Stepos Venzny

You asked how to defuse the tension, I’m telling you how to defuse the tension. If that’s not what you want to do then I can’t help you.

EDIT: That was kinda glib on my part so I’ll expand some more.

If my coworker gives in to every entitled relative who yells at her and treats her this way, either my coworker will resign or take leave due to depression, a coworker who was simply doing her job to the best of her abilities managing the 20 something operations that had to be readied for Monday next week. And she gets abused for that? And you condone the karen? This part of your post seems very tone deaf. My coworker didn’t even do her pause. It is her the one who deserves empathy, respect and my support, not the karen.

What you’re asking me to do right now is acknowledge the legitimacy of your grievance. And I do, of course. Nobody deserves to be abused.

The goal here is to make the abuse stop happening, though, right? So the best course of action is the course of action that stops it. If you discount the possibility that she can behave reasonably, there’s no possibility of talking her down from her current state of aggression. Essentially, you both want the same thing: not to feel upset, not to feel hurt. If you can make her stop feeling that, she will stop causing you to feel that. It’s not fair but you didn’t ask for fairness. You asked for how you can produce results.

She has framed this as her on one side versus you (you being a proxy for the hospital) on the other. Option A is you accept her framing and remain in conflict and both of you continue to cause each other pain, option B is you influence her to change her framing into one side being both you and her and the other side being the situation. If you succeed at option B, both of you stop causing each other pain. So you acknowledge the legitimacy of her grievance. Her father was supposed to get an operation that day and he didn’t. Nobody deserves to have their medical treatment withheld, even temporarily, even if it was an elective procedure.

You called her a karen five times in the space of this post. That framing doesn’t help you. You don’t know that she’s an innately unreasonable person, you just know that she’s unreasonable in a specific moment where several people have failed her in a serious matter.

does it really help to simply stay next to my colleague, letting her do the talking while I do nothing but looking at the karen in the eye?

Staying quietly next to your colleague does help your colleague but this sustained eye contact sounds like an escalation. Try to express condolence instead of contempt.

what if, each time the karen opens her mouth I repeat ‘calm down’ ad nauseam till she either tires, shuts up or walks away?

That is an escalation of hostility. Any time you find yourself thinking “maybe this will shut them up”, that’s you looking to defeat an adversary. The goal here is to make her feel better, not even more hopeless.

what do you say or do to support your coworkers while they’re being verbally abused that somewhat defuses the situation?

Redirect. Gently point out that the coworker isn’t to blame for the problem and suggest focusing on how to proceed from here.

what if avoiding conflict is a trait of mine to the point that I let people walk all over me?

how do you resist the urge to walk away? Situations like this trigger my fight or flight response.

All there really is to do is practice.

what if I have to do this with a man and it gets physical? If somebody strikes me and I strike back, and I can guarantee you I’m striking back, I’m as guilty as the first aggressor.

This is one of the reasons it’s nice to have coworkers standing by your side. If it does get violent, a third party can split that up easier than a participant.

Broad strokes, make it clear that you would also prefer that her father get his scheduled treatment.

I have that, too. Recently had a medical issue that was essentially a month-long open wound that obviously needed to be dressed the whole time. Absolutely brutal on the skin.

Tegaderm is less bad, I learned. Significantly more expensive but absolutely worth it for that situation. Showed up to the doctor with that on and was told “absolute overkill, stop using that” and then when I showed up the next time after following their instructions and using large Band-aids they took one look at my back and said “you should switch back to Tegaderm.”

“Fragrances.”

Boy do I ever wish ingredients lists would specify what fragrances they’re using, then I’d be able to learn which scented products are okay for me to use without testing them individually.

It’s very mild but fuck is it ever inescapable. Everything I use can be hypoallergenic if I put in the effort but take one step into any building other than my home and it’s being cleaned with scented cleaning products and pumped full of air fresheners on top of that.

Also I’ve got seasonal allergies that are stronger than my fragrance one(s), so the outdoors often doesn’t function as an escape, either.

At the computer desk where my desktop computer already is.

