kill the shift manager in your brain

you are not wasting time you are vibing. you are not being unproductive you are literally chilling. make a grill cheese with cheddar cheese and slather a piece of the bread with some honey and maybe you'll relax

Innes Keeper's Formula For Fantastic Grilled Cheeses (for nearly no extra spoons!)

Are you hungry? Do you have a hankering for grilled cheese sandwiches like, way more than a normal person maybe? Great news! I am about to give you the secret knowledge I stole, like Prometheus himself, from the Akashic Records—to bring back to Prudencia! And I’m even doing it without a ten hour long lecture about how the Akashic Records makes me think of idfk, 9/11, and how that relates to sandwiches.

I will, however, briefly say this: You gotta trust me when I say cooking grilled cheeses via this formula WILL grant you Bloodborne Insight. There is no fucking reason that making a grilled cheese this fucking delicious should be this fucking easy. I feel like I’m cheating God every time I do it because it takes (nearly) no extra spoons. And here’s where I show you why.

INGREDIENTS — SEASONINGS -butter, i usually use 2 or 3 tablespoons per sandwich -garlic cloves, I use 3 usually -a source of heat, like red pepper flakes, or szechuan peppers -a source of spice OR a source of sweetness, such as dijon mustard or honey. slather that motherfucker on a slice of your bread. -a source of herbiness, such as oregano, thyme, sage, rosemary, etc in any combination that goes well together or on its own. if someone tries to tell you that you need it fresh, they’re fucking lying, the 2$ crushed powdered sage is fucking great. experiment with other spices such as ground turmeric if you're spicy

INGREDIENTS - THE METAPHORICAL MEAT OF THE SANDWICH -two slices of bread per sandwich. this is actually a massive influence on your sandwich taste and texture as a whole. a basic white or wheat will still be fucking delicious because like I said, I stole this from the Akashic Records cookbook section and found it under “fucking perfect grilled cheeses forever”. However, if you CAN—getting bread like brioche, texas toast, brown bread, rye, or sourdough will make a sandwich already being elevated super easily to “pay 23 dollars at a fancy restaurant” level of elevation.

-one to three types of cheese per sandwich. you can get away with one type but really try for two or three if you can swing it. this is also one of those massive influences over the sandwich—listen, i know, that’s obvious, but stay with me—what matters isn’t the SPECIES of cheese, it’s the TYPE of cheese. getting the deli at your local Safeway or Walmart or whatever and asking for the cheese they gotta cut (or just in general the fancier, better-quality cheeses) is literally the only major requirement that I ask of you. If you are on SNAP/EBT programs, me too, and I promise you: Please do this. Please trust me when I say do not get the cheap Kraft-type cheese because it’s less money. I know it’s a bit extra but it’s only a bit to get like 1/4 or 1/3lb and you have no idea how much I’m actually getting a little emotional about this, because the “rice with butter and beans or top ramen every single day” life is soulsucking and sickening and it is genuinely one of the greatest sources of suffering to human beings I can imagine, I’m serious. Following this formula will genuinely change your life/mental health just a bit because you know that you have one meal that is super delicious, super filling, pretty damn cheap when it comes to how much you get, and super easy to make on days where the idea of doing more than just 15 minutes MAX is gonna make you wanna die.

super sorry for that paragraph btw i just really cannot overstate how this is a lifechanger especially when youre poor/low spoons/depressed. delicious food makes me not be as depressed. this is that.

METHOD

That’s literally it. I really hope this helps.

outta my way gayboy im making this sandwich

oh. oh my god. holy fuck. what. how. why. this is delicious. i kinda burned my bread and my cheese didnt melt all the way but it's still the best thing ive ever tasted?????

oh my god. this is so fucking good. the butter melting and absorbing the spices and herbs already smelled amazing, but then i threw the bread on and it started smelling EVEN BETTER. then i took a bite. holy FUCK this is better than sex. i legitimately believe that Innes Keeper stole this shit from Prometheus, there's no other way to explain why this is so easy to make, yet so FUCKING good, other than cheating a god.

