shortly after william the conquerer came to power he initiated something known as ‘the doomsday book’- he sent envoys to survey his new lands to record the properties he now controlled so they could pay accurate taxes. every acre of field, every mill, livestock, buildings and their relative size- all would be recorded to determine the wealth of each settlement so a percentage could be expected as rent. for an example of what this book meant; the previous king was aware of and collected taxes from about 20 grain mills in england, william’s audit shot that number above 200. you dont know the meaning of ‘pedantic’ untill you start reading about medieval grain mills, theres a church that paved its floor with confiscated ‘illegal’ millstones to ensure that the town had to get its flour from the church’s official mill and one war simply about stealing the same millstone back and fourth for quite a few decades
of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again. its safe to assume a large number of other villages also had sudden cases of strange diseases, mysteriously disappearing cows, or very large shrubberies and haybales shaped like buildings and you dont need to look over that hill either. thats not even touching how many small communities just plain didnt technically exist because they were too small, somewhere weird, or in legal limbo of who owned it
of course when the feudal part of feudalism started moving its gears you found that the local lord of that village was unlikely to divulge the exact amount of rents they could collect to THEIR lord either, knowing that the more they admitted to receiving the more they were expected to hand over. this was not exclusive to england either, the more you learn about feudalism the more you have to ask how all these minor lords out in the boonies kept having the money and soldiers to do all the political intrigue bullshit, the answer is also tax evasion. each village kept claiming it had fewer people living in shittier houses with less land and fewer livestock then they actually had, and each local lord kept claiming they were receiving less rents then they actually took so were also adverse to an accurate audit.
their knowledge of tax loopholes also extended to finding out that clergymen were either exempt from tax or received a far lower rate of tax, so proving you qualified as a clergyman was an endeavor that paid dividends. specifically to prove you were clergy you proved that you could read and write enough Latin to satisfy an official, so you could spend some money to hire someone to tutor you enough Latin to fake it. its estimated that due to this fully ten percent of medieval english households wrote ‘clergy’ on their tax forms.
another and even more extreme example was the peasants revolt of 1381, london was swarmed by the unwashed masses from all sides instigated by an official trying to collect (a lot of) unpaid poll taxes, an angry mob driving a teenaged king Richard II to retreat to a boat in the river, and culminating with 1500 peasants being executed by an emergency militia. this doesn’t sound like a huge success untill you dig into some of the details- peasants from a large number of villages all arrived at london at the same time, leaving dedicated forces specifically to stop ships from acessing london to break the siege, the peasants executed a select number of court officials and started burning paperwork- but systematically only burning the ones detailing who owned plots of land, debt records, and a few criminal records. the peasants who besieged london and scared the king into the river had successfully purged a whole lot of debts and reclaimed a lot of land in one very ballsy and highly coordinated move that relied on them being seen as illiterate dirt farmers with no ulterior motives besides pitchfork mob riot and trying to kiss the queen mother while they touch everything in the tower of london with their grimy hands
Someone bricked up a door of an S-Bahn (suburban rail) train in Hamburg
No fake, the federal police of Germany has confirmed the crime and is looking for witnesses. They also warn possible imitators that a crime like this may be punished with jail up to five years or a fine.
Street art blog here!!
“”””Art””””
MONSIEUR PLEASE I BEG YOU!!!
>be german >start my daily commute >waiting at s-bahn station >the train is taking forever kill_me.png >finally hear the train coming danke_gott.jpg >train is slowing down >the doors stop just in front of me >they open >it’s a fucking brick wall > >go home, quit job
They’ve only been seen in some survelliance camera footage, and it’s been proven they are real tangible things… being filmed and have yet to be definitively explained/debunked.
also uhhh. they remind me of this stock photo
I love Fresno nightcrawlers because you’ve got these other cryptids with all this Lore and theories around them (Bigfoot is some kind of prehistoric American ape, the jersey devil is a literal demon, every theory about Nessie etc)
And the nightcrawlers are just like-
Him Pants.
Took one look at this and I was like
That’s a guy with his pants pulled up to his neck.
For the most part they seem to be pretty interchangeable, but some people do prefer one over the other. There are also many of us who actually do not prefer any term like that at all, and actually just prefer “blind,“ as a much more straightforward, functional definition that doesn’t feel as clunky. For me, personally, “visually impaired“ and similar terms come with too many implications of visual strain and all of the terrible school officials that forced that terminology on me, when nowadays I can just ignore my eyes and be a lot happier, no matter how much residual vision I have. It feels too much like being called a broken sighted person, so I am much happier being a full and complete blind person.
A little bit of clarification:
Personally, I do not like any of those terms like “low vision“ or “visually impaired“ or “optically precluded“ or what have you, because frankly, most of those terms were created by sighted people, the sighted people who categorize and label is based on how much residual vision we have, creating a twisted hierarchy of “normal“ and “functional“ entirely based on how much vision we have left, something that is entirely false and incredibly damaging to every blind person’s psyche.
