I set up a fake phone number you can give out to people who ask for your number but you don’t want to give it to them.
515-808-2362 directs to ringing, then a voicemail that just plays this:
you’re welcome
if anyone leaves voicemails, i may post them here
This is actually a really good resource
jfc i called and they werent’ kidding i need to get a recording of this shit
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Let’s play a game.
Type the following words into your tags box, then post the first automatic tag that comes up.
you, also, what, when, why, how, look, because, never
(via goblinbutch)
[video]
friendlyneighborhoodcommiescum:
A cunning vampire door-to-door salesperson who stands in people’s doorways and talks until they can find a convenient moment to drop their pen and the person picks it up and the vampire says oh “Thank you” and the person says “you’re welcome” and the vampire smiles a big fangy grin and steps inside
And that’s this vampire’s modus operandi for decades And then the language starts to change and suddenly millenials have homes and the vampire thanks them and they say “oh, no problem” and the vampire is like ???????????????? this was not the plan
(Source: cupofcoffin, via dukeofbookingham)
ok so there’s a game me and my friends play called “don’t get me started” and basically someone gives another person a random topic and they have to go on an angry rant about it and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us at parties and car rides so I highly recommend playing sometimes with your friends
this is my kind of game
(via adelindschade)
Here’s a question that no one ever has a good answer for: why are cashiers forced to stand? Who decided people need to stand for 4 hours straight between breaks when they don’t MOVE?
If you find out, let me know so I can punch them.
Good question! It’s actually because cashiers sitting down appears lazy and unproductive to the kinds of customers who would complain about that sort of thing! Americans generally can’t accept when retail people don’t look like their job is excessively hard, so cashiers aren’t allowed to sit. It’s been shown that standing for so long, even on padded rubber mats many cashiers have, has a detrimental effect on the knees.
The American retail atmosphere is very different from most other developed nations. I’ve heard Americans describe grocery cashiers in Europe as “rude” and “lazy” because they get to sit down and they don’t have someone bagging your groceries for you. I’ve seen many Europeans genuinely shocked at how aggressive and in-your-face American retail employees are and even more surprised to learn we’re forced to be that way by our employers. Hired spies called “secret shoppers” are used to assess the quality of service, and at any time if you don’t greet and question every customer, if you don’t constantly have a smile on your face, if you’re sitting down for any reason, you could get fired. It’s a constant system of pomp and circumstance awash in paranoia meant to put us in early graves.
This system is seen as desirable by the people in charge because it ostensibly gets more labour out of people for the same salary and it drives many to quit. It’s much, much cheaper to hire and train new people and use them up than it is to pay the wage of someone who’s been with the company a year or two.
(Source: bulbabutt, via dyinghistoric)
[video]
Imagine playing a survival horror game where instead of being a gritty reporter or a single parent or a tortured soul with amnesia, you’re a cat. You live in a haunted house, and it is your job to defend your human/s from harm.
Instead of weapons, you fight with your claws. You jump, you twist, and your meows and hisses have different abilities. But if you make TOO much noise, your human/s hush you, and you can’t continue with your assault until they’ve left you be.
There are various spirits and some are helpful. Ghost mice give you life, ghost crickets give you information, and a former Guardian cat is your guide. You have to succeed where your predecessor failed- finding the source of the haunting and getting rid of it.
And if you don’t succeed, your human dies, and you are left alone.
I love this in particular because the Spring-Loaded Cat is such a horror trope – someone’s in a dark place, something jumps out and scares the dickens out of them, turns out it’s the cat
if you watch enough of these movies you can time the real monster’s subsequent arrival to the split-second
and I always thought “those poor cats, trying so hard to get these stupid people to leave immediately and wait in the car instead of wandering slowly around a dark basement calling ‘hello? is anyone there?’ but they never listen”
so yes, I don’t even like 99% of video games but I would absolutely buy Spring-Loaded Cat: The Game
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Bernie Sanders Scolds Reporter for Hair Remark: ‘Do You Have Serious Questions?’ -
Okay, but hold on for a second, because this is a serious fucking question.
Bernie is, of course, right – no one SHOULD be subject to criticism like that. But not being subject to intense scrutiny over our appearance is simply not an option for women in professional environments. It just isn’t.
And the thing is, this isn’t a small issue for women. This is an economic issue, it’s an investment-of-time issue, it’s a quality of life issue.
