As much as I love the Stardew Valley spouses it always kinda bugs me that they stay stagnant after you marry them. Like even after having kids and passing a decade in game they look and act the exact same? Anyway what if
Ian Stone, Doubting Thomas, oil on linen, 12x16 in, 2023
“If you know the painting by Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas, it was my direct inspiration for this piece.
A doubting Thomas is a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience. 50-60 years ago, it was not uncommon for people to think or believe that being gay was a phase or a mental illness or deviance in some shape or form. It’s embarrassing that the same things are being said about trans people today.”
STOP SCROLLING!!! THIS IS NOT A PHOTO IT’S OIL ON LINEN!!!!!!!!!
Fun fact: after the American Physical Society held their 1986 annual meeting at the MGM Grand, the entire city of Las Vegas politely asked APS to never, ever come back.
Was it because the physicists were super-smart MIT-blackjack-team forerunners who took the casino for everything it was worth? Actually, the complete opposite: they didn’t gamble. At all. After all, they knew their statistics. Most of them were broke grad students who had no intention of throwing away their stipends on fundamental misunderstandings of Poisson processes. As a result the casino gaming floor was dead. Sometimes the winning move really is not to play.
Me the only time I’ve ever been to Vegas - had one beer and didn’t gamble a cent. Funny thing is, they happily welcome back hacker cons, and you’d think hackers would be at LEAST as aware of probability. Apparently not!
When I was a kid living in LA, we went to Vegas pretty regularly, since it was only about 4 hours away. My parents would find coupons in the LA Times in the off season and we’d go for a few days. Our whole family could stay in one of the fancy Strip hotels for like $20 a night, and there were $5 all-you-could-eat buffets with actually good food. Plus the arcades were amazing. And so was the hiking! Which is what we were really there for. Red Rock Canyon, with all its tiny caves that you can easily climb up to, is amazingly fun when you’re a little kid. Our vacations were very much subsidized by gamblers.
Relatedly, one time when I was a kid, a large chunk of my extended family went on a cruise to see an eclipse. Everyone on the cruise was scientists or science hobbyists. The crew didn’t know what to do with us! Everyone wanted the 6 pm dinner, no one wanted the 10 pm dinner that you had to dress up for. The casino was empty for the entire week. A group of passengers demanded that all the lights on the deck be turned off at night, even the pretty decorative ones, for at least an hour and preferably more, every single night. One night at dinner, my grandmother saw dolphins out the window, and as word spread the entire dining room emptied, even though it was still the middle of dinner. And that’s not even getting into how my grandfather started talking to the cleaning staff (who were not supposed to talk back) and found out they wouldn’t be let off work to see the eclipse, and within hours had formed an entire committee to go with him to demand to speak to the captain about this mistreatment of the staff.
There are… a lot of places where large groups of scientists probably aren’t welcome a second time.
having cash is like having secret money. like whos gonna find out i’m buying tacos with this crisp $20 bill??? not my bank account, that’s for sure
That’s literally why the government wants to stop it
Defend cash. The existence of a cash economy is so so necessary for the survival of every population that the government wants to kill. Homeless people, sex workers, undocumented people, addicts. They all need cash to survive.
Alternative theory: time travelers from the far distant future with only the vaguest idea of how restaurants work BUT they have seen filmed entertainment. They only have a limited amount of budget/time so didn’t invest heavily in the subterfuge, and don’t care anyway. The old lady is a frustrated culinary historian absolutely thrilled to try out her recreated recipes on some unsuspecting locals.
my friends and i used to frequent a little Thai place that was For Sure the front for some kind of money laundering. we loved it. the food was amazing, also cooked by a single elderly woman. the vibes were absolutely chaotic.
the tables were separated by raw plywood dividers. the walls were covered by woven plastic mats. the plumbing was ancient, so there were “please only flush toilet paper down the toilet” signs–written in red sharpie on copies of their last repair bill?? the out of order stall in the ladies’ room was indicated by a potted tree holding the door open. they didn’t have a liquor license, but you could bring your own wine; they only charged a corking fee if you borrowed their bottle opener, so by the second visit everyone had started carrying one in their purse. there was one (1) soup dish that came with a vaguely threatening caveat against sharing.
that place gave us so much flavor, laughter, spice sweat, and tears. i hope the owners pulled off whatever they were trying to do. bless.
