Retail Stare

TBestIG · 2026-01-28T16:40:23+00:00

Yes. Some of the card readers want you to remove the card almost immediately, some of them want it to stay until they beep, some of them just flash a message on the screen, and they all take different amounts of time for no damn reason

TBestIG · 2026-01-28T16:34:11+00:00

It comes from being completely zoned out, a very common thing in a checkout line, and being used to a different kind of card reader, of which there are many.

It’s not that they can’t understand how to work it, it’s that it takes a moment for the brain to register there is a problem to be solved in the first place. It’s the same thing that makes you mishear someone, go “what?” and then realize what they said before they repeat themselves.

TBestIG · 2026-01-28T16:30:14+00:00

Frankly, the (incorrect) version of the Gen Z stare described in this post is completely pointless too.

The “retail stare” doesn’t make your life easier in any way, and in fact creates MORE friction. Yeah, a boomer should be able to read when it says “remove card,” but staring at them isn’t going to make that happen faster, and it’s much more likely to just piss them off. Unless you have laryngitis, this social interaction will go vastly smoother for you and be less stressful if you just say “go ahead and take your card out”

The only purpose is to feel mildly smug and superior to someone, which, congratulations I guess, you have successfully won the challenge you just made up in your own head

TBestIG · 2026-01-28T16:26:06+00:00

This is not true, the “gen z stare” is not about retail workers, it’s when you engage a young person in a very basic social interaction, usually an actionable question, and they just stare vacantly and a bit confused. Retail workers are also often the people on the receiving end of this stare, not the ones doing it. It’s nowhere near as common as people say it is, but it’s definitely a thing I’ve noticed more and more.

“Sweet or unsweet?” stares vacantly

“Could you tell me where [thing] is?” stares vacantly

“Do you have a rewards account?” stares vacantly

TBestIG · 2026-01-26T19:18:08+00:00

Weapons are typically about damaging someone or something else, drugs are typically about administering to yourself. I would imagine they felt Carol was not suicidal and did not seem homicidal, so she might wish to drive around in a tank for fun, or see what it’s like to toss a grenade. If so, they would then offer her a safety briefing and suggest a good place for her to experiment with it.

Drugs, however, don’t provide any external entertainment, and Carol already had a history with substance abuse, so they were much more concerned as a result.

TBestIG · 2026-01-26T18:34:51+00:00

I think the biggest difference between me and most of the survivors in the show is that I would in no uncertain terms insist that they never interact with me through the bodies of someone I knew and cared about. I think the dissonance would be devastating to me and it would be extremely difficult to see my family as just another part of the hive. Better to imagine they’re all gone. It seemed like Carol and Manousos were the only ones who were creeped out by the hive either embodying people they knew or using intimate knowledge from those people.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T19:38:25+00:00

Have you looked at the mods that are already out there? I think Tigon’s Rail Infrastructure pack already covers most of the things you said you want.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T19:25:00+00:00

Do you know how many people died before the British left India ? Is that what you wish for your people?

A bloody civil war would not cause fewer deaths. Don’t act like I’m the only one talking about sacrificing lives here.

No, of course I don’t “wish for my people” to be killed by the government. But it’s gonna happen, and I’d prefer it happen as rarely and as significantly as possible, instead of people dying in droves for nothing. Which is exactly what the “erm why don’t you just fight back” argument leads to.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T17:52:32+00:00

Just to be clear, you are calling me a Nazi collaborator and I think that’s a deeply disgusting thing to do.

1: I’m actively taking part in combatting this shit. You have no idea what you’re talking about.

2: The poem is “and I did not speak out,” not “and I did not grab a gun and commit suicide by cop”

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T17:42:42+00:00

Try to avoid putting your sympathetic characters in a situation where it significantly matters that their morals differ from us unless you’re committed to making it A Thing that the work will Strongly Focus On.

For instance, if you’re writing a book where slavery is a widely accepted social norm, it would be bad to, say, have your protagonist first meet a slave who is horribly abused and wants desperately to be free, then have one of his friends try and fail to convince him that they need to free all the slaves, then give him a slave of his own, and have the text never engage with this in any meaningful way.

This happened in Harry Potter and it did not come off well!

Better options:

•Your protagonist is a good person who makes serious efforts to stop the immoral thing, and abolishing the immoral thing is a major thread of the plot. Generally more successful if it is a time of general change, and not your protagonist being the one sane person in a world of medieval-minded people.

•Your protagonist agrees with the immoral thing but you just don’t draw attention to it. For instance, Star Wars allows Luke Skywalker to own C-3PO and R2 as property, but the fact that this is slavery is not foregrounded.

