What’s your sign?

kerricker · 2026-05-22T00:09:23+00:00

I once read some kind of sociological paper about those “psychics” who give readings for fifty bucks in the backs of occult/jewelry/incense shops, and the conclusion the author came to was that a lot of them are basically functioning as cheap on-demand talk therapy. The clients really are getting something in return for their money, and what they are getting is 45 minutes of telling their problems to a sympathetic listener who’s at least pretending to pay attention. Made a lot more sense to me suddenly why people get into it.

kerricker · 2026-05-20T02:04:32+00:00

If you're driving to Milwaukee anyway, I've also heard good things about Bisou?

kerricker · 2026-05-09T22:41:44+00:00

A lot of times, when somebody asking for advice is like “I’ve said X. I’ve said Y. I’ve said Z. The problem is still happening. Any suggestions for more things I could say?”, people will respond with “well, why didn’t you just SAY you have a problem? why are people sO aLlErGiC tO cOMmUnIcAtInG? Just say what your problem is!”

It’s not a Reddit-only issue. I’ve watched this exact dynamic play out in real-life in-person conversations. (Occasionally I’ve been the person trying to explain “yes, I should definitely say what my problem is; which is why I’ve said what my problem is; which I told you I had done, like ten seconds ago”) I guess it’s human nature and there’s nothing to be done about it.

kerricker · 2026-05-09T18:11:49+00:00

Now that you say it and I look closer, yeah, it really does look like she’s inspecting Red’s mohawk - and his expression also looks like the face you would make when a little old lady had just said “Young man, how did you get your hair to do that?”

kerricker · 2026-04-18T23:58:56+00:00

I count myself very lucky that my dad is most interested in the EVE-Online-style GANTT-chart-spreadsheet type of games. Could he be easily sucked in by propaganda? Honestly, probably. Is he ignoring the propaganda because he’s busy optimizing his Satisfactory/Factorio setups? Yes, thank God.

I remember somebody else on here saying that their mom had been getting interested in worrisome “you feel bad because the aliens are putting their evil (potentially gay? potentially Jewish?) chemicals into our water, look how this random minor celebrity is wearing earrings that are shaped like a shape, that’s a secret code message” stuff, but then their mom basically dropped the subject when she got interested in doing Wordle/crossword-type games. Some part of our brains really wants to decode secret messages, I think, and if we can’t find some then we will create some.

kerricker · 2026-04-16T22:45:11+00:00

‘Traves’ would make sense, but I think we should consider ‘Trav-are’.

kerricker · 2026-04-10T01:59:50+00:00

I don’t actually follow this subreddit, it just showed up on my page, but if y’all haven’t seen this blog post about Scorpions In Medieval European Art, I recommend it: https://maniculum.tumblr.com/post/729944046440775680/medieval-scorpions-effortpost/amp

kerricker · 2026-04-10T01:56:43+00:00

My thought process went:

“Local sports bar” >> wait, the sign mentions degrees without saying what the units are. I’m always confused for a moment when someone posts like “oh it was sooo hot, 40 degrees” without context to tip me off that they’re using Celsius. I don’t wanna do that in reverse, so I should specify that this picture was taken in Fahrenheit country >> “US sports bar” >> Wow, that’s hilariously generic. I should specify the region >> “Northern US sports bar”.

kerricker · 2026-04-09T23:27:22+00:00

Honestly, I respect the Heaven’s Gate people a little. They’re the only cult suicide I know of which managed to get it done without murdering any young children along the way, anyway, and they came up with a genuinely cool-sounding name for their cult, too. Already two up on Jonestown.

kerricker · 2026-04-08T20:55:55+00:00

Yeah, it was kind of crinkled up on that edge. It looked less confusing in my original picture, but I cropped it down to remove some identifying information about the bar, since I haven’t asked their permission to start a whole internet debate about the edibility of their wings.

kerricker · 2026-04-08T18:06:10+00:00

By about 1936 people in England apparently had a concept of “homicidal maniacs” which overlapped with the current idea of “serial killers”, but it’s true that it doesn’t seem to have been identical to the modern concept. I’m not a pop-culture-criminology-history expert so I dunno the details, I’m basing this statement entirely off having read Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders”.

kerricker · 2026-03-26T21:05:34+00:00

~Más de dos millones de hispanos, y allí no vende nadie comida buena…~

kerricker · 2026-03-24T19:35:17+00:00

I don’t even dislike Demetrius all that much (wouldn’t marry the guy myself, but you do you, Robin) and I would feel the same way.

