If you live somewhere with snow, get your car’s under carriage washed throughout the winter months. Salt and chemicals are used on roads to make them more drivable, but these in turn cause the bottom of your car to rust.
Speaking of car washes- get familiar with other car care services. Lots of gas stations have air pumps for you to inflate your tires. Car tires loose pressure during the winter and gain pressure in the summer due to temperature changes, so you may need to adjust your tire’s pressure throughout the year. Many car washes have little vacuum stations where you can vacuum your car seats.
Check engine lights are not aways deadly, but they sometimes can be! Mechanics with any common decency will run your car’s check engine code free of charge, it takes literally thirty seconds to do so. I’ve also heard that Autozone will do this as well. If your check engine light comes on, don’t just ignore it. Learn what the code is and decide if it something that needs to be addressed immediately. Do NOT put your life in jeopardy.
Do NOT wait until the end of the month to get your yearly inspection completed. If your inspection is up at the end of September, go in August. You can get your inspection done early! I recommend doing this, because sometimes unexpected and expensive problems turn up. Don’t give yourself a week to come up with $500!
Similarly- not all mechanics are stand up. If someone gives you an expensive quote, don’t just settle for it. Shop around and see what other mechanics say. Also, ask your friends/family who their mechanic is. A friend of mine is a tow truck driver and he recommend my current mechanic to me.
11. If you’re told you need all the fluids replaced, that’s really not always true. Often they can just be topped off at a fraction of the price. As stated above, get a second opinion.
12. Other things to keep in the car:
Map of your area (data doesn’t always work)
Pens
A bottle or two of water
A snack that will keep
A compass unless the car has one built in
Tire
Pepper spray (especially if you are feminine presenting)
A small shovel and bag of salt in the trunk/back if you live in a snowy place
A blanket
Get an OBD-II reader. About $11 on amazon and you can read your own car check engine lights wherever you are.
I was reading through reblogs on this post and was so happy to see this addition! Just bought an OBD2 scanner! It was $30, the cheaper ones are fine but you have to look up the codes yourself.
A pair of heavy work or gardening gloves is good idea too!
It’s sad that toxic game culture is so prevalent cuz like. As someone who has ended up in random matches with kids before, I can attest to how fucking easy it is to reverse and un-teach shitty attitudes in kids.
Example: I downloaded Friday the 13th because it’s free on psn. I dunno how to play, so I just enter quick play and I’m matched with 3-4 kids on mic. Immediately on mic they’re shitty and disparaging to each other. They laugh at each others deaths, they actively work against team mates and self sabotage, they call each other “fags”, etc. From the sounds of the voices they cannot be older than 13-14.
I put on my mic and just decide I ain’t havin it. I am nice. I thank them for barricading doors or leaving me items. When they break free from Jason’s grasp I say “good job!” or I try to help them. One kid survived for most of the match by himself. When he dies, I tell him he did a fantastic job.
The mood shift is practically INSTANT. These kids almost immediately stop being dick heads. They start encouraging each other and being kind. After the match all of them try to friend request me. Which should tell you a couple of things:
A) kids want to be kind, and they want to have a nice time playing games. But encounters with adults like me or so rare that they’ve trained themselves to instantly put on a toxic, shitty, defensive veneer when encountering any new person online. It’s literally just THAT EASY to not groom a horrible gaming community, it’s just that NO ONE does it.
B) the speed of which they all tried to friend me was cute, but paints for me such a sad picture? Like these kids are SO desperate to find people to play with who aren’t crappy jerks. They played with me for 10 minutes TOPS and all instantly tried to reach out to me.
tl;dr: The kids are alright. Adults are shit heads.
shoutout to 10th century norway for having the only medieval penal code (gulaþinglög) i’ve read that not only doesn’t suggest you torture people but explicitly says tortured confessions are made out of fear and you should specifically not listen to them. good job 10th century norway
also shoutout to tumblr mobile for letting me blog exclusively in hot pink
Seriously. What on earth could a 3 yr old do to “warrant” a gun to the chest???
Apparently they were in the process of arresting her mother (whom they beat while handcuffed, naturally), also pointed the gun at the head of the child’s grandmother, and pointed the gun at her when she did what any toddler would do and started wailing. The incident gave her one of the worst cases of child PTSD the expert they assigned has ever seen and she’ll need therapy well into her adult years.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of gun safety knows that you do not point a gun at anyone you are not willing to kill. So best case scenario these officers were grossly incompetent and worst case they were willing to kill a child for crying. This settlement is the least they deserve.
“We believe wheelchair users should have access to the same styles and trends everyone else has, without ever having to compromise comfort.
Our clothing has signature cuts and styles to fit a seated body shape, falling and draping naturally without interfering with wheelchair mechanics. We use top-quality fabrics that look beautiful and feel luxurious.
