men will crush your hand and be like this is great im winning the handshake. something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve
okay, so. here’s the thing.
when i was in middle school, the stem program i was in required us to do science fair as part of the curriculum. a pretty decent handful of us made it all the way to the tricounty regional fair, which was as high as we could go in the junior division. and one of the things i had to learn to win at science fair was a good business handshake to greet the judges with - something not too soft but not too firm, nice and crisp and decisive. i practiced this handshake with my dad until he deemed it Just Right, and off to the science fair i went with my newly calibrated Perfect Business Handshake at the ripe old age of twelve.
(this continued to serve me well in various other contexts, and i treasure every instance of watching someone visibly double-take over the fact that i - a squishy-looking 5′1 teenage girl - had casually deployed a Perfect Business Handshake.)
this all changed when i started doing construction work.
men who do construction work take firm handshakes to the next goddamn level. construction worker handshakes are a check to both parties’ professional pride, establishing to each other that they have the calluses and forearm muscles appropriate to their station. construction worker handshakes are ‘we are both using the other person’s hand as a grip strength checker’ handshakes. construction worker handshakes are like bricks.
(source: the many, MANY handshakes i’ve experienced at the union hall. carpenters local 197 represent.)
most importantly, however, construction worker handshakes would have eaten my perfect business handshake for breakfast. i had to up my game, so i recalibrated to match the standing expectation of ‘the right amount of firmness is the maximum grip output you are capable of.’ which was all well and good for a while, because the only people i was handshaking were other construction workers! i got a couple considering nods out of this! life is going swimmingly!
… except then one day my dad, an accountant, gets an assistant to help at his home office. a very skinny and desk-work-inclined assistant, to whom i am summarily introduced.
“this is jay, he’s going to be helping me out this tax season,“ dad says. “jay, this is kelly.“
i say “hi, nice to meet you,” and reach forwards for a handshake.
now, the thing you have to keep in mind is that i’d just come home from a long day at work. i am very tired, i am operating on pure autopilot, and my handshake has been calibrated for construction worker grip strength for the last year and a half. absolutely nowhere in my mind is the concept that perhaps a CPA’s assistant might not be expecting that. nowhere in my mind is the thought that perhaps i should dredge up my old business handshake for the current situation. but it really should have been, because you know what happened next?
he puts his hand in mine, and i crush it like a soda can.
The finnish array of folklore creatures mainly exists outside of any human understanding of good, evil, right, or wrong. Or to be more specific, their personal moral codes - if they have any - have no regard for human wellbeing. This includes household spirits. A house elf is attached to the house, not the people, and it does not give a shit about individual human beings, but grudgingly aknowledges that whatever’s good for the household is usually good for the house. But it will not tolerate residents who don’t maintain it.
The sauna in essentially a sacred place. Not in connection to any particular divinity, but sanctified for washing and cleansing. People gave birth and were born in the sauna, because it was the cleanest place to do so. The sauna was were the dead were given their final wash before burial. You strip naked and rinse yourseld before going in because your skin and your clothes are dirty, and in the sauna you sweat out the dirt still in your pores. Every surface of the sauna is scrubbed clean at least twice per year, for christmas and summer solstice.
The sauna, too, has a guardian spirit. And just like the house elf, the sauna elf does not give a shit about you. Their duty is to guard the sauna. See that it’s heated appropriately, washed properly, treated with reverence and used with respect. If you fuck around with the sauna, the spirit can and will kill you. You jack off in there too many times and the elf will straight-up skin you alive, eyelids and all.
There’s been joking discussion about whether all saunas have an elf or not - some say that all saunas do, some say that only wood stove saunas do and electric saunas don’t, the jury is out there. I for one have observed that my facial piercings start burning in an electric sauna, but not in a wood one, though I don’t know why a sauna elf would particularly approve of them.
That being said, the saunas that I am certain do absolutely not have a guardian spirit in them are the ones at the american gyms y'all are talking about. Because if you can walk in there without showering, in your sweaty gym clothes, with your shoes on, and watch tiktoks on your loud-ass phone with no headphones on, that is either not a true sanctified bathing sauna, or nobody is going to leave that building alive today.
