Waterflame's Wonders

The Queen of Spades, the asexual pride knight! Her armor is engraved with constellations and in her hands she wields a sword forged from the fabric of space itself ♠️✨ The Pride Knights Playing Cards, art prints and uncut sheets are now available for pre-order here: prideknights.com

My gender is Homosexula

And they’re all Vlad

happy pride month to lgbt people who are really boring. we deserve love too

ethan

Concept: Cold Topic. The opposite of Hot Topic. You walk in and you don’t immediately feel a thousand goth eyes piercing into you. The music is peaceful and subdued and not destroying your eardrums. Lots of color and pastel shades. You find a ton of cute stuff and the lack of the ow the edge attitude is kinda pleasant. The salesperson offers you complimentary cupcakes. You find yourself in a welcoming atmosphere, but it’s a little too welcoming. Another salesperson appears except they look identical to the first one. You start to feel uncomfortable so you buy your things and head for the door. Then 5 more freakishly identical salespeople appear to obstruct your escape route. They don’t let you leave

Claire’s

S T   O   P

as someone who used to work at Claire’s, I can confirm

Ted Cruz Is The Zodiac Killer is so very last year. Here, have a new derangement to incorporate into your belief system

For reference, the federal minimum wage would have you earning roughly on average $1,256.66 a month

It’s recommended your rent only be 30% of your total budget, so with an average monthly rent of $1,827 that would mean your average renter’s monthly income should ideally be $6,090

That would be roughly $35.13 hourly or $73,080 annually

However, the average renter’s household income is only $42,500 annually or $20.43 hourly (as of 2019 according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey)

This means either rent prices are too unsustainably high and price gouging or wages are too unsustainably low and predatory

Or both

(Hint: it’s both)

not to mention the maximum amount of money a person can make on disability is just under 800$ a month. 800. not 1k but 800$. u will 100% need assistance to afford rent anywhere. and the amount only goes down the more roommates u have. u cannot afford to live anywhere in the country on disability alone. and if u try to earn more money by working u lose funds from ur disability. the more u work the less disability u have the more u need to work etc. its beyond predatory its impossible to live in this country

This is what makes learning Spanish so uncertain -- I get told some word by Duolingo, that contradicts what I learned growing up along the US-Mexico border, and neither agrees with the words my co-worker from Columbia uses 

:D

When I was a kid, we lived in Chile, and my mum had a friend who was from another LatAm country (I don't remember which) and one time she told a taxi driver to "keep the change" but she said "y quedate el pico", which to the Chilean taxi driver meant "and put away your prick"

Ah me. :)

(Still remembering the time when Dave Gemmell told us how he went to Germany on a book tour and chanced his arm with the language one time, telling the bus driver on a sultry summer's day, "Ich bin so warme.")

(...Whoops.) :)

THE SONG IS SO GOOD

This reminds me of my Freshman year of high school. We were being taught Spain Spanish, and the two Mexican girls in class got pissed off at the girl from Madrid because she was "wrecking the curve" of the class... And I have vivid memories of them getting mad at the teacher because they put down the Mexican word for "bus" instead of the Spanish one, and got marked as wrong.

Do not attempt to out-malicious-compliance the staff at the malicious compliance conference.

Some dipshit decided to pay the conference fee ($250) in quarters. He handed us a wrapped plastic bag full of loose change. "It's all there," he said with a shit-eating grin, "you can count it."

Oh buddy. We're going to count it. What were you expecting?

At about the time I got to $60, he offered to give us $300 collateral so he could get his badge and go to the conference.

No, bud. You get to watch the most dyscalculic staffer count to a thousand while all your friends go in to the breakfast and find seats for the first talk.

"Ruining someone's day" is the favorite hobby of everyone here. Why would you hand us the perfect opportunity to wreck your shit and think that was an own? Half the con is calling him "Untraceable," the other half is calling him "Quarter Boy" and nobody cares what he says his handle is.

I spent an hour counting that and made him go fetch me baggies to hold it every fifty dollars.

This ended up being a good bonus prank for me too, because when the counting was done I wrapped the bags in gaffer's tape and spent the rest of the day handing it to people very casually while saying "oh here, hold this for a sec" and then watching they weren't ready for the weight (I only did this to people I know well enough to know this wouldn't hurt them).

