Leverage Redemption + text posts

Bonus:

I have mixed thoughts on sex work. I love sex, but I hate work!

“Yeah, we hate seeing you work too!”

how does this post keep getting better

Starving to death this morning because ive been to the new local cafe twice this week already and if i go a third time ill look desperate.

Me: I like the goods and/or services you offer in exchange for my money

The cafe, in my head: lmao cringe, kill yrself buddy

The endlessly wailing siren of my social anxiety issues is probably not going to be silenced by the people in the comments pointing out that being a regular at a restaurant is a normal thing for people to be, but I do zero-sarcasm appreciate the attempt, is very kind!

I used to walk into [redacted nonpizza store] in my area and the guy behind the counter would immediately ask me if I wanted a pizza. truly I experienced the mortifying ordeal of being known as the pizza guy

compared to that being a regular at a normal cafe ordering normal breakfast items would be a real relief

Literally dread this scenario, to have your identity *reduced down* to a single item order, to be known as such a plebian with such a restricted palette that your order can be charted in advance, oh widdle ash wants his chicken tendies uwu.

I agree having a set breakfast order is more socially acceptable than a set pizza order. But its not enough; its never enough.

Though life update: i did just go to the cafe in the end. I compromised with my anxiety by ordering a sandwich instead of my typical bagel. It was fine but not as good.

on the flipside, we went to the same place for brunch a couple years, one time my buddy orders something new, and while he’s eating five different members of the wait staff stopped by to be like “did they bring you the wrong thing?”

This thread needs a trigger warning keep the horror stories coming

There was a bakeshop near my house that made soft ginger cookies and and macarons but only 2-3 good flavors. I walked in once and the cashier (who I definitely didn’t recognize) said “let me guess - ginger cookies and cookies-n-cream macarons, right?”

Needless to say, I never returned.

I once went to a McDonald’s, the cashier said “big mac combo meal and a chicken burger, right?” and I said “yeah” and then didn’t come back for two years

This entire genre of concern so fascinatingly foreign to me! the cafeteria pizza guy knows I want 3 slices of whatever veggie pizza he has, and he will have them ready for me without me having to say anything besides a quick murmured thanks, and he smiles when he sees me and starts to grab them, and it feels so good! to be known, even a little bit, to be a small constant in someone else’s life… there’s just something so beautiful and precious and good in that, for me.

When I lived in [the city where I lived for undergrad] there was this place very close to my house with cheap and delicious lamb curry and the people at the counter knew my face and would start scooping the lamb curry into a bowl when they saw me come through the door. I thought this was lovely of them and always made sure to tip generously. Restaurant and regular is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Yeah there’s a bakery/cafe a few doors down from me and reaching the point where they a) remember my face/name and b) know my regular order meant that I can no longer get breakfast anywhere else ever.

Had the guy at the taco truck I routinely went to for lunch who asked me after a few years if I only ate burritos or something, no man I’m just don’t see the need to mix up my lunches.

As someone who’s been both front and back of house in various large and small food services: regulars account for roughly 40% of sales and thier consistency makes it easier to order supplies and keep stock levels stable.

As front of house my regulars were always a welcome sight, an easy serve and clear, a guaranteed a happy customer and pleasant interaction. Especially in diners or lunch spots where reliable turnover = tips and most people never come in more than once, having a familiar face who’s rhythms and tastes you recall makes the rest of your service work easier.

If you have any anxiety about being a regular somewhere just be sure to tip well, and you will magically transform from ‘pizza guy’ or ‘lamb curry dude’ to Beloved Favorite Regular and the servers will squabble to get you seated in thier section.

When I worked for Domino’s Pizza, there was a guy who ordered a pizza, without fail, on Thursday at 6pm. Until the day he didn’t.

One of our drivers was delivering nearby and decided to check on the guy. Turns out the guy got home, got most of the way through the door, and lost consciousness. (If memory serves, it was a diabetic episode.) Driver couldn’t revive him and called 911. Saved the guy’s life.

when i worked in a remote office when i started my job, i went to denny’s for lunch enough that i’d just walk in and a server would go “take a seat over there, I’ll be over with your iced tea to take your order in a moment”

Food service workers love their regulars, especially if you’re a good tipper and are polite, we literally look forward to seeing you every day. Also service workers don’t care if you order the same thing, and us remembering your order means we like you.