I didn't steal it from Prometheus he's my trophy husband!

ok me and my partner went back and made this. exact words upon eating were “we’ve cheated god” and “i feel like my world just got rocked” and then we were both energized to get back to drawing. proof:

please make innes keeper’s scientifically proven perfect extremely easy grilled cheese

I'M PUTTING THIS ON THE FRIDGE (WHERE I KEEP ALL MY CHEESE)

loudly going "YOU'RE GOOD YOU'RE GOOD" to myself to ward off the memory of every embarrassing thing i've ever done

casey jones more like Lazy Bones!!!!!

The words are nothing to her right now. They merge and jumble and the letters fall away into an indecipherable soup too hot to even take a sip. April resists the urge to groan and blinks her tired eyes in a futile attempt to Focus. She should’ve had this research done for her paper Days ago but life always finds a way to fuck up her academic pursuits. The usual.

A soft rustle of paper to her right. She glances over at her companion who has oh so graciously lent her space for the night since her parents have decided now would be the best time to have a party with all their friends and ugh she doesn’t wanna even think about how trying to do work at her place would’ve been. Too many interruptions by overly concerned adults asking about her studies that would eventually trail off into asking about her love life.

Her brain stalls even more at the thought, her gaze lingering enough that Casey finally registers it. Their eyes meet.

Shit.

Casey says nothing. Her eyes glow in the soft light of her laptop. She blinks. April blinks.

It’d be so easy, wouldn’t it? To lean down and really examine the deep dark brown of her eyes, the many scars in varying states of healing, the shape of her nose that has healed not quite right from a past break, the softness of her lips. To close the distance would be Nothing.

It would be Everything.

Brows furrowing, Casey smirks up at her, resting the open pages of her comic on her chest with a faint crinkle.

“What’s up?”

The cozy temperature of the room suddenly ignites. April wants to rip her gaze away, but she can’t. It’s Go Time, something whispers urgently in her head. Just Do It. Her heart pounds in her ears.

“April?” Casey says because ohhhh she’s definitely been silent for way too long. And oh no oh no she’s starting to move, propping her elbows up so she can raise into a sit and April resists the urge to lean away because that would be really fucking suspicious.

She manages a grin and a chuckle, “Just Tired, y’know?”

Oh mi gosh, she thinks to herself because she Still Hasn’t Looked Away, and her heart feels ready to burst out of her chest. Casey keeps getting closer and closer, her comic forgotten in her lap.

“Don’t force yourself,” Casey says in that quiet voice that April has only recently discovered and has only admitted quietly to herself that she adores it very much. She watches her friend glare at the article on her screen as if she could vaporize the stress of schoolwork with a single thought. Knowing Casey, she probably could.

Before she can process it, April is suddenly swathed in the soft confines of a quilt, squares individually made by Casey’s brownie minions and painstakingly stitched together by the woman herself. There’s a click of her laptop shutting. Gentle hands take her glasses off. A yawn escapes her as she feels her body lower into a comfortable position.

“My hairrr,” she whines, voice muffled by the cloth.

“It can survive a few damn hours,” Casey reasons with a click of her tongue. “Just take a nap. I’ll wake you up in a bit.”

Relief that her heart has finally gone back to normal, that the room is cozy again, that she’s finally managed to break eye contact. Disappointment towards the same.

April sighs as her eyes slip shut and she lets herself relax. Casey settles in next to her, phone out with the light dimmed.

Next time, she thinks to herself. Next time, I’ll definitely do it.

I was talking with my housemate about how to be more physically active if you’re not used to it at all because everywhere you’re told to start a training routine where you push yourself a little every day, and while that may seem easy for some people it can be really fucking daunting if you start from zero.

As someone who comes from a very physically active family that doesn’t exercise just for the sake of exercising but do things like walk to the grocery store and bike to work, here’s my advice that has always worked for me:

Go super duper easy on yourself.