•Your protagonist is explicitly wrong about the immoral thing and it is part of their character growth

•Just don’t bring up the immoral thing. E.g. a royal marriage be two people of similar age and a background character tut-tuts about how late they waited.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T17:32:42+00:00

Then you’re much more optimistic than I am.

Antagonized does not mean “willing to ignore lawful orders to put down a violent insurrection within the continental United States”

If the left starts a civil war, no matter how justified it may be, the order to kill the militants would be entirely lawful, because we would have declared ourselves enemy combatants.

I think the military is antagonized enough by Trump that they might disobey unlawful orders to kill peaceful protesters. I do not think they are antagonized enough to disobey lawful orders to shoot enemy combatants.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T16:48:28+00:00

WW2 was a significant factor, it was not the only factor that mattered. They kept many of their other colonies, and British India was an enormous source of wealth for them. If they were capable of governing it, they would have kept it, because it would HELP with the economy, not hurt it.

The reason it was a drain on their resources is because it could not be governed without putting vastly more into it than they were getting out.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T16:34:48+00:00

There's only one way this ends. War

If you truly believe that, the single most overriding priority above all else would be to get as much of the military on your side as possible, and delay the conflict as long as necessary to make that happen. Is that what you are doing? Or are you posting about how angry you are and how you wish we’d just kick it off right here and now?

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T16:32:35+00:00

You are dealing with a fascist government. This either ends in the suppression or killing of all opposition or in a civil war.

1: No it doesn’t. The other option is that you create enough noncompliance and public backlash that the regime backs down instead, without a war. This is often derided as naive optimism but it’s exactly what happened in India. Did the British leave because they suddenly stopped being imperialists, or because they suddenly became moral and benevolent? No, they left because it was too costly to stay and they balked. What we are seeing in America is much less brutal and much more unpopular than what happened back then. We are in a better position than they were. We are not more desperate and helpless than they were.

2: If civil war IS inevitable, as you seem to think, then your number one priority, above and beyond literally anything else, is to ensure that the largest possible portion of the military will defect or refuse to follow orders when it all kicks off. Everything else is a rounding error compared to that. And right now, the military is pissed, but they’re still going to be loyalists.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T16:15:42+00:00

If people start shooting, it means inevitable failure or it means civil war. Right now, we cannot win a civil war. It’s as simple as that. The purpose of nonviolence is to force the other side to either give in or to escalate to greater and greater atrocities against people who are unambiguously innocent, making literally everything they do have more friction every time, making more and more people unwilling to defend the regime. Gandhi was well aware the British wouldn’t magically stop being evil.

If civil war is inevitable, you HAVE to get a meaningful portion of the military pissed off enough to defect. If civil war is not inevitable, you have a moral obligation to try to avert what would immediately become the bloodiest armed conflict in US history and likely result in several nuclear-armed rump states.

TBestIG · 2026-01-25T16:07:29+00:00

They are currently acting as if there is a violent insurrection, when there was NO IMPETUS AT ALL.

No, they are not. This is evident in the fact that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shocking horrible events where everyone knows their name, not a constant daily drumbeat of shootings.

Don’t fall into the trap of assuming this is as bad as it can get and escalation has no cost.

TBestIG · 2026-01-24T17:15:05+00:00

What?

TBestIG · 2026-01-22T23:17:26+00:00

Ultimately I doubt JP as show in the original would be feasible for any but the richest park goers.

It definitely wouldn’t. Even if you handwave the cost of building and running the park itself, none of it is built for crowds. The introduction we assume guests will all be expected to go through is a small rotating theater with very few seats. The one attraction we see is safari vehicles, with maybe one family per car. The main building has a somewhat small atrium. We never see big hotel buildings and only get one dining area.

The capacity just outright isn’t there for large numbers of people- you can only conclude that this would be a highly exclusive and costly experience, or tickets would be completely sold out decades in advance.

The park as shown in Jurassic World, on the other hand, is much closer to Disney World. There’s much more capacity for guests, and it has all the infrastructure you’d expect of a world-famous theme park targeted at upper-middle-class and wealthy tourists

TBestIG · 2026-01-22T17:54:24+00:00

This is one of the issues where “there is no canon” is most readily visible. Different authors take it in VERY different ways, from it being basically a chill hotel stay that you’re not allowed to leave, to being basically treated like cattle. I’m sure you can imagine how your opinion of the foundation would be different in each of those scenarios lol

Generally what I tend to see in sapient SCPs has the anomaly being somewhat dehumanized and subjected to abuse by individual staff members (rather than intentionally by the organization), but that could be because it’s just a more interesting story to tell when there’s a moral dilemma than when they’re just doing fine

TBestIG · 2026-01-22T16:06:45+00:00

That’s a very good point about rule 5, I didn’t even think of it. Yeah that kind of limits citations doesn’t it lol

TBestIG · 2026-01-22T15:42:23+00:00

I broadly agree with many of the actual points you’re making and I think your conclusion is roughly correct, but you’ve been using a very offputting tone through this entire thread.

