The Optimist

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[ancientson]

You know what? This actually isn’t funny at all because this really does happen. Baby boomers can’t afford to retire; that’s a big part of why millennials can’t find jobs in their fields. And if they lose their jobs (which can mean a variety of things, including their companies finding an excuse to fire them so they don’t have to pay anything for their retirement, which happened to my uncle and 5 people he worked with over one year), they aren’t as desirable because they’re retirement-age. The world has changed a lot since they got jobs they thought were supposed to be secure, and now their old strategies that used to work for finding a job don’t work anymore and they don’t know what does work. So a lot are desperate; I recently talked to a woman who had to be in at least her mid-60s who was begging on a street corner because she was replaced by a younger person and lost her job of 18 years, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard a story like that. A lot of people who were never rich to begin with lost a lot in the 2008 financial crisis and never fully recovered. Baby boomers didn’t all just magically become financially secure as they got older.

This generation war bullshit is 100% manufactured to keep our anger misdirected. It’s not baby boomers screwing over millennials. It’s rich capitalists of every living generation screwing over baby boomers, their parents, gen x-ers, millennials, and gen z-ers all at once and all in different ways. And if we collectively realize that we’re not enemies and that we actually have a common cause with common enemies, it’ll be really bad for the people doing this to us, which is why they’re pushing the generation war thing so hard.

[seoscribbles]

[brattylikestoeat]

[angelsonthesideline-deactivated]

This looks more like a how-to by @5triderofthenorth or @instructor144

[5triderofthenorth]

One of the easiest and most gratifying restorations a person can do! About half my cast iron is salvaged, the rest was new.

[bethrogers]

A great YouTube channel for cast iron cookware, restoring, collecting, cleaning & cooking, is Cast Iron Cookware.   The guy is incredible.  

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO7aRkmQGejiKrXhAniOVnw

[sugarcoatedagony]

This is one of my favorite childhood stories.

[alwaysalyvia]

WHAT THE FUCK

[amburdoll-deactivated20151121]

I loved these books

[mentallyrecovering]

[384739257024032382-deactivated2]

[nature-punks]

Instead of endless wastelands of mowed grass lawns, consider:

[sophist-sophia]

😍

[dvar-trek]

this only works in places with lots of rain, a temperate summer, and a nice cold winter. like England. or Michigan.

[star-anise]

True! Unless you can find an economical way to irrigate, more appropriate lawn alternatives in hotter, more arid places might lean more to prairie meadows using local grasses and wildflowers:

Or, they might mean doing classic landscaping, but with rocks and xeriscape plants:

Or having a cactus garden:

There are lots of exciting possibilities once you throw the classic turf lawn out the window!

[tygermama]

these are all so beautiful and all I can think is ‘that stone arc isn’t a stargate and I’m sad about it’

[archliches]

having adhd makes all of your thoughts feel like a 7-way venn diagram

[archliches]

and explaining anything like this

[shock]

love being trusted with “you cant tell anyone this” conversations and nodding a lot and forgetting everything they told me like god intended and going down as a trustworthy individual while doing literally zero work of ill or good

[itscolossal]

WATCH: Ingenious Hack for Sketching with Two Point Perspective Using an Elastic String [video]

[lunariagold-deactivated20230802]

Oh look… MORE AWESOME SHIT NOBODY TOLD ME IN ART SCHOOL

[spitblaze]

if someone tells you they play Yakuza for anything other than the stupendous water physics they’re probably lying

[draayder]

I just started yakuza kenzan and was already floored by this, the literal first moments of the game featuring the most photo-realistic puddle I’ve ever seen

this game came out in 2008

[draayder]

this is not water physics but yakuza 7 decided it wanted to innovate bread physics too

and the team kind of going hog on little things like that gets talked about a little here

Yokoyama just writes “and then Ichiban eats some bread” and the entire animation and modelling team just goes oh yeah? oh yeah??? oh he’ll eat some fucking bread alright 

[unyanizedcatboys]

yo WHAT THE FUCK

[lagonegirl]

[simonalkenmayer]

The Sacrifices of the Windy Pits

In the 1950’s, spelunkers in North Yorkshire, England, took it upon themselves to investigate a set of narrow crevasses cut into the landscape, known as the Windy Pits. They uncovered the remains of some 22 individuals, which according to carbon dating, met their fates there some time during, or just prior to the first century. The manner of their deaths and disposal is most odd, and has the…

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[little-miss-rasputin-pageant]

honestly i think we should just start reacting to people without masks like they reacted to socks in monsters inc

[hockeysweetheart]

[little-miss-rasputin-pageant]

how dare you be funnier than me

[later-slayer]

can someone please draw V and Johnny Silverhand in one of those “this is our getalong t-shirt” shirts?