If you want to walk more start by walking for 3 or 5 minutes. The shortest possible walk you feel you’re capable of. A trip around the block or across the yard. You don’t need to sweat or get your blood pumping. Just a short stroll. The hardest part is to convince yourself to set aside 5 minutes every day to go on this short walk but nothing else about it should be hard. Do it every day and one day you’ll realize that you don’t want to go home just yet. It’s very important that you don’t think “I want to pressure myself to walk further” but rather “I haven’t spent all my walking energy yet. I have more walk in me” and only then do you lengthen the walk. I repeat, at no point should it be exhausting or difficult because even when it feels easy your body will be building muscle and stamina and it will eventually feel too easy and you’ll naturally want to crank it back up to easy again.

If you’re not used to being physically active it might not make a ton of sense when I say that you’ll have more walking energy left but trust me, you’ll get it when you get there.

I grew up with going on evening walks with my parents and passed that on to other housemates who didn’t get it at first but are now going on walks long after they moved somewhere else. Because once you get the hang of it you’ll realize how calming it is on the brain to move the body even if the body isn’t exhausted afterwards.

And it of course helps to entertain yourself especially in the beginning. My housemate started out listening to audiobooks and podcasts but eventually realized Pokémon Go was the best motivator. Whatever you feel like you want to do on your 5 minute easy stroll.

Love this. Exercise should be individual. No pain no gain is a big lie most of the time. Just do a little bit if that's what you can do. A little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.

"Wai-Case-Casey!"

The blade stops an inch from his snout. Shakily, Casey slowly lowers the weapon, her feral snarl cracking into teary-eyed disbelief.

"Raph?" Casey whispers, voice hoarse. The bundle in her other arm wriggles with a happy gurgle.

A... Baby??

My reference :3c

As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

TLDR: It's much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren't expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don't get angry, get spitefully polite! :)

I once witnessed a very soft-spoken young Southern man take a hateful older woman’s hands gently in his and say “Sister, I am so sorry that the Devil has carved a home for hatred in your heart. I’ll pray for you.”

It was glorious.

This works with all sorts of inappropriate behavior. I work as the archivist in a public library, so I end up on the reference desk a lot, and sometimes patrons will say or do things that aren't exactly appropriate. When patrons try to hit on me, I put on a teacher voice and calmly ask, "Is that an appropriate question to ask someone at work?" and it shuts them down immediately.

This sort of thing always does the trick.

so being in a smaller fandom has made me realize that plenty of otherwise talented fic writers genuinely DO just suck at writing summaries. so ive compiled a couple quick tips

The Very Basics of Not Killing Your Computer

If you have a laptop DO NOT use it on a soft surface like a pillow or on a blanket, it’ll block the vents on your computer and make it get really fucking hot inside.

If you have a desktop you gotta open it up and blow out the dust sometimes.

If you are moving your laptop in a bag turn the laptop off. Don’t put it to sleep, don’t just shut the screen, turn it off, because otherwise it’s in the bag generating heat and there’s nowhere for the heat to go in the bag. OFF. Not sleep. OFF.

Okay I know that should be obvious but drop damage to your hard drive is bad bad news. Be as careful as you can to set your computer gently on flat surfaces; don’t leave it hanging out on a bed where it can get knocked off, don’t set it on the roof of your car. And yes, just dropping it a couple inches can kill your hard drive or totally shatter your screen.

Look I’ve seen four people ruin their laptops because they had a pen on the keyboard and closed the laptop and it fucked up the screen and the keyboard and it sucks so much and you feel awful after it happens because it’s so avoidable just don’t put things on your keyboard and always check that your laptop is clear before you close it.

You’ve only got one power jack and a limited number of other inputs on your computer and if they detach from the motherboard you’re fucked. USB ports get damaged because people use them a lot and eventually it weakens the connection and then they just stop working and it sucks. You can get around this with USB ports by using a USB hub to connect things like your keyboard and mouse.

For your power plug you just gotta be careful. Avoid tripping over the cord at all costs, don’t yank the plug out of the computer. It will SUCK VERY MUCH A LOT if you have to buy a new computer because the power port lost contact with the motherboard.

Don’t move your computer with things plugged into it. Take the power cord off before you put your laptop in the bag, take out the USB mouse dongle, do not travel with little nubby bits sticking out of your computer that can easily get caught or get tweaked or snap off inside of the thing.