Think about the end of the movie. Our protagonist is being crucified. A whole field of people up on crosses with him. And this happens on this scale regularly. There’s a tradition of sparing one and only one person out of these groups by request so as to pacify the citizens by giving them an illusion of power. And the citizens, rather than even trying to save one life, prioritize laughing over and over at a speech impediment.

But against all odds, our protagonist is chosen through that process to be spared. But he isn’t, because Rome cares so little about any of this that they make absolutely zero effort to verify who they’re sparing. Not that the guy they let down deserved to be crucified, either.

And a rebel group shows up to maybe save these people from, and I can’t stress this enough, being crucified. And instead they too die pointlessly. By their own hands. On purpose. And the movie ends on a jaunty musical number about how terrible everything is and frankly maybe it’s better to die than to be a part of this world.

When I look at the scene you’re talking about in the context of the rest of the movie, it looks less like “Rome is good actually” and more like “why are these the freedom fighters we have?” Whether being conquered by the empire also comes with perks isn’t the point and it’s meant to be frustrating that they chose this ineffectual argument.

The only issue I might have is that some of the bigotry might start coming after me for associating. I’d like to think I’m the sort of person that would stand strong against that shit but I recognize that’s easier said than done from a position as relatively comfortable as the one I’m in.

Who am I kidding, though? I’d never think through the question as long as I did being asked it as a hypothetical. I’d date her and then maybe regret it later for the tangential reason.

Nothing smart technology promises over dumb technology is something I ever wanted in the first place.

I just want phones to be phones, TVs to be TVs, and glasses to be glasses.

You’re calling people with different visual preferences than you ignorant cultists. Surely that qualifies as you pushing back on personal enjoyment?

You know, filmmakers don’t always like the tech they’re using. Matching their equipment isn’t always the same thing as matching their vision. All art is comprise.

You remember the Hobbit trilogy? That was a pretty famous instance of a director going against the grain visually, giving it a higher than normal frame rate. Looking like a soap opera rather than cinema, as you put it. On purpose. Audiences hated that. He spent more money making it and they said it looked cheap. They could see motion in enough clarity that it looked like they were seeing a human with facial prosthetics rather than a dwarf. It looked objectively more real than a regular frame rate but that proved too real for most.

Now if I were the sort that likes to turn on motion smoothing, do you think Peter Jackson who tried to pioneer high frame rate theatrical releases would disagree with me doing that for his earlier 24 FPS movies, like the good Lord of the Rings? Or does making the motion look more real make the movie more like he wishes it always had been?

Me, I don’t like high frame rate movies either. If he came out and said motion smoothing is the best way to watch the older movies then I would still leave it off. That’s barely even a hypothetical, since he said the theatrical cut is the best way to watch yet I still prefer the Extended Editions.

If he said OLEDs were the best way to watch them, would you stop watching on a projector? Of course you wouldn’t. You like projectors better. Directorial intent is irrelevant.

The correct response to weird gatekeepers who talk shit about projectors isn’t to gatekeep back in the opposite direction, it’s to just continue enjoying what you enjoy. And when somebody asks for advice on their home theater, sing the praises of your beloved projectors. But this long and unprompted argument you just started against faceless masses with accusations that people who disagree with you aren’t capable of forming their own opinions, maybe don’t be doing that so much.

I grew up watching 4:3 movies with monaural sound on CRT screens that were roughly a foot tall and loved movies then no less than I do today on my modern OLED and surround system. Bigger and clearer is nice to have but there’s no reason to stress over what display is optimal.

With FPTP in the USA, the winning option would have been that everyone who normally voted Dem, voted for Green or the Democratic Socialist Party. But again, harder to pull off since you gotta convince so many people.

This is you not pulling the lever.

Five people call out to you to save their lives with the simple pull of a lever and you shout back to them “No, I am too principled. Perhaps if I had the abilities of Superman I could save you all with this lever and then also save that person with my hands but I recognize my limitations and will therefore choose the outcome where more people will die rather than fewer.”

They’re all so proud of you for those next five seconds.

I’m angry enough that people made me get a smart phone, I’m not gonna actually use it like one. All off.

No, they were totally fair in saying that. As much as Tomb Raider is a knockoff narratively, Infernal Machine is even more directly a knockoff mechanically.

