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Red's Lair

@rederiswrites / rederiswrites.tumblr.com

100% a contrarian old crank. I write fic for Dragon Age, Witcher, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, primarily. On AO3 as RedEris, Etsy at www.goldenapplebeads.etsy.com. Expect fandom, lampworking, and homesteading content.  Icon is my Samhal Lavellan by kirkwallgirl, header Aedan Cousland by me, Shale by rhodaperdition.
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And lo, after these many hours of scrounging through the same areas again and exploring every area I can reach, I finally managed to get the Shadow Dragons shop to level 3 and buy Arden the Tevinter decorating theme.

I like the tables and benches and the cool news stand scroll holder things, but on the while I could do without the freaky cult statues. I think some magic neon banners would've been more suitable tbh. The creepy demon statues aren't really modern Tevinter; you only find those in the deeper, more out of the way spots.

Still, for Arden's sake, I'm happy.

Could have really gone for some of those gorgeous green and red enameled brass trays you see but can't buy in the market. Or the pretty painted trunks.

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““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””

— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)

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could you tell me what Private Equity is and why it's a bad thing?

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Oh man okay first of all I'm pretty sure that only MBAs truly understand private equity, and I'm so far from being an MBA that I don't even file my own taxes, but I'll try to give a really rough explanation.

At the most basic level, a private equity firm is just a business that buys up stock in companies that are not public (not on the stock exchange for people to buy public shares). In practice, these firms are massive, and in 2021 they managed close to 20% of corporate equity in the US. Importantly, that's a MUCH bigger share than it was ten years earlier, and private equity is a fast-growing part of the world market.

Why it's bad is that this sector of investing falls at the juncture of just a lot of loopholes and blind spots in government regulation, allowing these private equity firms to manage the companies they own in very predatory ways.

For example, private equity firm Golden Gate Capital killed Red Lobster. Basically, they bought the company and started stripping it for parts, because their only interest in the companies they buy is investment profit. They don't have any incentive to care about the company's long-term health. The biggest thing they did to Red Lobster was what's called a sale/leaseback. Basically, insofar as I understand it, they sold the real estate the company owned--i.e. the actual restaurants, took the profit from that, and then made Red Lobster pay them to lease the restaurants. Ultimately this proved crippling for Red Lobster, but through evil finance magic and careful corporate structuring, Golden Gate Capital gets the profit, while Red Lobster got all the debt.

Private equity firm KKR is what killed Toys R Us, again with sale/leaseback and other management methods that favor short term profit over long-term viability, like firing people until there isn't enough staff, pushing store credit cards, assorted other bullshit I barely understand.

Basically, private equity is companies that buy up businesses using leveraged funds (borrowed money) and then "strip and flip" them, squeezing as much profit out of them as possible and then dipping out to leave the company to deal with the fallout. A lot of recent major company bankruptcies besides the ones I mention above came on the heels of the company being managed by a private equity firm. JoAnn Fabrics is one of the most recent.

Yeah. That's the best I can do. Basically, it's a very fast-growing sector of vulture capitalism and it's making a small number of people very rich off killing otherwise viable companies that the rest of us plebes liked and wanted to keep.

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The invisible line between the solavellan fans reblogging Trick Weekes' recent posts about Solas and his uhhh tastes and the Solas fans quietly ignoring them.

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reblogged
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thededfa

Starting to make my mother's dolls their St Patrick's day outfits!

Another! That's all the 14.5" dolls, now on to a vintage one

The doll from the 80s and the one from the 60s have their holiday outfits!

Whoops, binge sewing...

A couple more 14.5 dolls, (mom bought more lol), Grandma Wolf, and my great-grandmother's doll all dressed!

Finished in the nick of time!!

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State of the garden address:

Yeah it looks like shit. So does the bigger one. I've put in some work; Jacob and Phantom have put in some work. But now it's time to really push, because the starting gun has gone off and there are now quite a few things I could be planting. Lettuce, spinach, carrots, collards, kale, kohlrabi, parsnips, peas, radishes, turnips, and beets.

I'd love to get a 3x whatever bed cleared today. I usually do 3x [width of garden] beds, rather than rows, because it's more space efficient and makes it easier not to compact the soil.

This year I'd really like to do mixed plantings within those beds to make individual beds more genetically diverse, for integrated pest management purposes. That is, if you have, say, a bunch of collards plants and they're all in a row, touching at the fullest extent of their growth like they're supposed to, then it's very easy for harlequin bugs to come along and infest the entire bed. But if the next plant over is a radish, and then a row of beets, the bugs have to work harder to get to all your collards.

Well. Here we go.

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So Jacob and I are confirmed for demonstrating a collaborative project for the upcoming local blacksmithing event. Here's a sneak peek at what we're aiming for.

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Computer died, and when I reloaded, Tumblr's UI was all fucked. Is that Tumblr-side, or me-side?

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Another one about my husband, because I entertained a friend of his with this fact yesterday: Phantom, the boy, me, we all have computers fully capable of playing the latest generation of video games. Jacob bought them as gifts, unasked in all cases, working with the bestie to get the best value per money on each build. The boy's graphics card came from a lottery the bestie won, during the period where you almost couldn't get the high end cards for love nor money. Jacob? Does not have a computer. He uses his shitty work laptop, and when something he needs is locked out on that, he uses my 7 year old laptop.

Shoutout also to the bestie, though, while I'm at it. Not only did he design the pc builds and provide high-end used parts whenever he upgrades his own setup, as well as gifting us various peripherals, most of our consoles up to and including the PS5 were straight-up gifts. And no, he's not rich. He works in a warehouse. He just has his priorities, same as my husband, and we're very blessed to be among them.

Neither of them can express an emotion to save their lives, and I have raised my own son to be different, but nonetheless, as the poem goes, I love the way men love.

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Eira Aldwir Lavellan Look Book: Veilguard Era

I sort of forgot that I'd been working on these! I was planning to do a full collection, including Eira's time with the inquisition and even before that with her clan, but I ran out of steam. It was very fun though! So I am planning to go back to it and bring out an Inquisition Era collection next.

Individual images under the cut, including a very tasteful nude.

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