(I really can’t emphasize enough that most of the “it will cost more than it’s worth to fix this” laptops I see are because of USB ports and power jacks. People don’t seem to know that this isn’t something that can be fixed easily; a broken power jack is a “remove the motherboard and resoldier components” job, not a “plug a new one in in fifteen minutes” job and most computer repair shops aren’t going to solder things for you and if they DO it’s going to be very expensive)

You should probably restart more than once a month but whatever. This is actually something that I consider part of reducing heat stress because when your processor is straining to keep up with all the background bullshit that’s running from a program you opened three weeks ago it’s going to use up resources and get hot and look just restart it once in a while.

Also the updates are almost always okay and safe and generally running updates is a good and secure thing to do (though maybe follow a blog dedicated to the OS you run because if there IS a problem with the updates that blog will probably talk about it before the update gets forced on your computer)

Yes you should probably be running an antivirus.

Sophos is free and it’s fine. But don’t pay for it - if you’re using Sophos use the free version.

If you’re looking for something paid and a little more comprehensive I recommend ESET - get the cheap version, renewals cost less than the initial purchase, and feel free to get a multi-year version, the credentials follow your email not the computer so if your computer dies before your license expires you can install the license on a new computer.

DO NOT INSTALL NORTON OR MCAFEE THEY ARE EXPENSIVE BULLSHIT. Kaspersky is whatever. It’s less bullshit than Norton or McAfee but not as good as ESET for about the same cost.

If you think you’ve got a virus run the free version of Malwarebytes and get your shit cleaned.

Again this should be obvious and yet. But seriously, just make a rule for yourself that drinks aren’t allowed on the same table as your computer and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches.

Okay I fucking hate amazon but here’s a thing you should be using, just search the rest of the internet for “surge protector/UPS” and you’ll find something that isn’t from amazon - APC is a solid brand for this.

Basically you want a fat surge protector that has a little bit of a battery backup and you want to plug your computer (desktop OR laptop) into that instead of into the wall. The benefit of this is twofold:

1) if there’s a power surge the UPS will prevent your computer’s power supply from getting fried and possibly frying parts of your motherboard

2) if there’s a power outage and you’re *at* your computer you’ll have enough time to save what you’re working on before your computer loses power (like, you’ll maybe only have a minute or two on a small UPS but that’s still time to hit CTRL+S and keep from losing work)

At a bare, bare minimum your computer should be plugged into a surge protector but NOT directly into the wall.

[we interrupt this yelling for me to tell you that Western Digital has apparently released their new My Passport line and I’m obligated to inform you that you can get a 2.5″ USB 3.0 backup drive with FIVE FUCKING TERABYTES OF STORAGE for $130. Or you can get 4TB for $93. Or you can get 1TB for $53. basically what I’m saying is that it is not only cheap computer season it is also cheap hard drive season.]

[also if you’re getting a backup drive get western digital not seagate seagate fucking sucks and has a much higher failure rate]

Uh, okay, anyway - Do an image backup of your computer every once in a while so that if you get infected or your hard drive dies or whatever you can just restore from backup and move on like nothing happened.

HERE’S HOW TO DO AN IMAGE BACKUP.

You know what is cheap? USB Keyboards and USB mice. You know what is not cheap? Fixing the touchpad on a laptop or replacing a laptop keyboard.

Get yourself a USB hub, a USB Keyboard and a USB Mouse (wired or wireless, doesn’t matter) and if you’re using your laptop at home plug *that* into your computer.

Also if your keyboard on your laptop breaks it’s fine just to use a USB keyboard instead I promise; if the screen breaks it’s also usually cheaper and easier to get a used or inexpensive monitor than it is to replace the screen. Your laptop is basically just a very small version of whatever bullshit is going on inside a desktop, if the peripherals break but the core components are fine you can just use it like a desktop.

Unless it’s a piece of shit that doesn’t have any USB ports or video out in which case you got ripped off, friend, demand functionality in your devices I’m sorry.

/rant