See it’s called “customer” because you’d be “giving custom” by customarily getting your iron from this one forge or having a standing order with this cheesemaker for X pounds each winter, because you might buy one-off finished or consumer goods from artisans or marketplace traders, but established merchants dealt in bulk staples and intermediary goods
The RPG “item shop” is a backwards projection of a general store concept that dates to the 19th century
(Potion shop actually has earlier precedent)
I do appreciate how in Jeff “Spiderweb Software” Vogel’s Exile/Avernum tactical CRPGs the “general merchant” role was often filled by “quartermaster of an outpost, trading from its stores”, that’s pretty historically plausible
See it’s called “customer” because you’d be “giving custom” by customarily getting your iron from this one forge or having a standing order with this cheesemaker for X pounds each winter, because you might buy one-off finished consumer goods from artisans or marketplace traders, but established merchants dealt in bulk staples and intermediary goods
The RPG “item shop” is a backwards projection of a general store concept that dates to the 19th century
Y’know about notorious housing costs and homelessness situation in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Pacific coast of the US? In 2023, Portland and San Francisco are both moving forward with major multi-million-dollar projects to outlaw “street camping” while opening “city-run mass encampments.”
The mayor, 14 April 2023:
San Francisco is site of arguably one of worst situations in the US, where thousands units are completely inaccessible, and people pay over $2000 a month to live in closets or dorm-style high-density shared rooms, and upscale coffee shops and restaurants require phone apps or payment receipts for people to access restrooms. The W!!pedia page “Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area” is over 120,000 bytes in size and 12,000 words in length.
In April 2023, the city announces its grand plan: A “five-year plan” costing $600 million to “cut the number of unsheltered homeless in halve” in five years. So not a plan to put people in homes, but just to get them off the street, qualifying them as part of the strange designation of “the sheltered homeless” (they will still be homeless, but they won’t be “on the streets,” and will be “sheltered” by a city shelter or camp).
Get them out of sight, put them out of the way on an island or something:
In 2022, the city estimated that over 20,000 people are homeless in a calendar year.
And that’s only within the formal city
limits of San Francisco and doesn’t include the rest of the Bay Area
(which contains millions more people in Oakland, San Jose, Richmond,
etc.)
The rest of the Pacific coast?
In late 2022, Portland, its mayor, and its city council announced a major initiative to ban and outlaw “street camping”. Portland will simultaneously by opening “city-run encampments” or “sanctioned mass homeless camps.” In early 2023, Portland begins this project:
March 2023:
Hmm.
One of the most popular homeless related questions on Q/uora, as if were a “valid question” about how “you must earn your existence through work”, and not a sickening disregard for life:
Hmm.
Like:
The context of this is that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the layer-under-the-Supremes court for the West Coast, has established that localities may not criminalize sleeping outside unless they have some acceptable place on offer for everyone sleeping rough, other areas under other circuit courts do not face this constraint and thus do not feel the need to build such facilities if they want to ban people from camping on the street.
(though other dynamics may exist – New York City recognizes a right to shelter, which underpins a system that serves upwards of 20,000 people nightly)
This is exactly how the old personality handled socialization, but with the new personality it’s like I click on someone and select “small talk” from the contextual menu, it’s nuts.
Honestly weirder than the fact that more than half the groups of elementary schoolers walking home past my window are walking with parents is that those parents often have their own backpacks. What do they have in there?
OH, okay, I just saw a group go by with a mom wearing 2, front and back, while only 1 of the 5 kids had theirs, and I realized the adults are carrying children’s backpacks for them
Getting friends silk sheets because I kind of want being in my circle to be experienced as a bounty of petty luxury
Realizing that since you have to air-dry them they’re kind of class-gated away from apartment-dwellers, though.
You can absolutely air dry stuff in an apartment. I dried my clothing for years by hanging them from a piece of rope I strung between the fire sprinkler water pipe on one side of the apartment and the one on the other. Worked fine.
I wasn’t even doing it to be cheap, the building had dryers in the same room as the laundry room, I just wanted to reduce wear and tear on my clothes.
Air drying things in an apartment is, like, normal in most parts of the world. Liberate yourself from your American trappings and enjoy the internet weirdo’s gift of sheets.
My apartment in Norway has a portable drying rack.
It folds up nicely when not in use. IIRC, it was the single piece of furniture that came with the apartment, indicating that the landlord expected me to dry clothes there. (perhaps also because it’s cheap)
Yeah, can you put a whole fitted and top sheets on here, though?
…well, I presume you dry your own sheets somehow, huh
Horn combs are more affordable than you’d think because there apparently aren’t all that many other uses for buffalo horn (especially as an input to finished goods – I see them offered for dogs to chew), and our capitalist supply chains use every part of the buffalo
trying my hand at writing a video about fern sex again and I’m obsessed with the alternation of generations diagram on the American fern society’s website that (in addition to the typical bio textbook life cycle of just one fern drawn so it looks like it’s inbreeding) also depicts a girls’ night of ferns sitting near one another having sex on a blank background, thus contextualizing the dynamics a group of girlies usually has instead of just trying to show only one. it just brings me joy
oh to be a fern having sex with other ferns on a white background……
For everyone confused: Ferns go through two alternating generations, the big asexually reproducing sporophytes (the ones we normally think of as ferns) and the little sexually reproducing gametophytes (very tiny, look like leaves).
This image shows sporophytic selfing, where the big asexual fern makes little sexual ferns without breeding (since it has no sperm or eggs); outcrossing, where the little sexual ferns breed with others to make big asexual ferns; and gametophytic selfing, where one little sexual fern makes big asexual ferns by breeding with itself (a sad world).
Fun fact: flowering plants also do this–the little gametophytes just live inside the sporophyte’s flowers! Pollen is just a bunch of little male gametophytes :)
Thinking maybe I should try to find a serious girlfriend, but like, feeling it on inertia, since the anxiety zeroing I actually don’t feel any need for companionship and would be totally fine completing my life as the only human alive.
say what u want about the manscaped ads I know they are shit, all of them but the “evil, sinister, malcontent, balls” one puts me into fucking hysterics actually
Neighborhood is finally filling up with the young renters who feel like they own the place but show up a half- to full- decade after the first-time homeowners who actually own the place (when it’s time to settle down good luck finding a house remotely close, kids!)
Trying not to be put off by the fact they are clearly not registering me as a young peer
