My son, when he fell as a toddler, always looked to us to see if we reacted. I learned to say "TOUCHDOWN!" or "What are you doing on the floor?" or "While you're down there, can you see if there's any loose change under the couch?" If he was okay, he'd be distracted. If not, he'd cry immediately, and that's how we knew he was actually hurt.
"He certainly has a fertile imagination," said by some upper class twat trying to sound intelligent while using an intellectual dog whistle to alert other highbrows I was a liar, and passing it off to stupid little me as a compliment.
I used to hang out with those types. It's similar to country clubs, airline lounges, and first class travel. It's not so much about the amenities of the luxuries as much as it's about whom you meet. Or don't meet. You become good at golf as part of an upper class social thing.
Well, not just cakes are stored in these; sometimes rolls, cookies, or rotisserie chickens. Also the joke is that we care it's loud because then we have announced that we are eating late at night. Sometimes this wakes people, and sometimes you just want to snack and not have a conversation, or at the very least be polite to people sleeping. Same with the microwave beeping three times loudly when you heated something up.
Also, "big cakes in the fridge?" implies that cakes are sold and stored by the slice. They are, but they also come in wedged shaped boxes made from this plastic. Also it is usually leftovers, like there was a whole cake, but now it's a third of a cake left on some weird slippery cardboard tray. You had a party, most of the cake was eaten by others, but you didn't want to waste the last bit. It takes up a lot of room, is fragile, and spoils quickly. But your significant other is on the couch sleeping off a hangover, so being quiet is considerate.
I have had hosts be this direct, and we all went, "okay," and left. And came back when invited with no hard feelings. Usually D&D games, but also movie nights.
"The one thing about working concom is that fen sometimes enjoy freaking the mundanes."
The one thing about working as science fiction convention staff is that your attendees sometimes like being weird to outsiders, just to see them react in amusing ways, and that can be annoying to deal with.
You assume adventures follow similar logic. For example, when was the last time you encountered latrines, garderobes, or outhouses? Or thought about things like "how come this remote temple on this mountain has no food prep area?"
Nobody ever thinks that a tribe of lizard men, after the party slaughters half the scouting party made of mostly the most healthy of males, won't make the rest evacuate and take valuables with them?
I had an older cat that had broken hips that healed wrong. So when he laid down, he did this weird sploot on his belly that cats normally don't do. One of my younger cats imprinted on him, and also did the sploot. The first cat died, the other one splooted that way the rest of her life
I'm old, but "The Mephisto Waltz," a1971 horror film about a dying pianist (and Satanist) taking over a young piano players body. Lots of murder, lots of screaming, and decanters of blue liquid. My parents took me in a drive in to see it, and I guess thought I'd be okay with it at age five, sleeping in the back of the car.
I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.
"Nothing we can do," Microsoft said. "We have no gate key."
Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, "okay," and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.
"Oh, you mean this gate key," said Microsoft.
Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.
I only have one machine using Windows because I don't want to be "left behind" in the corporate desktop world, but it's on my "left hand monitor" while my center and right of three monitors are Kubuntu. The specs won't let me use 11 on any of my systems. My company laptop is still Windows 10 as well because some of our security software doesn't run on 11 yet.
If I didn't have to work in the corporate space, I'd quit Windows in a fast second. I have been using Kubuntu as my daily driver for almost 10 years now.
In high school, we had a science fiction club. I was vice president in my senior year. A year after I graduated, I was hanging out with some fellow graduates and one of them said, "How come you hated Christine so much?"
"Who?"
"Christine Smith. The blonde girl?"
"The blond girl who wore all those surfer shirts?"
"Yeah. Whats so bad about her?"
"Nothing. She was always so quiet. I barely remember her."
"Yeah, well she practically threw herself at you, and you treated her like she didn't exist."
"She did?"
"Yeah. We even tried to make it easy. We set her up at parties to talk to you, and you just acted like she wasn't even there. You were so rude."
"I literally had no idea. I totally would have dated her."
"Yeah, well, too late. She got so depressed after you graduated, that she ended up dropping out of everything and tried to kill herself. Shes been hospitalized and her parents moved away to be with her. Like, couldn't you gave even said hi? Just because you made vice president of the club didn't mean you were better than her or something."
The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.
I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, "by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this," and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that's millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like "This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group" or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.
They might be talking about FIEF.
https://www.feif.org/