^^^^

Also no we aren’t “boiling your personality down to an item/order”, you are. We are offering you preference recall and welcoming you and your *presence* does in fact correspond to our need to give you a certain order. It’s okay for that to happen.

For all my fellow social anxiety sufferers out there. Because my local coffee shop knows I always get iced coffee or a mocha and a biscotti and it stresses me the fuck out because I’m like “What if they think my order is dumb?? What if they’re like there she goes again stuffing her face with biscottis all the time” but nothing matters and a biscotti with your coffee in the morning really makes all the difference in what kinda day you’re gonna have.

I have pretty severe social anxiety, but there was a Chinese restaurant in [town I lived in for a few years] that made some of the very best egg drop soup, vegetable lo mein, and spring rolls. I ordered that every time I went there. They would seat me by a window in a quiet spot because they saw me put earplugs on when things got noisy.

Then I moved to a different but nearby town. I’m unable to drive (due to medical reasons) and public transportation didn’t go near the town. It was a year later, when I had a study group, that I was able to go there again. We had been taking turns for what restaurant we would eat and study at. We’d be there for hours, ordering several meals, and tip heavy, around 50%. Anyone one of us who couldn’t afford to eat or tip would be covered by the rest because several of my classmates were from wealthy families. They covered me more than once in exchange for drawings.

When it was my turn, we went to the Chinese restaurant. I walked in and they immediately knew who I was and what I favored. It was pretty dead in there, so we mostly had the place to ourselves. It ended up being a six course meal and five hours of studying and discussing the project. They brought me my favs as soon as they saw my plate or bowl was empty. The bill ended up at a little over $1k.

A couple months later, a friend took me there where we had a nice lunch after I finished my last exam. The owner approached our table and told me each of the students I had brought last time were now regulars. Some brought more people, and business was booming. They gave me a little card that said I would receive free meals for the next two years, as thanks for being a regular bringing in so many new people.

Before I moved across the country, I wanted to visit the place for a final meal before leaving. The place was closed with a sign that said “moved to new location.” The new location was near the university. So we went there, and the owner informed me that because so many of their new regulars were uni students, they moved. The place was easily 3x the size of their original. They told me it was always packed during meal times, and they now opened for breakfast with tradition Chinese breakfast foods. Business was booming, and all because of their regulars.

Being a regular is one of the very best compliments you can offer a restaurant, diner, meal trucks, etc. They love seeing you, especially if you tip well. I will likely never eat there again due to living more than 2500 miles away, but it feels good that my love for egg drop soup, vegetable lo mein, and spring rolls helped out a wonderful restaurant.

Be a regular. They love you.

Laika: 1954-1957

Opportunity Rover: 2004-2019

I THOUGHT I WAS DONE BEING HURT BY THIS BUT NOPE. I WAS WRONG.

the idea behind a grim (a big friendly ghost dog) is that because the first soul buried in a burial yard would be its guardian they would bury a Very Good Boy there first so a human wouldn’t be stuck at the gate so to speak. so in that way Laika is continuing an ancient tradition of a guardian spirit protecting the souls of everyone who passes after her.

the bechdel test

this anime passed the bechdel test during the hot springs episode when the girls were comparing titty sizes

to be fair the original point of the bechdel test was “can i interpret these two characters as lesbians” and there is quite a lot of bad harem anime where the answer is “yes”

It is possible that somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland there is an iceberg shaped like a giant dick.

IT'S REAL

AND THE PHOTOGRAPHER COMES FROM DILDO, NEWFOUNDLAND

ITS REAL

Mr. Pretty from Dildo, Newfoundland photographed a Giant Penis Shaped Iceberg

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness was a big deal in feminist science fiction for being one of the first widely popular and critically acclaimed works to do cool shit with sex and gender (which was certainly nothing new, but previous such works had rarely "taken off" the way LHoD did). It was criticized for referring to the genderfluid characters with the indefinite "he," which was a la mode in style guides at the time, instead of using alternating or gender-neutral pronouns. In time Le Guin came to agree with this criticism; she considered her decision not to take things further one of her biggest literary regrets, stating that "I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns."