It's an infosec conference, so it's a weekend in a hotel full of people whose favorite thing is breaking the law and whose second favorite thing is following the letter of the law while cheerfully violating the spirit.

Thank you, that means a lot coming from you, @unyanizedcatboys

They're calling him 'untraceable' because he was hanging out at a hackerspace and talking about how he didn't want to pre-register for the con because that could be traced back to his real name, so he was going to pay cash. Then someone else was like "bills are serialized, if you really wanted to be untraceable you'd pay with dollar coins like Redacted did a couple years ago," and Quarter Boy was like "I have an even BETTER idea. I'm going to double down for the meme potential," and then put a note in his bag of quarters that said "Blame Redacted, I had to beat his high score," so this wasn't even an *original* troll. He wanted to be a legend and instead became a cautionary tale. He wanted to get laughs and instead he got laughed at. He wanted everyone at the con to know who he was, and now everybody knows he's Quarter Boy.

Legitimately I don't have any idea why he thought this was a funny joke that would make him look good, and there are very few things you could do that would draw more ire from attendees than inconveniencing the volunteer convention staff during the registration rush when everyone just wants to get through the line (and in spite of diverting me to counting quarters and loudly explaining the reason for the delay to the massive line, we managed to get 150 attendees checked in over the course of 25 minutes while ALSO selling 50 shirts).

And I mean. Of course we could have put him aside and counted the quarters later, but then fewer people would have witnessed the legend of Quarter Boy, the untraceable hacker who realized exactly how much he'd fucked up about four minutes into hearing us answer "what's with the quarters?" with "some asshole thought it would be funny" over and over and over again.

You know what *was* a good joke this convention? One guy made stickers that were almost-but-not-quite exactly the logo for a hackerspace (one letter off) and stuck them all over the convention area, prompting outrage and a spur-of-the-moment Easter egg hunt from the hackerspace guys that escalated until he was covering their logo on their merch with his stickers and was using sleight-of-hand tricks to sneak his stickers into their pockets and bags.

not the mean girls in the barbie trailer literally being the bratz ☠️☠️☠️

I feel like a good shorthand for a lot of economics arguments is "if you want people to work minimum wage jobs in your city, you need to allow minimum wage apartments for them to live in."

"These jobs are just for teenagers on the weekends." Okay, so you'll use minimum wage services only on the weekends and after school. No McDonald's or Starbucks on your lunch break.

"They can get a roommate." For a one bedroom? A roommate for a one bedroom? Or a studio? Do you have a roommate to get a middle-wage apartment for your middle-wage job? No? Why should they?

"They can live farther from city center and just commute." Are there ways for them to commute that don't equate to that rent? Living in an outer borough might work in NYC, where public transport is a flat rate, but a city in Texas requires a car. Does the money saved in rent equal the money spent on the car loan, the insurance, the gas? Remember, if you want people to take the bus or a bike, the bus needs to be reliable and the bike lanes survivable.

If you want minimum wage workers to be around for you to rely on, then those minimum wage workers need a place to stay.

You either raise the minimum wage, or you drop the rent. There's only so long you can keep rents high and wages low before your workforce leaves for cheaper pastures.

"Nobody wants to work anymore" doesn't hold water if the reason nobody applies is because the commute is impossible at the wage you provide.

Idk about this one boys, Cookie Monster always refers to Cookie Monster's self as "Cookie Monster".

no he doesn’t. he refers to himself as “me.” elmo’s the one that talks in third person. that’s the joke. elmo doesn’t use pronouns and cookie monster is blue. how dare you assume i made this post and didnt know my fucking sesame street history. christ

In honor of Day of the Dead, here’s a repost of my comic about the San Francisco Columbarium and the man who spent 26 years restoring it.

This comic originally appeared on Medium at The Nib. Go check out my other work there.

Emmitt and the Columbarium.

I hope Barbie is so good and successful it makes every executive that’s turned everything bright and fun made for young girls into edgy boring teen dramas for the last ten years spontaneously combust into flames

First rule of gifmaking is to have fun and be yourself, 2nd rule of gifmaking is to learn to leave photoshop alone when something is not working and close ur computer and take some deep breaths, 3rd rule of gifmaking is to ignore 2nd rule and bite your computer, 4th rule of gifmaking is have fun and be yourself

5th rule of gifmaking is never take someone named SpicyVampire's advice on gifmaking cuz they probably gonna tell you to Bite Your Computer