicated to socks. No idea if it’s still there. Cool, I want funny socks so I buy a couple pairs, and I wear one pair the next day
My feet were peeling for weeks. Like, I could peel off a square inch of skin in one go. Didn’t hurt to come off, but boy my feet were sore. This was because I went on a water ride at Disney and my feet got wet
So, you might think it was because my feet were wet, not the socks. Nah. I’m the kind of freak who both enjoys peeling her skin off and wearing socks in the shower. And when we got home, I did Science
Only the Universal Socks did this. Also they gave my sibling blisters. We tested that too, with more Science.
So don’t buy their socks
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queerism1969 · 7 months
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saranilssonbooks · 10 days
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Sat staring out across the ocean when a man who looked so much like the Ahab of my imagination that it was downright uncanny waded past in the surf. He was also in the midst of smoking one of the fattest joints I've ever seen and it made me think (not for the first time) that things could have ended up quite differently.
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philibetexcerpts · 5 months
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On 17 October 1980, the Queen and Prince Philip were received in private audience by Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.
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“The two religious leaders - the Pope as Head of the Roman Catholic Church on earth and The Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church of England - found they had much in common, including a mutual interest in ancient sacred documents, and the Pope was delighted to discover that The Queen was not merely being polite but showed an expertise he had not expected.”
Life with the Queen by Brian Hoey
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atomicradiogirl · 4 months
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before i succumbed to the house md brain worms in my freshman year medical ethics class we had to watch the house md episode “the tyrant” and write a paper about if it was ethical or not for chase to kill a dictator of a country who was about to commit genocide and like for the sake of the essay i had to say that chase was wrong for killing that guy but like…. this is the medical malpractice show about medical malpractice. hate crimes md. also this is a college essay. and it’s not chase’s job to play god. but like he did it anyway. maybe chase is the real villain. anyway i got like a B- the paper. because it was stupid and i didn’t care about it then. house md is a good show.
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greatwyrmgold · 1 month
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Do as I say, not as I do, and don't get into arguments in a YouTube comment section. Even if the community is normally pretty chill.
So, a YouTuber I watch has been playing Final Fantasy 7, and just got to the point where Aerith gets Sephiroth'd. Someone in the comments argued that that scene might be done differently in the remake, since Aerith doesn't do anything in the plot. If you found some other way to introduce the White Materia, you could remove her.
I of course jumped in, pointing out that:
Aerith influences other characters in important ways (particularly Cloud and Tifa, the protagonist and arguable deuteragonist)
Arguing that a character is useless to the plot because you can remove them from the plot if you replace them with something that does the same thing is very silly.
After exchanging a few comments, I realized two things. First, the other guy does not seem to understand the second point. Second, said guy genuinely does not seem to think that any action Aerith takes that doesn't directly contribute to defeating the bad guy with a sword can matter.
To him, Aerith matters because she owns the White Materia and helps use Holy to stop Meteor from destroying the Planet. Nothing else matters.
Not her conversations with Cloud and the others. Not her refusal to put up with Cloud's tough loner persona. Not that time she convinced Cloud to wear a dress. Not her getting captured by Shinra, inspiring the rest of the party to rescue her (and the other experimental subject they found). Not her getting Marlene to safety, and making sure she'll be safe while Barret is out of Midgar. Not the lore about the Cetra she knows, or the discoveries made while following her, or even what she learns from talking with the Ancients or the Planet or whatever.
Apparently, Aerith matters because she owns a rock, and that's it.
What a #$%^ boring game Final Fantasy 7 would be if that were true.
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asleep-and-afraid · 5 months
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a girl handed me her viola while she played mine and i immediately noticed how small the viola felt in my hands. and then i plucked the strings and was like hm i think someones put a G string where your C should be! and hey why’s your A sounding like an E? this is a funny looking viola dude!- OH.
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silvermoon424 · 3 days
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I just remembered that, when I was a kid, my siblings and I would jump off the basement stairs as high as we could onto a pile of pillows/beanbag chairs/blankets below. We would just fucking yeet ourselves as hard as we could, lol. Something deep in my bones tells me that “jumping from high up into a pile of soft things for fun” is a nearly universal childhood experience.
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tarnia2 · 6 months
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My mother: "Sometimes I wish you could be a baby again, just for a little while".
Me: "Haha, okay, mom".
Years later, watching a show...
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"Well, once you get this new crown, you can always use it to make an ice Betty".
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Me: "He did it. That son of a bitch did it".
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lerefugedeluza · 4 months
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Bon. On est maintenant assez proche pour que je vous avoue un truc.