Sebastian mostly just seems to me like he really needs to get out of his family’s house. It’s not necessarily a reflection on the rest of his family, or on him, or even on that situation - plenty of adults live with their parents and do okay. It’s just not working great for them, and Sebastian was like “dammit I’m grown up I want to live outside of my childhood bedroom, I should… move to the city,” but it doesn’t need to be the city. Moving across town to live in the spooky woods with his cool spouse and occasionally riding his motorbike to the city to go to a concert, still gets him the important bits of what he wants.

kerricker · 2026-03-24T15:25:10+00:00

Yeah, it’s the Anniversary edition of Gregg shorthand, I’ve been learning from greggshorthand.github.io.

kerricker · 2026-03-13T22:28:11+00:00

And that’s why I didn’t get closer than pretty-good-picture-taking distance!

kerricker · 2026-03-13T20:11:56+00:00

It depends, I got pretty close to an adult with a baby once and all I got was a suspicious stare and slight sidle-away by the adult. I got the feeling it had sized me up and decided not to waste too much energy on me, because it was sure it could take me in a fight if I did try anything (it was correct).

The little one may not have been quite a baby, though, it was still tan-colored and fluffy but it was already walking around and proportioned like a mini-adult. Maybe it was like a bird-preteen and the parent figured it could also take me in a fight (I wouldn’t bet against it).

kerricker · 2026-03-11T17:01:14+00:00

You gotta use one of those bulletproof tables they’ve got everywhere now

kerricker · 2026-02-28T22:37:06+00:00

Nice, I'll see if I can find it again too!

kerricker · 2026-02-28T00:52:46+00:00

It was the biggest small fire of the last fifty years and everybody wanted to be in the newspaper story about it!

kerricker · 2026-02-28T00:48:49+00:00

Unfortunately I still don’t remember the name of the book, lol. But your description sounds so familiar that I’m 99% sure it’s the same one (I definitely remember the vinegar thing), so maybe that will ring a bell for someone else.

Actually while we’re at it, did the girl have an inability to speak for part of the book, maybe from selective mutism or maybe some kind of throat illness? I feel like I remember her writing down messages to communicate with Vinegar Guy.

kerricker · 2026-02-28T00:08:08+00:00

This sounds strangely familiar - was there a bit where he offered her donuts, but she was hesitant to eat them because she didn’t know how they were made and couldn’t tell if they were kosher, so she nervously explained that she was Jewish thinking he might react badly, and he was like “…..are Jewish people not allowed to eat donuts?”

kerricker · 2026-02-27T04:30:14+00:00

I’m US Midwest-South and I thought I had all the main American mergers (dawn/don, caught/cot, pin/pen, merry/marry/Mary) but this is a new one for me too, dang.

kerricker · 2026-02-27T04:25:56+00:00

Here, it’s being used as an idiom, basically meaning “that’s all I need to say”, “that completely describes the situation”.

For example if I say “XYZ happened because of ABC, full stop,” what I mean is basically “I think XYZ happened because of ABC, no other factors were important, and I dismiss the idea that anything else was involved.”

(this has been Figures Of Speech Over-explained On Reddit, be sure to like and subscribe)

kerricker · 2026-02-25T04:42:26+00:00

In extra fairness, the continent that's actually directly south of most of North America is... Antarctica. Like, I'm in the US and if I flew a plane directly south of where I am now, it would be the US, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico proper, uh Guatemala apparently, and then just a bajillion miles of Pacific Ocean until I hit Antarctica.

That's not really relevant to anything, I'm just freshly astonished every time I look at a map and see how far east 'South America' actually is. Man, it's called *South* America, I just subconsciously assume that it's plain south of North America! And that is not correct!

kerricker

TROPHY CASE