I was an employee and a regular at the cash only coffee shop that the owner used for laundering money from his cocaine sales for a local extralegal organization.
We had a very stable clientele of 30 of so people who would come in once a day, buy a cup of coffee for a dollar, and then hang out for twelve hours. Most of these people (me included) were Weird But Not The Kind Of Weird That Attracts Police Attention and if anyone did start attracting police attention (by starting fights, dealing meth in the parking lot, or leaving their bong on a table on the patio) they were promptly banned.
It turns out that having 5-20 broke, chainsmoking misanthropes on the premises at all times does a great job of making it look like you’re a real business while keeping the overhead low because you can pay under the table and your customers never care when you run out of milk, bagels, or to-go cups. (I had one shift there near the end where I sold a total of $6 of product because we were out of everything except whole milk, flavor syrups, and decaf coffee)
For the last six months of operation that place didn’t even have a working coffee machine (one of the employees brought in his grandma’s Mr. Coffee when the heating element on the Bunn died) and in the last two months even coffee stopped getting delivered and the employees were buying ice and ground coffee from the grocery store out of the drawer and leaving receipts in our cash-out envelopes (which were kept in the fridge until the manager showed up once a week and did everyone’s paycheck out of whatever was in the fridge).
So if you were a normie who wandered in we just looked like a shitty coffee shop that didn’t even take cards that sold canned drinks and black coffee and was always out of ingredients for smoothies and you didn’t want to hang out on a date or study or bring you kids there because the place was full of smoke and angsty teenagers who were all fucking each other. But if you kept coming back we would eventually adopt you as a regular and someone would tell you why there was a 6-foot-long mirrored table in the lounge where the manager did the cash count.
Go buy takeout without a bra on. Go pick up your prescription without having shaved your PCOS facial hair. Go get groceries while wearing a raggedy shirt because all of the other shirts are in the washer. Go to a friend’s house without makeup on. Go buy gas while wearing fuzzy slippers. Go sit outside with your hair a mess. Go throw out the garbage while wearing clothes that don’t match.
You are allowed to exist, and all of this stuff is especially okay while working on recovery when you can’t even function. You’re allowed to do this while fat too, and I say this as a fat person myself. If someone judges you? You’re not harming anyone. You’re paying for whatever you’re buying. You don’t owe anybody a specific appearance while doing stuff like errands. You will never see those people again. They can kiss my fat ass.
If you’re in a state where you can barely take care of yourself, you are allowed to do errands and leave your house without looking “proper.” You’re already struggling. Fuck anyone who would judge your pajamas while you throw away your trash. They don’t fucking know you and how hard it is for you to even get out of bed.
You deserve to take care of yourself however you need to.
Sorry babes but as someone who lived lug around 500 cds they can die. To me lps are at least pretty and pretentious like a fine wine. Cds have no point
the point is cds are sexy as hell. sorry you dont know what sex is.
The real point is that you OWN a CD. You do NOT own anything digital you purchase.
Google Play stole hundreds of dollars worth of music I paid them for from me by forcing me to upload it to YouTube Music (or lose it entirely) which is behind a subscription paywall, requiring me now to pay more money every month if I want to listen to MY music I PAID for without constant advertising.
You do not own anything digitally purchased. It can be taken back from you at any time and it is fully legal for big corporations to do so for some reason.
CDs can’t be taken from you unless they come into your house or car in person to physically pry them out of your cold dead hands.
That’s why the resurgence. As funny as that person’s reply to you was, it’s not in fact because they look sexy. It’s because you actually own them.