The bad guys in Black and White were Pokemon rights activists and your heroic allies were watching them speak being like “everyone knows Pokemon love being captured and made to fight each other, these guys are a bunch of nutjobs!”

Then later it turns out the Pokemon rights thing was just a cover for something nefarious because nobody could actually believe what these people are claiming to.

Fresh air has kicked my ass harder than any virus ever has. Allergies have straight up bruised my ribs from the force of my own coughing.

Make sure fresh air agrees with you before you make any rash decisions about how much to get.

An extra six percent isn’t really the difference between a big purchase and a small one, so it’s pretty much just background noise for me. I know to leave some wiggle room if my budget is tight but don’t make the effort to calculate my technical maximum. Worst case scenario I get one less item than I planned.

I am colorblind, so no.

Magenta

Cyan

Yellow

Cyan

Red and blue are tied in this image but in darker shades the answer is always red.

An adult dressing like an adult feels completely appropriate to me.

Imagine the world as we know it is a work of speculative fiction: you’re reading a book about a world that has harnessed the power of electricity to achieve all kinds of incredible things. Electric power’s not just magic, though, right? This is hard sci-fi, there are technical limitations on how this fantastical technology works. There are ways to generate electricity enough for everyone to use but to actually use it they need the electricity to travel long distances from its source to their location and the route is required to be more or less contiguous.

Now electricity, according to this wild sci-fi premise, is a force that kind of wants to travel; it is possible for it to move, then it will. And I said “more or less contiguous” up there because it can actually cross small gaps as long as the rest of the route remains valid. And one thing it is possible for it to move through is a human body, which can be nightmarishly harmful to the human it travels through. Indeed, there is a history of intentionally placing humans into that route in order to execute them. And living creatures aren’t the only thing it can harm: electricity traveling through a flammable medium can start fires and, if misdirected in some way, can even destroy the very technology it’s being harnessed to power.

Even setting aside the destruction it can cause should it end up traveling where they don’t want it to travel, there is also the fact that if it fails to travel along the desired route then electrical technology that people have built their lives around will simply stop functioning. There are ways to generate one’s own limited supply of electricity as a stopgap until the main course is reestablished but most people in the setting don’t have that and it’s a temporary measure even if they do. And I don’t just mean stuff like their business failing to function, I mean that even the basic day to day operations of their lives will fail. They have stores of food kept safely cold by electrical technology that will spoil if the electricity stops, they have kitchens that run on electricity to cook that food even if the ingredients are still good, and most of them never learned how to do these kinds of basic things the old fashioned way and if they want to learn how then their primary source for information is itself a technology that requires electricity to function.

So you’re talking to a friend about this book you’ve been reading about this electrical world. And your friend asks you about these “routes” you told them the electricity travels along:

“How do they move this super dangerous yet super integral substance across such long distances that even people in the middle of nowhere have access to it?”

“For the millionth time, it’s not a substance.”

“Whatever it is, how do they get it from A to B?”

“Well… mostly they the put wires that conduct it on top of thirty foot tall wooden posts.”

“Wouldn’t those just fall down whenever there’s bad weather?”

“Yeah, ‘power outages’ as they call them are not entirely infrequent.”

“So these wooden posts that if they fall over could start fires or kill bystanders or, like, melt stuff. They keep all that away from where people are at least?”

“Well, okay, I was simplifying. There’s these bigger and sturdier metal constructions for carrying wire the longest distances and they build those in the middle of nowhere. These wooden posts that fall down easily are mostly situated around where people are, like roadsides. They were first on my mind because they’re more what’s present where the story takes place.”

“Didn’t you say earlier they’ve all got these individually operated vehicles on the roads that are measured in the strength of dozens of horses, thousands of pounds of metal that move faster than jungle cats? Wouldn’t they just hit the poles by accident and, like, demolish them?”

“Yeah that happens sometimes.”

“…I guess I’m being uncharitable. If I were in this scenario I’d probably be more excited and not thinking as clearly as I do from this distance. It makes sense that such a radical new technology would have some unforeseen negative consequences.”

“Actually it’s not new. Electrical power’s been commonplace for something like a century as of when the story takes place. The characters don’t remember a world without it.”

“And they’re still just… putting it on sticks?”