Je ne sais pas si vous vous y connaissez en Monoprix, mais sur leurs produits, en dessous du descriptif, ils ajoutent toujours une phrase amusante (voir photos plus bas). Et moi et mon humour plus que douteux, on est fans de ces phrases.
Quand je vais chez Monoprix, c’est juste pour passer dans leurs rayons et toutes les lires. Si un jour vous y faites vos courses et que vous voyez quelqu’un pleurer de rire entre deux paquets de céréales, ce sera sans doute moi donc n’hésitez pas à me dire bonjour (ou fuyez, les fous rires c’est contagieux).
Je vous mets quelques pépites de ma dernière visite chez eux (je rappelle que j’ai un humour absolument nul).
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En prime, je leur décerne la palme des meilleures pubs (plutôt des courts-métrages à ce niveau d’ailleurs). Regardez-moi ça (maintenant vous savez comment déclarer votre flamme à votre crush) :
youtube
Bref, contre la dépression hivernale, une solution : Monoprix.
J’espère que leur équipe marketing est payé à la hauteur de leur génie.
(Et j’espère que mes imbécilités vous feront rire ou égayeront votre journée).
Des bisous ♡
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torchdreemurr · 7 months
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ok so storytime a few months ago or whatever i was giving my family a basic rundown on what shipping is to explain why i had made such a big outburst over Ted Lasso and wanting my OTP to get together (you'll never squeeze them out of me) and at one point while i was talking my brother butted in and said "that's stupid that's like saying zoro and sanji are gay" HE LITERALLY DOESN'T FUCKING KNOW
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I think one of my favorite things about the Ides of March and the associated shanking of Caesar is that it's one of the most famous assassinations in history, not sure where it would rank exactly, but it's definitely in the top 5, and yet somehow this is a thing that happened: So no shit, there I am at a party in 2005, talking about the statute of limitations on spoilers and how certain pop culture references make the idea of specific things being 'spoiled' for people kinda laughable. Stuff like the boat sinks in 'Titanic', and Darth Vader is Luke's father, and they shoot Kong at the end of 'King Kong', and this girl whips her head around from another conversation and goes "Oh my god, I haven't seen that movie yet, why would you spoil it?"
Now in her defense she's talking about the remake Peter Jackson came out with that year, but in my defense the original came out in 1933, and I'm pretty certain that 70+ years exceeds any reasonable period of time people can be expected to refrain from talking about a movie. So I was amused at both her indignation and the fact that I got to literally reenact a recent Penny Arcade comic strip and ask her if she thought Kong just climbed back down the tower after the planes started shooting at him.
But that's just the set up for my story.
My roommate hops to my defense and says "Yeah, it's like when [acquaintance] got mad at me for spoiling 'Rome' (which was currently airing on HBO at the time, cuz 2005). I was talking about how much I liked Ciaran Hinds in the role and I was gonna be bummed when Caesar died, and she yelled at me for spoiling it."
*blink* *blinkblink*
"...she yelled at you? For 'spoiling' the assassination of Julius Caesar?"
"Yup."
"Beware the Ides of March, et tu Brute, 'we should totally just stab Caesar'? That one?"
"Yup."
"Well shit, does she know Jesus dies in 'Passion of the Christ' or is that news also 'too soon' since the movie only came out last year?"
"I dunno, maybe we should ask her."
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nouklea · 5 months
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An anecdote.
When I was 13, on Christmas morning, one of my cousins decided that we shoud play D&D, he had been working on a quest for us, it was ready. It wasn't really my thing, so I managed to create the worst possible character, hoping I would die quickly. I ended up with a very high level of charisma and terrible scores in strenght, dexterity and all the other skills I can't name. Perfect to be killed on the first fight.
So we started the game. After a few minutes we faced a monster. I don't remember what it was. A cousin of mine attacked and lost. Another one tried and lost too, the monster was too strong.
And then, little me asked "Can I flirt with him? I've got tons of charisma!" My donjon master cousin gave me a weird look, you know, the look of an eleven years old boy totally disgusted by girls. He rolled the dices. And then he said with a flat voice "Well, it seems you now have a monster boyfriend." The game ended at that point; I had completely screwed his quest and no one wanted to play anymore.
My parents, uncles and aunts all thought it was hilarious. No one knew the expression monsterfucker back then...
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spectrayus · 1 month
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Funny anecdote:
When I was in my comic book process. My younger sister (she's very young), saw the drawing where was drawing Specter, I asked her "Él está guapo?", she simply said "Si, muy guapo".
She even grabs my phone, and draws hearts on it. hahaha she does it in all his appearances.
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