“We are in the midst of a political coup that, if successful, would forever change the nature of American government. It is not taking place in the streets. There is no martial law. It is taking place cubicle by cubicle in federal agencies and in the mundane automation of bureaucracy. The rationale is based on a productivity myth that the goal of bureaucracy is merely what it produces (services, information, governance) and can be isolated from the process through which democracy achieves those ends: debate, deliberation, and consensus.”
Does anyone have the fucking tiktok video of the overly enthusiastic rich bearded guy showing off his new hiking shoes in his Mansion and the Woods, but then another dude duets with it to make it look like he’s escaping from being held prisoner please please
i think rickrolling is the only meme that gets objectively funnier with age. in 2009 you learned to anticipate it but in 2019 it happens just infreqently enough that i fall for it every single time
like people still make rage comics and doge jokes and shit but it’s always ironic (the real punchline is that you’re using an outdated format) or more in line with modern absurd internet humor. rickrolling is the only meme i can think of that’s been the exact same for a full decade- click on a link thinking you’re getting something else, get rick astley instead, and it’s still consistently funny
the more time passes the more foolish you feel for falling for a rickroll as well. Like darn I learnt about this prank 10+ years ago how did I just fall for it now,
Their instagram post said to share this, so please spread this around so that families who’ve lost everything can receive just a little bit more hope in their lives 🥺
this could actually really help the morale of the people over there. People often underestimate how much of the damage caused by fires is emotional (as opposed to purely financial). Comforting blankets, photos, books, stuffed animals, all the familiar things children and even parents derive a sense of security and comfort from ripped away from them for no good reason. this may not be much, but getting a kid a little stuffed animal to hug while his parents try to find a place to live… the emotional benefit is enormous. And if they aren’t able to find a place to live, this might be all they have for a long time.
I am finding out that a lot of things I thought were common knowledge about Christian Fundamentalism are not in fact common knowledge.
Like with the aid freeze, people were like why would they do this? And I was like cause they want churches to be the only option for aid.
And people were shocked. And I was also shocked that this wasn’t like…more well known. I grew up with people who were anti-aid because they felt that belonged to the church and made people behave more worldly if they could get it elsewhere. It was so well known it was a debate topic in my Philosophy of Religion course in high school.
I’m just…I’m concerned at how little some groups seem to know about Christian Fundamentalism. I wish I could help translate more.
Yes! I’ve heard this as well!
One of my friends asked if they wanted people to die and I was so confused because yes, of course they do. That’s a feature not a bug.
People in my church would talk about people who needed aid but didn’t or couldn’t work as parasites who represented an active threat to able bodied and working people. It’s a zero sum game to them.
It’s the coming eugenics that is in those thoughts processes that is really upsetting to me.
I grew up non-mormon in Utah and studied religion and I didn’t not no until a few years ago that Fundamentalists don’t think Catholics are Christian, it blew my mind.
Also, this article was helpful in understanding why they seem to think empathy is a sin. It’s so bonkers and backwards!
Being the only guy who works in a beauty store is fucking hilarious sometimes. Im the only one who can sell our shitty beard shampoo and a not insignificant amount of our customers think im untrustworthy. According to my coworkers i use every mens product we have so they can get dudes to buy a shaving cream. Trying to explain to people that theres no difference between “men’s” and “women’s” products is like talking to a brick wall. Ive had multiple women get angry with me for sampling them out one of our “men’s” moisturizers when they specifically said they wanted a mattifying one to control oil and that’s the best one we have for those two things. I still think about the guy who came in asking if we had “masks for men.” I contemplate ending it all every time someone returns a completely unused product that they absolutely refuse to try just because it either says or doesnt say “for men” on it. 90% of the time its the perfect product for them. I had a lady who was willing to buy a worse product for her needs that was more expensive just so it wouldnt say it was for men. Are you ever tired? Are you ever exhausted? These are the same kinds of people who say that im the one whos obsessed with gendering everything because im trans.
My coworkers call me the diversity hire. Theres like 3 men in this company in all of western canada so i think we should get t shirts and go out for drinks sometime. I found out recently that my boss was talking about hiring another guy so that “damien can have a friend.”