I’ll give you an example, and for this example, I’ll use myself and a mythical dude named Steve. This mythical dude named Steve would be almost exactly like my husband, who also worked at a bank, except not in the big-and-tall section where suits cost so much money you think they were hand-sewn by magical elves.
Mythical dude named Steve and I are both bankers for a bank. Let’s it call it Wagontrain. Just for funsies. We both make a nice round sum of money, say, 50K a year. (We’ll come back to that in a moment, but for the moment let’s assume we both make the same amount of money.)
Let’s even say that Steve and I spend the same amount of money on suits that I did every year, which, again, in my experience, isn’t going to be the case. But let’s just say we’re spending the same exact amount of money on suits.
Now, let’s say that in order to be considered a promotable employee, we both have to maintain a certain level of grooming. For Steve, that’s going to be getting a decent haircut, shaving, wearing deodorant – pretty basic stuff. And if he is decently groomed, even somewhat slightly slovenly, he’s likely to be judged on the quality of work he does.
But me? I’m going to have to – in a professional environment like that, and again in my direct and personal experience – in order to be taken seriously, I’m going to have to maintain a manicure ($15/weekly), get my hair professionally cut, styled, and dyed (when I worked in banking, the prevailing style all of the women got cost about $60 more than a man’s haircut, every six weeks), wear makeup (let’s be generous and call that $25 a month, but that’s pretty generous). I’ll also need to wear jewelry, so let’s give me a jewelry budget of $25 a month also, just for round numbers.
Oh. And let’s not forget shoes. Where Steve the banker will get two pairs of shoes, maybe three if he really likes them, I’ll need to continually buy new pairs of shoes. I don’t really want to, but I am going to be judged if I keep trying to wear the same pair of shoes all the time. Let’s say I only buy 5 pairs in a year, and he buys 3 every two years. Again for the sake of argument, let’s call every pair of shoes $50. So in one year he’s bought 1.5 pairs of shoes, so that’s $75, and I’ve bought $250 pairs of shoes, so I’ve spent $175 more than he has.
None of this is mythical, by the way. This is all based, again, on my personal experience. I’d get coached at Wagontrain for my appearance not being ‘promotable.’ I got sat down by an upper-level female manager and given a walkthrough on professional dress and appearance at the management levels, what they expected to be able to promote me to management
So at the end of that year, I’ll have gotten my hair done 8 times at $60 more than Steve’s haircuts, I’ll have gotten, let’s say 50 manicures (maybe I made a couple of those manicures last more than one week), I’ll have spent my jewelry and makeup budgets as we noted above, and I’ll have bought those shoes.
(8 * 60) + (50 * 15) + (12 * 25) + (12 * 25) + 175= $2005
Wow! I’ve just spent FOUR PERCENT of my GROSS (not net) income on grooming, and more than that, four percent MORE than Steve, just to meet the basic grooming standards that we’re both expected to meet. The standards just happen to be way different and far more strenuous for me.
Now let’s walk that back a little bit more. Let’s assume that instead of us making the same amount, that I make 40K while Steve makes 50K. That’s about 80 percent of 50K - so pretty close to the national wage gap (for white women - remember that Black and Latina women will make significantly less, on average). My grooming standards haven’t changed for this job – we’re just adjusting for my gender. Suddenly that $2000 is 4.4 percent of my income, and again, 4.4 percent MORE than Steve has to spend.
But wait – there’s more. Women in professional environments spend an average of 55 minutes per day on their appearance. Assuming Steve spends 20 minutes getting showered, shaved, and putting on his suit, that’s 35 minutes more per work day.
At 22 working days per month, 12 months a year, 35 more minutes is… ((22 * 12) * 35)/60 = 154 hours of our lives, or, put another way, 6.41 days.
That doesn’t count the hours spent in the salon, the hours spent getting our nails done – and my time in a salon was nothing compared to the investment of time, pain, chemicals and care some of my Black coworkers have to put in, in order to maintain “professional” appearances. That’s something I don’t feel really qualified to speak further on, but I am completely aware that grooming regimens are far more strenuous and costly for women of color than they are for white women.
So, when that reporter is asking Bernie if he thinks it’s “fair” that news focuses more on Hillary’s hair than his, they’re not asking about an unimportant issue where women are concerned. They’re literally asking about an issue that eats 4 percent - at minimum - of our income, and literally almost two percent of the time out of every year we live. Women are judged on their appearance far more than men as compared to the job performance they actually put forth.
That’s an economic and quality-of-life issue, and it affects women at every socioeconomic level differently, but it definitely affects us all.
(via bonehandledknife)
[video]