potential ship names for pearl/malachite: "otp: murder moms", "otp: let's get this travesty started"

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Does Pearl have a nickname? I don’t recall seeing one. I know Malachite is literally called The Terror Of The Western Reaches. And while on the one hand, I love Murder Moms, I feel like calling a queen a mom is kind of… not… quite right somehow. I mean, they are, but. 

God, I was resisting the siren call of writing fanfic for this, because the only times I’ve tried writing Raksura fanfic have been so difficult (it just seems to bring out my worst writing? I have one success so far and the rest is all like, stuffed under a virtual pillow on my machine because it is so so so bad), but I have like, 1k words now, post-Harbors, of both Jade and Chime being guiltily and inadvertently turned-on thinking about Moon’s youthful experimentations with cross-species sexual hijinks, and I totally don’t want to write Pearl/Malachite but I think I might have to. 

I think the best part is that nobody else would understand what was going on at all. Queens don’t… like… each other… at all… so what could they possibly be doing in there??? ??? ?? all?? night?? and there’s no?? screaming?? what even?? 

Their idea of dirty talk would be complete silence, I think. 

I’m terrible at ship names but I am delighted to contemplate this. 

qualityisthegoal replied to your post “Having

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I relate to this like you would not even believe. I’m sorry for your brainweasels and wish there was something productive or useful I could say to help. I hope the tornado of feels leaves you in peace soon. ❤️

OMG New Xkit just fixed replying-to-replies!!!!!! Now I don’t have to overcome terrible ennui to screenshot like an animal!!!

It’s not so much a tornado as an overwhelming vacuum of nothing where I ought to have common sense. But. 

To everyone who reads, and especially everyone who likes and replies and such, thanks for putting up with the complaining, it’s how I keep myself pointed in approximately the right direction. <3 <3 

wilwheaton: mutecute: It’s legit. …2013.

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wilwheaton:

mutecute:

It’s legit.

…2013.

It actually says 2015, there’s a starburst behind the 5 making it look like a 3.
But. No, there’s a real website. I’m imagining the people who made it, like, waiting until the time for the episode to air, and like, watching for the traffic to spike…

I got, like, a modern Business Etiquette pet peeve

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I got, like, a modern Business Etiquette pet peeve here. 

I feel you, I really do. Your phone rings and like, nobody calls you, so who the fuck could this be? You don’t pick up. 

Here’s where I lose you: Call goes to voicemail, listen to the voicemail, mystery solved, right? 

People don’t do this. So, say you don’t do this. You get a mystery call from a number you don’t recognize. 

You immediately call it back. Someone picks up with a business greeting. It’s a business you’ve worked with, someplace maybe you’ve left an order to be worked on. But for some reason, I guess blinded by anger that someone called the number you left them on your order, you demand, 

Who is this! I missed a call from this number! Who is this! in as unsettling a manner as you can muster. 

“Uh,” says the person, who just identified themself, “[name], from [business],” because what do you say? 

“Why are you calling me?”

“Uh,” says the person, “well, I didn’t, this is a place of business with multiple phone lines, so someone else who works here likely called you and left you a voicemail about an order you have in progress with us. Do you have an order in progress with us?”

You have several choices here, for rational behaviors you could now engage in. 
#1: “Oh, really? Why don’t I listen to that voicemail?” 
#2: “Why, I do have an order with you! It was a complicated one, I bet they have questions. Can you get me the person who was working on it? I think it was a young man, his name might have been Jeff?”
#3: “Oh yes! It was supposed to be done today, I bet that’s it. Thanks!”

No, you don’t do that. Instead, you yell, again, “Why are you calling me?” (Alternative: Begin to tell me a rambling story about why you missed the call. I’m drawing from considerable recent experience here. Literally nobody so far has done #1,#2, or #3 above. I’m sure I posted about the one who told me the rambling story because it was the weirdest one.)

“Well,” says the person, quite confused now, “who are you? Could you possibly have an order in progress here? Something we were working on for you? [The business’s specialty], maybe? Or [other service business offers]?”

I know cellphones are still a relatively novel concept, in terms of society as a whole, but they have been pretty commonplace for a very long time now, long enough for most individuals to have gotten over the novelty and begun to apply common sense. I get that many private individuals who have never used a phone for work might not have internalized the professional phone etiquette those of us who’ve manned reception desks and retail front-line phones have, and so they might stumble over commonplace ideas like identifying oneself on the line or clearly stating one’s business, but they’re not really advanced concepts. 