It does not, and I repeat it absolutely does NOT matter how much residual vision you have in the slightest. Every single blind or low vision person is capable of the exact same things, and more vision does not make you better or better off or more capable and less vision does not make you worse and worse off or less capable at all. A totally blind person can do everything just as efficiently and effectively as somebody who barely even crosses the threshold into legal blindness, because with the right skills, tools, confidence, and resources, any level of blindness can be reduced to no more than a mirror inconvenience, and that is entirely true.
So frankly, I don’t believe in the visual hierarchy, and while I used to use terms like “visually impaired“ as my primary identification when I was younger, those days were very much the days fraught with internalized ableism and painfully low self-esteem and a desperate desire to cling onto whatever vision I had left, thinking more was better no matter what. I didn’t know a lick of braille, I never left the house by myself and refused to go out at night, I used ridiculous magnification system after ridiculous magnification system to read at a crawling 30 words per minute, but I thought because I “didn’t need a cane“ that I was fine and wasn’t “really blind“ and would never be like those REAL blind people. They were pitiful and I wasn’t pitiful. And more often than not, it seems most other people who use those terms tend to also be using them with similar motivations to my younger self, and it is an incredibly common story.
This isn’t to say that people are not allowed to use the language they want, because people can have all sorts of reasons for choosing the words they do, and they may not be choosing them out of internalized ableism and may have completely different motives. And even if they are using those terms because of internalized ableism, that is a journey that they will need to take for themselves and they may not be ready for the word “blind“ and it is not a journey you can force the ending you think it should have on too. Everyone is at different places, and part of being a community is taking everyone where they are and allowing them to grow at their own pace.
But I, personally, am not fond of those terms, and will not typically use them on this blog and I’m not especially comfortable being referred to with them. I have residual vision, as many blind people do, but I am a very capable blind person who is no better than any other blind person with any less vision than me. I am not fond of using terms created by uneducated sighted “professionals,“ and I am not comfortable reinforcing the visual hierarchy, so I much prefer to remain universally with blindness in all areas of life.
Whut? Optically precluded!? Is an actual term that people use?! What silly terms will non-disabled people come up with next!
For deafness, someone once told me they had seen the term “audiologically incapacitated” which I think is one of the more silly terms I’ve seen for deafness.
www.paypal.me/calebcinaedHello loves, I have a very good chance of getting this wheelchair on Sunday afternoon for the amazing price of $260 which I currently don’t have. I can’t afford to pass this up, so if you’re able to donate, I would greatly appreciate it! My hips, knees, and ankles will thank you too!
Forced Safe Mode just went live. Go into your account settings to check for the changes.
I literally just had to do this because it hid a drawing of a cat from me. It was a really good drawing.
Even if you’ve already turned off this nonsense before, it is probably turned back on again. I checked mine a week ago, when I first saw a resurgence of these posts and it was off. Today it was on.
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
This is the Coffee Shop AU we deserve.
Two of my managers got fired for having an affair with each other. There was this guy I never really talked to, so one time I see him and ask how his weekend was. He says “I wanted to drop some acid but I couldn’t find any.” Never saw him again.
I had a friend whose manager used to sit in the backroom doing lines of coke before opening at 7am. It was and I quote ‘the only way to deal with this shit’.
My own manager, who was heavily pregnant at the time, told an asshole customer to take their latte and shove it up their arse, before walking out and promptly going into labor.
We had homeless people sleeping in our dumpsters who used to throw the trash back out at us when we opened the lid.
I have myself uttered the phrase “M’am, I am the manager” after they dumped a cream cake over my head because it wasn’t what they ordered except it was. They even pointed at it first and said “that one”.
I had a customer piss themselves out of defiance when we asked them to leave. Then when the police were called they did it again, like some vengeful piss camel.
I’m telling you friends, I have stood at the precipice of hell, I have stared into the void and plummeted into the depths of humanity and it tips less than 20%.
Found it. The origins of everyone starting to send me the phrase Vengeful Piss Camel instead of Crucifix Nail Nipples for a short time. Amazing. I do not miss catering.
Tales from the world of discount retail:
One of the ASMs told us in casual conversation while setting up Easter merch that he used to be a stripper. He happened to be holding giant bunny figurines. I was holding mugs with Jesus themed phrasing on them. He then told me I should listen to more Sia. He was correct.
A boyfriend and girlfriend work together. For two months I thought they were brother and sister. He does not deserve her.
One woman compulsively lies about everything. EVERYTHING. We have no clue when she’s telling the truth. It’s great entertainment.
One woman’s family collectively makes up the law enforcement for an entire county. She also has three degrees and a PhD and is hilariously anti-Trump.
One of the young men working there just… Straight up disappears? Like we’ll lose him for hours and then he’ll just show up again? Amazing.
There is a teenage girl working there who is abjectly the worst at customer service and still somehow has a job. Despite multiple customer complaints.
The manager never leaves the store. We’ll think he’ll be gone and then he’ll just wheel out another display to be set up. “Didn’t you go home?” No. He’s been here the whole time. He never left. He never leaves. This is not a retail Gothic post my manager is just some sort of fae creature capable of blinking in and out of this dimension.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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