Blackmoor Vituperative

This is a public service message (mainly for myself, as I try to be a better person).

When someone¹ posts, “Here is something I like!”, there are five acceptable responses. I will list them here.

1) “Tell me more about this thing you like!”
2) “Did you know this fun² fact about the thing you like?”
3) “I like that, too!”
4) “The thing you like reminds me of this other thing, which I like!”
5) (silence)

Now you know.

1)  “Someone” means “Someone who is not a full-blown Nazi, sexist scumbag, or overt racist.”
2) “Fun” means actually fun — not mean, snide, derogatory, or judgemental.

One of my most enjoyable convention panels, back when I used to do that sort of thing, was “gearing up for a zombie apocalypse”. I insisted that before you could make that kind of plan, you needed to answer three questions about the zombies:

1. Are they fast?
2. Are they aggressive?
3. Are they infectious?

The answer to each of these questions dictates the gear you will need to survive. The most important factor is #3. It’s the infectious nature of modern zombies that makes them a civilization-ending threat. Even if every person who died eventually became a zombie, that’s a much easier situation to deal with than one where you get bit by a zombie today and turn into a zombie tomorrow.

Tipping is bullshit. American “tipping” has created a whole class of beggars. People who work on my car work just as hard as the people who bring me food, but they’re not dependent on the kindness of strangers to pay their damned bills. And how much my mechanics get paid doesn’t depend on the cost of the part I have them install, or whether they’re young and cute.

I tip well, because I can (this was not always so), but I would much prefer that businesses actually pay their employees to do the job they were hired to do, so that the price I am quoted when I place my order is the price I actually pay.

“Tipping” should be abolished. It’s unfair to the people who pay, and it’s insulting and unfair to the people who receive.

But with the current political trends in this country, I suspect that most Americans will be depending on “tips” to survive before too long.