In America, race and sexuality being irrelevant is a privilege of straight white men. When someone has done you violence because of who you are, you’ll spend every second of the rest of your life with who you are and how likely the people around you are to try to kill you over it in the forefront of your mind. When I, as a queer person, walk into a room I immediately sort everyone in the room into threats, allies, and people who will just stand off to the side because experience has taught me that if I don’t some people will beat the shit out of me and others will tell me that I deserve it for “being a f*g about things”. Ask your black friend, or your gay friend, or your woman friend. I guarantee you every one of them is more on guard than you because race, gender and sexual orientation will never be irrelevant to them.

This isn’t about forcing people to disclose their sexuality. “Why does he have to be gay?” Is almost always an effort to force people not to disclose their sexuality, but it’s only ever used when the sexuality being disclosed is non-straight. You have never seen and will never see any reaction at all to a straight cis male character simply using the phrase “my wife” but a cis female character doing exactly the same will elicit a backlash. They’ll dress it up as being against unnecessary sexualization, but the only sexualization that’s ever unnecessary is queer sexualization. Straight sexualization is never a problem.

because I’d “like” to “know”. Some people use them to communicate dubiousness, some people use them to indicate they’re actually quoting someone, some “people” use them for emphasis.

I still only have ever heard “Tim shot Eric dead.” I’ve never seen it any other way except in this headlines.

I’d love to see an example of “I shot dead him”. I’m not trying to be defensive, I’d really enjoy seeing it. Dialects fascinate me.

But we absolutely see backlash of the type of “why does he have to be gay” in response to something as simple as two men holding hands, or other things that would never be seen as “making a point to mention someone’s sexuality” if that sexuality is straight. I’m generalizing away from this particular example and addressing the idea that anything that isn’t cishet is abnormal and requires justification.

Did they run out of monkeys?

Why are straight white people the only people who don’t need a plot justification to exist?

Imagine how difficult it is to try to tell people that you are, globally, the pre-eminent batman researcher…

The headline is technically grammatically correct but ambiguous. “…shot and killed unarmed black man” would have been better. If you absolutely need to stick to word/character count, “shot unarmed black man dead” would be less ambiguous and more in keeping with how people actually use “shot dead”. I’ve watched a lot of westerns and I can think of quite a few where someone says “I shot him dead” but not one where someone says “I shot dead him”.

there’s no way to know what an IPA will taste like before you crack it open

That’s why I like brewers that publish their hops. I’m the opposite of you, I live for the citrusy, fruity type of hops and despise the more traditional floral/piney strains. If I see simcoe on the bill I’ll go to bed sober, but if you’ve got Willamette or Cascade I’ll make tea from them.

Nope, just bored to death by the seagulls constantly squawking “THING BAD! THING BAD!”

But of the near-infinite number of things a person dislikes, they only meme about a couple. The Internet loves an easy target…

Why is she in quotes?

You see, I always thought that he bought Twitter so that he could have a parallel equivalent to that thing where the president can send a message to every cell phone instantly. You’ll notice that one of the first things he did was make himself block-proof. He still shows up in your feed, even if you blocked him. That was actually what caused me to leave Twitter, though his later decisions have validated that. He’s even floated the idea of getting rid of blocks altogether. He’s slowly making Twitter unpalatable to anyone who isn’t part of his white supremacist genius entrepreneur cult.

At a press conference today, Musk was quoted as saying:

Look at me. Look at me. Please, God, I need people to be paying attention to me and validating me all the time. Ever since I fucked it up with my hot goth gf I’ve been an absolute mess of transparent attempts to remain relevant. I tried to gain your approval by doing what I guessed would be cool guy shit like going on stage with Dave Chappelle and yelling at you small people about how rich I am. I did the meme thing with the fake money and the fun monkey pictures. I spent billions evading your blocks on Twitter. I give up. You don’t have to love me. No one will ever love me. But I need you to always be looking at me.

Musk then produced an acoustic guitar and began to play a cover of Matchbox 20’s “Push”. According to reports, the entrepreneur who used his slave-generated wealth to build a private space program was on the verge of tears and within shouting distance of the key as he sang the line “Don’t just stand there/say nice things to me/cuz I’ve been cheated and I’ve been wronged”.

I can take you to my local beer store in suburban Pittsburgh and show you each style you listed, alongside fruit sours, goses, and a pretty incredible variety of ciders. Pittsburgh is a hard drinking town, but I don’t think our craft beer scene is leaps and bounds ahead of other similarly-sized cities. What that tells me is that the beer you (used to) want is there if you look and that you’re more bitter than the 2x NEIPA that you’re railing against.

Vegans, PSL girls, IPA guys, furries, and anime nerds seem to be the most popular targets for boring, basic memes.

Are they wrong to do this? I believe so, and I can’t comment on UK law but US law agrees with me. But can I tell you why they do this? 18 years in foodservice and one of my most common complaints was coffee or tea that isn’t hot enough. Sometimes it was that I poured a cup and then had to go do something else before I dropped it off, but a lot of times it was just done brewing and I had walked the pot straight to the table only for someone to send it back and tell me to microwave it until it boiled.

People love narratives that are simple and have an easy to understand moral to them even if they’re absolutely wrong. In this case, the narrative is that she asked for hot coffee and got hot coffee, and the moral is that people are greedy and stupid and you have to protect yourself from them. I’ve often found that one well-constructed point can blow these narratives up though. I was talking with my dad about this particular case, he’s a big “gotta do something about these frivolous lawsuits” guy because he used to own a business that was adjacent to real estate and real estate is probably the most litigated business in America. I’m a big “frivolous lawsuits is a term exploitative industries use to get people excited to give up their rights” guy, so we were at loggerheads about this one. Eventually I was like “Have you ever spilled coffee? When you did, who paid for your skin grafts?” Turns out that when crafting their narrative about how she was “suing them for giving her what she asked for”, the industry lobby left out the part where she had to spend 8 days in the hospital and have multiple reconstructive surgeries.