I just happen to sit by the phone, in a separate room and on a separate system for a separate department, that only rings when both store lines are busy (it’s mostly used for outgoing calls to headquarters, so that we don’t tie up the store lines)– such as when one of the clerks is methodically going through all the to-be-called orders and leaving messages for customers, and a second one is answering the phone when those customers call back. Most of them do listen to the voicemails first. But there are just enough who don’t, that I get calls like this often enough to have enough of them to make an anecdata post with multiple examples. 

I made a pie. Bacon, egg, and potato pie. When you

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I made a pie. Bacon, egg, and potato pie. When you don’t have counter space, you improvise.

dahllm:I really loved All Systems Red: the Murderbot Diaries by...

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dahllm:

I really loved All Systems Red: the Murderbot Diaries by @marthawells. I really recommend it, it’s a (too) fast read!

Coworker got another good call this morning. Phone

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Coworker got another good call this morning. Phone rings, she picks up. “Storename, employee name speaking, how can I help you?”
“What is this?” demands the caller.
“What is… what?” Coworker responds, confused.
“What is this place?”
“Uhh… Storename?” Coworker tries, baffled.
“Ohhhh,” says the caller, “the [specialty] store? Ok. I had this number written on a piece of paper and I didn’t know what it was. Thanks! ” *hangs up*

…
Now, I don’t know about you, but if that were me, I’d Google the number? And if that didn’t work, maybe I’d, like, open with the context?

Idk, it’s just weird phone etiquette to accost ppl, call me crazy.

thesacredreznor replied to your post “I got,

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Every fucking day at the dog grooming shop I worked at. “Oh yes I was trying to make an appointment for fluffy” “yeah and the groomer called and left a message with some possible dates” and then I’d have to go but to groomer to find out what those dates actually were because SOMEBODY DIDNT LISTEN TO THEIR VOICEMAIL

Yeah. You’re not calling an office to schedule an appointment, you’re calling a retail establishment. Have you ever been to a retail establishment that had a receptionist? No, we don’t do that. That’s not how it works. Even hairdressers and so on, there’s not a dedicated receptionist. You’re not going to get ahold of someone, by phoning, who has all the information at their fingertips. You’re especially not going to directly reach the person who left you the message and who presumably knows what that message contained– not at a place that employs more than two people, anyway.

I get that you want to do stuff for customers and give them a good experience and all, but there’s a point where they have to take some ownership of their own desires. People call asking about orders all the time and have no clear notion of what it is. We file specialty items by size, sometimes– it’s alphabetized, sure, but I’ll spend all day looking in the regular file under your name if you don’t tell me it was oversized, like a large print or a box full of VHS tapes or whatever. And I’ve even had people call and when I ask (i’ve learned to phrase it this way) “what name is the order under?” tell me their own name, and after much searching, eventually they remember that their mother dropped it off, so it would be under her name instead. 

Like, I’m not fucking psychic? I understand that I’m being paid to do a job for you but I’m not psychic! Take a tiny bit of initiative here and we’ll all be much happier! Christ. 

(It’s never millennials, by the way. It’s exclusively people in their fifties and up. Young people almost always have reasonable phone etiquette and organize their thoughts before dialing. Maybe it’s just that our customers skew so elderly… Not that we don’t have young idiots, but they’re not this kind of idiot.)

I’ve reread Harbors of the Sun enough that

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I’ve reread Harbors of the Sun enough that I’m pretty sure I’ve absorbed all of it, so now I’m going back and screenshotting the notable quotables. I’m going to post them one at a time but you can block the tag “botr” [books of the raksura] if you get tired of it. 

And I’m starting with this one, which is awesome:

FLORET I’M KINKSHAMING

For real though, what else could that mean??? Floret, an accomplished female warrior of some standing in the court, finds it attractive that her court’s reigning queen gets along well with Malachite, the Terror of the Western Reaches. How else can you take that? 

There’s no other way to take that. Floret ships it, and what’s more, will be in her bunk. 

(I don’t have page numbers so I’ll try to include the location numbers from the ebook. This one is 6096.)