Our Easy Zip Back option in coats is just one way that we’re making layering up and staying warm easier than ever. Discreet zippers in the back mean that Easy Zip Back coats separate into two individual pieces.
Our signature ‘L-Shape’ means that IZ coats have the length you need over your lap while looking sleek and clean so you don’t sacrifice your style.”
The IZ Collection goes up to a 2X and has a wide range of masculine and feminine clothes.
They look gorgeous, but be prepared. They are expensive.
This is so rad
Right now, they’re throwing everything out for far lower prices – because they’re closing shop. So if you need/want any of these, now is the time to get it, I guess.
I saw this post years ago, and I just rechecked – don’t click that link, it tries to make you download and install a thing and then redirects to a google search. I’m pretty sure this clothing company no longer exists. It’s a shame, but spreading this around like they’re still in operation is not great either.
Don’t leave out any hard of hearing children who come to your door this Halloween, take a minute out of your day to learn a few seasonal asl signs! These are two different variations of “Happy Halloween” Click here for my source.
halloween is for everyone!!!!!!
this is honestly the cutest thing ever 10/10 will do this year💗💗
And here are the British Sign Language versions. (I love the BLS sign for Halloween. It’s so cute.)
Deaf inclusion for every holiday!
Love this! I also posted a video the other day of different signs from about 90+ countries for “Happy Halloween” 🙂
Two years ago, I had a Deaf girl show up in my drivethru on Halloween. Her mom was kind of sad when I tried to offer the girl candy, and you could tell it’d been a rough night. I asked her to get the girl’s attention, and then signed to her the way I learned from those top gifs. She started laughing and clapping her hands at once, and when I held out the bowl of candy she was DELIGHTED. I think there’s a very serious possibility I was the only person all night who was able to share with her that way.
I googled a few interviews and Einar Selvik, the band lead, congratulates Vikings the TV series of not focusing only on barbars
killing each other, but at least remembering in part that viking age
people had, you know, normal lives.
part 2) viking fanboys are always all about valhalla and fighting when
he himself said that those traditional songs were about everything,
daily life.
This is an older ask now, but fits yesterday’s self-reblogs!
I don’t know much about Wardruna, and while I do enjoy their tunes, I’ve been a bit hesitant, especially since they seem to be very popular among said viking fanboys.
But this really does make me feel a bit more optimistic! Valhalla/Valhöll definitely wasn’t the “standard goal” for any Viking Age man, and the song Helvegen (Hel’s road) pretty clearly states in its name already that it’s the road to Hel that people actually have to walk when they die.
If I was to only analyse the song itself, it definitely doesn’t talk of warrior’s honour. It talks of death, plain and simple, the reality of it as a plain old final destination for all of us.
I especially love the bits they lifted from Hávamál at the end of the song,
Deyr fé,
deyja frændr /
deyr sjalfr it sama en orðstírr
deyr aldregi hveim er sér góðan getr.
Deyr fé,
deyja frændr /
deyr sjalfr it sama,
ek veit einn,
at aldrei deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.
Because I feel like the most desperate macho ego support groupt readings ignore that last line pretty skillfully:
Cattle dies, family dies / You will die the same One thing that never dies Is the good fame one earns.
Cattle dies, family dies / You will die the same I know one to never die How each dead is judged.
No one is saying that you get to Valhöll by screaming bloody murder and defending an imagined war front you made up. You’ll die just like the rest of us and walk that road to Hel.
“I think that
many people who don’t visit a church or a mosque, or what others they
now can be, also haven’t experienced being in a sacred space. I think
that’s what all people have need of. – – For me it’s about creating a
neutral room where in that blink of an eye it’s just the weight and something sacred of the moment. – –
Religion? I think I’m a
spiritual person, but to define that in relation to whatever movement or
group is not something I do. – –
We are slowly starting to get over and see the
problematic aspects of our cultural heritage. What springs to mind
foremost is the misrepresentation [of Nordic culture] by the Nazi
movement. We are slowly getting that history back. And it’s a very
positive thing, that we can now start to rethink about how to teach that
history to our children.”
– Einar Selvik for “Rocknytt”, 17th of November 2016
Also a nice reminder that the fact Nordic people speak English well enough for international interviewers to understand us is a direct result of international connections and “globalism”. Here he talks about / criticises the ethno-centrism of [white] Christianity as opposed to the nature-bound universality of folk religions:
“It is this universal theme that transcends age or culture or social background or gender. It’s timeless. And since these old traditions are born of nature – and nature we still surround us with, it makes it still relevant. For me it’s not about romanticising about the past or trying to make ‘viking music’ or bronze age music. It’s about taking some old ideas and old tools and making something new.”
Artisan Scribbles 