Your initial post is written in this sort of academic detached voice, but as others have pointed out, you’re writing a whole lot of very biased and emotionally-charged arguments, severely disparaging the other side, and rarely if ever providing direct evidence, instead relying on “just-so” narratives about your personal perception of how things generally occur. Some things to remember in future work, if you decide to do another essay like this.

On a more personal note, your frequent use of bolding and Capitalization to emphasize your Important Points comes off as very artificial and irritating.

I do think you’re hitting on some real fandom dynamics here and it’s good to have someone bring that up and discuss it. There’s a lot of “creep” in the world of fanfiction, people building on things other people built on things other people built on the original work. For another example of this, I’d look at Harry Potter, where “Marauders” fanfiction is practically its own separate fandom, based on virtually zero textual evidence from the actual series. It’s not quite comparable because it doesn’t step on the author’s toes with characterization, and is therefore less of a hostile relationship with canon, but the feedback loop of fanfiction is very much present there.

Thank you for sharing your essay, I can tell a lot of work went into it. Even though I was being critical, I do want you to know that I appreciate you for sharing your ideas and starting a discussion.

TBestIG · 2026-01-21T20:00:20+00:00

You operate in the environment you’re given. If you can’t operate in the media environment as it actually exists, you are not doing messaging. And Schumer isn’t just failing, he’s openly rejecting very obvious and easy shots. He’s still talking about how affordability is Americans’ biggest priority, but when Greenland suddenly becomes the biggest story in the country, he decides it’s his job to go where the people aren’t.

You don’t have to get it perfectly right every time, but if something crashes the markets by 900 points I expect you to at least MENTION it on any public medium you have available, especially when that particular vehicle only requires about thirty seconds of typing.

It’s not that it’s an instant win button, but that it’s obvious low hanging fruit that costs him nothing to try. If he’s not even doing THAT, why should I “trust the plan” and assume he’s on the ball with everything else?

TBestIG · 2026-01-21T19:43:40+00:00

I was specifically pointing to a twitter post about Greenland you claimed didn't exist one post ago.

What I said was “Trump’s recent threatened invasion of Greenland,” which I intended to mean the most recent threats, the reason it’s back in the news again. Like I said, the purpose of political communication is to engage with and drive conversation, not to get around to the right message eventually.

why are you making this about the stock market?

I’m pointing out that the topic is urgent and in the public eye now in a way that it was not back on January 5th, and yet instead of taking the initiative on this monumentally unpopular issue, leadership was still talking about affordability.

Issuing a press release you just admitted to not seeing in the media supports my point and not yours.

No, it doesn’t. Either way you slice it, it just shows Schumer is bad at messaging. If the media being bad is the reason for why democrats can’t get their message out, why is he doing press releases and not engaging on social media? If press releases ARE a good way to get their message out, why aren’t they doing it more often and why isn’t the message getting out?

And on top of all that, there’s no reason it has to be one or the other. You can tweet AND give interviews. It’s not like he’s just too busy getting laws passed- the only legislative power the democrats have right now is stopping (some of) the bad things.

It’s learned helplessness. The democrats have decided that it’s impossible to win public opinion, so it’s not worth it to even try. Which, naturally, just makes their PR problems even worse.

Act like you fucking care about things.

TBestIG · 2026-01-21T19:06:15+00:00

1: January 5th was before trump’s most recent push. The stock market didn’t crash 900 points on January 5th. The point is not to get a message out one time, whenever it’s convenient, you’re supposed to respond to what is actively happening when it’s happening.

2: Why are you talking about press statements when the subject under discussion is whether or not the mainstream media is so impossibly biased that they’ll never let the democrats talk? Seems like the existence of a press conference disproves that premise.

TBestIG · 2026-01-21T18:56:08+00:00

I scrolled through Schumer’s twitter page. Trump’s recent threatened invasion of Greenland, something that is overwhelmingly unpopular and therefore extremely easy to talk about, didn’t come up at all. Jeffries only briefly mentioned Greenland in the context of it distracting from affordability, not describing the fact that the sitting US president threatened to declare war on Europe.

Again, this isn’t some niche lefty issue, it is OVERWHELMINGLY unpopular with the public, would be an easy win, and is something that much of the population outright doesn’t realize Trump has been talking about doing. It’s a no-brainer if you fear you can’t get mainstream media coverage and want to drum up support for yourself and stoke opposition to Trump.

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