[beesmygod]

“chuffed doesnt mean what you think it means”

it means exactly what i think it means its just some stupid word that literally has two definitions that mean the opposite thing

[mysterysnake-deactivated2013122]

what the hell

[ashwilliamsrighthand]

This makes me really chuffed

[pameladoove-deactivated20180821]

This post is quite egregious

[cornflakepizza]

Well I’m nonplussed by this whole post.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

goddamnit.

[leatherpatches-deactivated20150]

[conservative-libertarian-deacti]

[mattsunsthighs]

all of you go to hell

[divagonzo]

And you wonder why i am boggled at times

[inactive1346597623595641352]

These are called contronyms! A word that is its own opposite.

[rubes-dragon-deactivated2024030]

Why the fuck do these exist

[operativesurprise]

One theory is that the sarcastic use of the word became exceedingly prevalent and because another dictionary definition. 

[sufferingsappho-deactivated2017]

Are you telling me that we were such sarcastic shits it literally changed our language.

[summonerxi]

Literally is another example now.

[luxlightly]

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present. 

[luxlightly]

“Wooow! How did Orwell predict the surveillance state so well in 1984??” 

He didn’t. He was making an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present, and exaggerated it to make the metaphor obvious.

Learning and discussing these works in terms of them being predictions and having test questions like “do you think his prediction came true?” is not only pointless, but actively counterintuitive. When you frame these works as being ‘people from the past knew that the future would be terrible’ you shift the entire perspective to one of some kind of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. 

These author’s aren’t oracles. They’re satirists. Their predictions ‘come true’ because they were already true when they wrote them. 

[goawfma]

this is an insult

[blame-my-muses]

I once applied and interviewed at a bookstore cafe for a barista position. It was way closer to my home, and I had almost a decade of experience working in a coffee shop at that point. 

Got to the interview, and it turned out they didn’t want a barista, they wanted someone to spearhead their new cafe, as the cafe that had been in the store before didn’t want to resign their lease with the bookshop. They wanted to put their own cafe in its place, all new menus etc. They needed someone experienced to train their new staff, to handle window displays, to communicate with the bookstore owners about changes and needs of the cafe, to be able to handle inventory and ordering.

Okay, I had basically done most of that stuff at my previous job. I asked if cafe positions would also be required/trained to work the bookstore. They would. They would be required to run the book sale counter, stock and reshelf books, and help bookshop customers find things. They would also–despite having an outside cleaning company–have to help maintain bathroom cleanliness. They’d have to take out trash, and clean spills, and vacuum.  Wow, that’s a lot, I said. Is this a manager’s position, then?

No, I was told, it wasn’t, but there was a chance that after a training period it might become one. And that made me pause, because I’d been working as the front-of-house manager at my cafe, and I knew how much work that entailed, and what kind of money I was making, and it was only the commute that had me looking for a new job. So I asked what the job paid. $8. E I G H T  D O L L A R S. Per hour. Barely above minimum. For all of that work. For someone they expected to get an entirely new cafe up and running, and then also do the work of the bookstore and the cleaning company as well.  I thanked the woman for the interview, said I’d have to talk to my significant other about the impact a four dollar pay cut would have on our finances, and that I wasn’t sure it was the job for me. She asked me to sleep on it, and she’d call me the next day.  This is a job I was way more than qualified for. I had years of experience doing exactly the things they wanted. It was a convenient location, close to my home–I could walk there if I absolutely had to. I did not go home and talk about that four dollar pay cut and what it would do to our finances. I knew as soon as she told me that not only was it not feasible for us, it was downright insulting. That little money? For a frankly ridiculous list of responsibilities and expectations? She called back the next day. I thanked her again, and told her in no uncertain terms that my time was worth way more than what they were offering. And whenever people bitch about Millennials being lazy, not spending money, not buying houses…whatever the complaint of the month is…I think about the very nice lady who conducted this interview, and how confused she was that I didn’t want the job.