I tell you this only because the phrase "I am haunted and bedeviled by the matter of the pronouns" is one I think about a lot.

junji itō was so right when he said this

this too

I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.

He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.

So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.

Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven.

huh, i did not know that.

movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….

girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.

if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:

I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–” “Ten,” I said. “What?” “J. J is ten,” I said again. He stared at me. “I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him. Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.” He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room. I looked at the wall for a while. He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time. So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is. “It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were” “Sit down,” he said. I sat. Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted

ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.

This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.

It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.

I’ve decided there are two categories of historical novelist:

Category A: Primary sources? What primary sources? I read Alison Weir, that’s enough.

Category B: Oh I did SO much research, I am SO historically accurate, I read ALL the primary sources….wait what do you mean those sources are ‘apocryphal’? What do you mean ‘the author has an agenda’ and ‘apply critical thinking’? It was in a primary source! Why aren’t you treating me like a historian?

Category C is Patrick O’Brian who did bonkers amounts of research and then went and wrote the year 1812 twice because he couldn’t fit everything he wanted to write about from that year into the novels’ timelines otherwise

Warning for cis men: if a trans woman invites you to play dungeons and dragons do NOT accept. She is attempting to induct you into her coven, and likely infect you with cooties

Out of my way loser I’m boutta get it

I am no longer a cis man

the prophecy is complete

For a long time I’ve wanted the Batman universe to have a public defender, because that has to be one of the weirdest, most thankless jobs in the world. Sure, Gotham’s public defender works a lot to defend small time, non-violent drug offenders, and maybe Batman will even be a character witness sometimes to support rehabilitation, but you’ve got to also get the guy who set fire to a huge pile of money or the guy who turned to bank robbery to pay for a rare book habit. (The Penguin can probably afford his own lawyers.)

Come to think of it, as a law student, it’s not impossible that Becky Albright could become a public defender…but if I were her, I would stay as far away from Gotham, supervillains, and even criminal law as possible.

Public Defender Albright: “I learned to understand supervillains from my experiences…that they are sad, pathetic little people who really need help.”

Exactly!

In response to Slate's article on the possibility having non-heteromative team in figure skating (particularly, ice dance and pairs), Oniceperspective shared a glimpse of Gabriella Papadakis (FRA) and Madison Hubbell (USA) working on their same-sex program. You can see how they switch the leading figure between them.

You can see them trying out lifts in this video.

The rest is on Instagram here:

OKAY I thought I recognized these names so I had to go check but I love that these are the literal GOLD and BRONZE 2022 Olympic medalists

it never hit me how shortsighted Heaven is until i realized they put a Principality (whose entire raison d’être is to protect places and people from harm) in charge of Earth, and then were genuinely surprised when Armageddon came and said Principality went absolutely off-the-grid feral trying to stop it

Where did I read the sentence “you can’t give a Principality a territory and then act surprised when they become territorial”

Honestly, given how Heaven reacts to everything throughout Good Omens, I’m 99% sure that they meant for Aziraphale to be guarding against the humans, and Aziraphale just had one of his “I’m going to selectively hear those orders” moments, and the rest was history.

“And,” Gabriel said with a wink, “you’re going to be a guardian in the human realm.”

Aziraphale nodded and winked back.

As methods of communication go, a wink is quite versatile. You can say a lot with a wink. For example, Gabriel’s wink meant:

You’re going to go down to that earthly territory and make sure those hairless monkeys don’t do anything to get in the way of the divine plan and make sure they know what it is to fear the wrath of the Almighty and behave themselves as lesser beings should.

And as far as he was concerned, Aziraphale’s answering wink meant: I shall indeed descend to the earthly plane full of gross matter and hairless monkeys and be sure to keep them in their well-deserved place, beneath our divine heel.

Whereas Aziraphale, on the other hand, thought that Gabriel’s wink was more along the lines of: You lucky beggar Aziraphale, getting to go down there and look after God’s new humans and all the exciting things they have to make and discover. Now you go down there and experience all the humans have to offer and protect them with your life.

And therefore, his own wink had meant: Message received and understood. The humans will never have a more stalwart guardian. Looking for to seeing what sushi is when it comes around.

It took quite some time for angels to learn the important of using words when dispatching pedantic principalities on human-sitting duty.