What i dont tell them is that i now get territorial every time another guy comes in to drop off his resume. I dont show it but i can feel my hackles raising and my pre-domesticity instincts kicking in every time some guy threatens to usurp my position as “only guy here.” I know thats a completely unwarranted reaction but its so fucking funny. My coworkers are out here wondering if i feel out of place and lonely without any guy friends at work to be bros with and when a man applies for a job i get the urge to bite him like a beast
I have had the honor of working on two different comics projects with Don Hertzfeldt. Flight, and Fusion Future. But this is the story of my first interaction with the man.
Fully missed the title of the subreddit on my first read and thought they had a toddler that they were being kind of mean to who had taken to the wheel instead of the cat
my idiot naked toddler son named Salt, who runs faster than God and demands as much praise
Not only did I miraculously survive the first assassination you all know about, I also survived the assassination attempt on that other impostor too
The plot thickens
I want an AU where Anna Anderson and a False Dimitry are working together to try and take over Russia, like an even more incompetent and more Tsarist Jessie and James
When unions are outlawed, only outlaws will have unions. Unions don’t owe their existence to labor laws that protect organizing activities. Rather, labor laws exist because once-illegal unions were formed in the teeth of violent suppression, and those unions demanded – and got – labor law.
Bosses have hated unions since the start, and they’ve really hated laws protecting workers. Dress this up in whatever self-serving rationale you want – “the freedom to contract,” or “meritocracy” – it all cashes out to this: when workers bargain collectively, value that would otherwise go to investors and executives goes to the workers.
I’m not just talking about wages here, either. If an employer is forced – by a union, or by a labor law that only exists because of union militancy – to operate a safe workplace, they have to spend money on things like fire suppression, PPE, and paid breaks to avoid repetitive strain injuries. In the absence of some force that corrals bosses into providing these safety measures, they can use that money to pay themselves, and externalize the cost of on-the-job injuries to their workers.
The cost and price of a good or service is the tangible expression of power. It is a matter of politics, not economics. If consumer protection agencies demand that companies provide safe, well-manufactured goods, if there are prohibitions on price-fixing and profiteering, then value shifts from the corporation to its customers.
Now, if labor has few rights and consumers have many rights, then bosses can pass their consumer-side losses on to their workers. This is the Walmart story, the Amazon story: cheap goods paid for with low wages and dangerous working conditions. Likewise, if consumer rights are weak but labor rights are strong, then bosses can pass their costs onto their customers, continuing to take high profits by charging more. This is the story of local gig-work ordinances like NYC’s, which guaranteed a minimum wage to delivery drivers – restaurateurs responded by demanding the right to add a surcharge to their bills:
But if labor and consumer groups act in solidarity, then they can operate as a bloc and bosses and investors have to eat shit. Back in 2017, the pilots’ union for American Airlines forced their bosses into a raise. Wall Street freaked out and tanked AA’s stock. Analysts for big banks were outraged. Citi’s Kevin Crissey summed up the situation perfectly, in a fuming memo: “This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers”:
my brother had a brilliant idea that i wanted to share with other people who have four-legged family members: he trained our two cats to go directly to the door when they hear the fire alarm.
obviously at first the fire alarm sent them scrambling for cover, but he started slowly by giving them treats whenever it went off, when someone burned food or forgot to open the fireplace flu. he then progressed to calling them to the door to offer treats immediately after the alarm went off. and it actually wasn’t too long before the cats voluntarily started going to the door upon hearing the alarm.
i think this was genius because in the event of a real emergency we know exactly where the cats will be and we will not have to waste precious time trying to find them to rescue them. i think this method would work equally well with dogs and probably other free-roaming pets such as rabbits, ferrets, etc. and i certainly encourage others to give it a shot!
I trained Neelix to alert me to Sounds. So in the even of A Sound he’d find me to let me know about it. Oven timers, knocking at the door, weird creature stuck in the yard, etc. This has the added effect of being able to scoop him up and bring him to safety in the event said sound is a fire alarm or a tornado siren.
The downside is, when I had a baby, every time it cried he’d barrel into the room to let me know. Even if I was already in the room. And if I couldn’t make The Sound stop (because an infant works differently than an oven timer), he’d start biting me urgently. 😅
Confused, but doing his best:
Oh, context is that I’m deaf not that I wanted to create a beast that’d harass me over sounds.
I am honored to be toasted by anyone's first shot of Malort :D I don't believe for a second it's what made me sick! It's healthful and medicinal. Anyone in Chicago will tell you that. That's why it....tastes that way.
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