i think the best practical joke any video game pulled was Skyrim opening their game making you think the rebellion was this amazing noble cause against an oppressive government (as most fantasy universes frame it), but then you pretty much immediately find out that the stormcloaks are just racists with swords and the empire isn’t really all that terrible save your standard government problems.
yall are gonna have to stop sending me messages about how im an imperial government of tamriel apologist
the greybeards aren’t any help either. or the blades. Skyrim is just a bunch of rednecks who hate each other.
THE DARK BROTHERHOOD WAS GOOD TO EVERYONE
they killed people for money
But at least they weren’t racist about it
I was a khajit so both sides were racist to me from the start and I saw the imperial torturer dude so I was like “fuck this war I’m not joining either of you” and wandered off and did what I wanted and I’m still not sure whether or not that was what the game was trying to get me to do.
This is why universal programs are important. Every single kid in my school got an eye test through the school at age 10. We just had some opticians come in and take over a room for a week to test every child. Testing for shit like colourblindness too. You need to test every single kid, or some of them will get missed. They might get missed because their parents don’t have vision problems and missed the signs, they might get missed because their parents can’t afford regular opticians visits, they might get missed because their parents couldn’t afford glasses, or couldn’t afford new lenses when a kids’s prescription changed. but they’ll get missed, and that’s really, really bad.
Systemic inability to afford glasses is terrible. I forget how lucky we are here to have the NHS. I mean, my mum hated her big blue NHS glasses, but she had them. And when I got glasses age 14 you got an £80 voucher for kids frames, and then lenses were free. IDK what it’s like now what with the cuts and all, but universal access to basic healthcare is so important.
People underestimate the degree to which kids do badly in school because of vision problems. Personally, if I were helping a child who was failing, it’s one of the first things I’d check.
With wealthier kids who actually get eye exams, and have their vision corrected to 20/20, it’s visual processing problems like difficulty converging at near or processing clutter or tracking. With poorer kids, it can be all of that, or just needing glasses.
And then kids grow up thinking they’re stupid or lazy when really they just can’t see.
Many people don’t think of poor eyesight as a disability, but it is. You don’t have to be legally blind to benefit from accommodations, i e eyeglasses.
Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him
A friend of mine did something with online dating where, before meeting a person, she’d say no to something minor without a reason for the no. For example: “No, I don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about X?”, or “No, not Wednesday”, or “No, I don’t want to recognize each other by both wearing green shirts”. She said how the potential dates reacted was a huge indicator of whether she actually wanted to meet them, something I readily believe.
I’ve mentioned this to a few people and sometimes I get very annoyed and incredulous responses from guys about how are they supposed to know that it’s a test if the girl is being unreasonable? How are they supposed to know that and let her have her way? I find it difficult to explain that if you find it unreasonable for someone to have a preference of no consequence which they don’t feel the need to explain, then you are the one being unreasonable. You can decide for yourself that it sounds flaky and you don’t want to date her, but you don’t have a right to know and approve all of her reasons for things in order to deign to respect that she said no about it. Especially in the case of someone you haven’t even fucking met yet.
The point isn’t to know it’s a test, the point is that if you would only say “yes” if you knew it was a test, then what if it’s not a test, but because she hates coffee shops, or because she’s attending a funeral Wednesday and doesn’t know you well enough to want to share that, or whatever else? Because if you’re making rules for when other people can have preferences and not explain why… yeah, that is a thing they can reasonably want to avoid.
@ all the angry dudes in the replies: the point is not to trick or manipulate men. The point is to see how a potential romantic partner reacts to a minor inconvenience. If they say, “oh, ok, would seven work instead?” or “well there’s this Armenian tea house I’ve been meaning to try out, want to go there?” then that’s a good sign that they’re safe to date. If they throw a fit and/or demand to know every little detail about your rationale over something as simple as rescheduling dinner plans, that’s a bad sign. A really bad sign.
It’s like this, dudes. Women in Western society are socialised to cooperate and compromise. Some men are socialised to get all their own way, all the time. These dudes are incredibly dangerous to women their partners,* and the only way to tell them apart from the OK guys is to pay close attention to how they react. If you’re one of the OK ones, this isn’t about you. Learn to take “no” for an answer, and you’ll be fine.
*Updated to reflect the fact that abusive men can target any gender, and the fact that I used this screening tactic to good effect during my Big Gay Slut phase.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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