Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

Avatar
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.
Avatar

I am sorry to say that if I were a dragon age companion, my after-fight dialogue line would almost certainly be "hah! Bitch."

Avatar

🔥 The beacons are lit; the library calls for aid

The Trump administration has issued an executive order aimed at dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services - the ONLY federal agency for America's libraries.

Using just 0.003% of the federal budget, the IMLS funds services at libraries across the country; services like Braille and talking books for the visually impaired, high-speed internet access, and early literacy programs.

Libraries are known for doing more with less, but even we can't work with nothing.

How You Can Help:

🔥 Call your congressperson!

Use the app of your choice or look 'em up here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Pro tip: If your phone anxiety is high, call at night and leave a voicemail. You can even write yourself a script in advance and read it off. Heck, read them this post if you want to.

Phones a total no-go? The American Library Association has a form for you: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577

🔥Tell your friends!

Tell strangers, for that matter. People in line at the check out, your elderly neighbor, the mail carrier - no one is safe from your library advocacy. Libraries are for everyone and we need all the help we can get.

...Wait, why do we need this IMLS thing again?

The ALA says it best in their official statement and lists some ways libraries across the country use IMLS funding:

But if you want a really specific answer, here at LCPL we use IMLS funding to provide our amazing interlibrary loan service. If we can't purchase an item you request (out of print books, for example) this service lets us borrow it from another library and check it out to you.

IMLS also funds the statewide Indiana Digital Library and Evergreen Indiana, which gives patrons of smaller Indiana libraries access to collections just as large and varied as the big libraries' collections.

As usual, cutting this funding will hurt rural communities the most - but every library user will feel it one way or another. Let's let Congress know that's unacceptable.

Avatar

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.

Avatar
““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)

Avatar

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

Avatar

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.

Avatar

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.

Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
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!!

Avatar

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.

Avatar

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.

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.