I once drove through Ohio, don’t remember my exact route, but came up north from Kentucky to Cincinnati, then east into Pennsylvania
There may be more boring drives out there, but I haven’t made them.
Cincinnati seemed like a nice enough city though. Can’t think of any particular reason I’d ever want to go back, but I didn’t hate it, so that was pretty much the high point of my time in Ohio
My mental health is pretty solid, but it’s in spite of capitalism. I do pretty well at managing stress, I don’t have any real mental health concerns or other issues. I’m physically pretty healthy, have a decent head on my shoulders, and am lucky enough to work a job thats very secure and for me is pretty enjoyable and pays well enough that I’m not struggling in any significant way.
But damn-near every ounce of stress or anxiety I ever experience has to do with money. What if I lose my job, what if I have a health problem, what if I need a new car, what if my house burns down, etc.
Big one-time infusion of cash or a decent enough raise would eliminate just about every source of stress I have.
Poland and Hungary have historically been very close allies since the middle ages, lots of shared culture, history, they’ve faced similar struggles over the years, and generally they’ve always held each other in pretty high regard. They each even have a little poem about how much they like each other
Them polish version translates to something like
Pole and Hungarian brothers be,
good for fight and good for party.
Both are valiant, both are lively,
Upon them may God’s blessings be.
The Hungarian Version
Pole and Hungarian — two good friends,
fighting, and drinking at the end.
Unfortunately there’s been a lot of tension between them in recent years over the war in Ukraine, and their relationship has been deteriorating.
I don’t know, I’ve met a decent amount of Canadians over the years, never got any bad vibes from us. I think the problem is America has more than our fair share of assholes, so they approach us a little skeptically, but if you show you’re not an asshole, I think they like us just fine.
Of course, my biases should be disclosed. Most of the Canadians I’ve met have been from roughly the Toronto area, plus a good handful of French Canadians.
Couple of the officers at the border when I went to Montreal were kind of dicks, but I think that’s more of a universal feature of border crossing and customs officials around the world. Once I was there though no one gave me any shit.
An independent artist probably isn’t going to have an employer-sponsored retirement account like a 401k or a pension, etc. like many of us with “normal” jobs have, and are counting on to help our spouses, children, or other dependants should we die before them. Allowing them to retain the rights to an artists work for after death seems to me like it would help fill that same kind of role and also provides them a little protection, since not all artists are wildly successful and may not have been able to save much or anything for retirement/funeral expenses, etc. on their own. I don’t think it needs to last their whole life, their kid could potentially live 100 years which seems excessive and against the spirit of allowing things to go into the public domain, but I think seeing them into adulthood is fair.
Edit: I’m personally contributing to a pension at my job, my wife has never worked there but she still gets to collect that pension after I die, that’s a big part of our collective retirement plans. If we had kids, I’d want to make sure those kids are being provided for out of that pension at least until they’re old enough to live on their own. I think artists would also like to have that kind of safety net for their loved ones after they die.
I feel like there needs to be at least 2 separate sets of rules for copyright.
For independent artists, I think it’s pretty reasonable that copyright should last for their lifetime and maybe a little longer to make sure that their spouse, children, or other dependants can be cared for before the work goes public domain. We can quibble over exactly how long after death that should be, but that seems pretty fair to me (personally I’m tempted to say 18 years+9 months, so if hypothetically a male artist knocked up his wife immediately before kicking the bucket, that kid would still be able to receive something from their father’s works until they reached adulthood.) And if they don’t have any apparent next of kin, it just expires at death.
But when it’s not an independent artist, and it’s something like Disney, where that legal entity that owns the property could very well be around forever, I think it’s more appropriate to put a hard limit on it, maybe 50 years as long as they’re actively using the property- marketing it, selling merchandise, licensing it out, making it available on streaming, etc. and maybe 15 years if they aren’t doing anything with it (Again, we can quibble over the exact length of time, I picked 50 it’s a nice round number, and 15 because that’s how long a design patent lasts and it felt appropriate)
There’s of course going to be some interplay between those two categories, an independent artist who’s contracted to make something for Disney may retain some rights to that work, so what happens after 15 years? What if that artist is contracted to make something using IP that’s about to expire even sooner? What if an independent artist creates something insanely popular and builds a disney-like megacorporation around it with hundreds of other people all creating derivative works from that original thing, does the copyright stay with that original artist to expire when they die or does it become one of those corporate copyrights that expires in 50 years? And if the latter, does that happen automatically when the company hinsts a certain size or how would that happen?
I definitely don’t have all the answers to all those questions, but as a general framework that feels fair to me.
Another thing that just occurred to me, is that if we harp on people too hard about only calling 911 when it’s a “real” emergency, they start getting paranoid and are reluctant to call sometimes when they really should call
I’ve seen it happen in person, one time I was over my friend’s house and we had a short but really intense storm roll through. We look outside and a big tree on his property is leaning and very obviously about to fall over the road and probably take down some wires.
He starts talking about calling the township and the electric company and like 3 other agencies to get it taken care of and starts looking up phone numbers.
And I’m there telling him to just call 911. I get about 50 calls just like that every time there’s a storm, it’s not a big deal- you know your address, your cross streets, what town you live in, you’re not a moron and not freaking out and can explain the issue intelligibly and succinctly, so you’re better than like 70% of the calls I get on any given day, the entire call will last you like 30 seconds. We have all the contact info to get anything we need out there to deal with it and can do it blindfolded because we do it every time there’s a storm.
And even with a 911 dispatcher, standing there telling him to just call 911, he was really reluctant to do it because to him it wasn’t a “real emergency”
And of course everyone has a different threshold for what a “real” emergency is. I’ll get people calling in cool as a cucumber to calmly report that their daughter just got stabbed like it’s something that just happens to them every other Tuesday, and I’ll get people losing their minds like it’s the end of the world as we know it because some road construction is too loud (and of course that same person would probably call in just as angry that there’s a pothole in the road and they’re angry it hasn’t been fixed yet)
I have a thousand other stupid reasons people called, some came in on non emergency lines, some on 911, and just as many stories of people who called in actual emergencies on a non emergency line for one reason or another.
I think the worst case scenario is us getting hit by a hurricane at the same time our local nuclear plant has a major meltdown, there’s widespread cellular network outages, our dispatch center catches fire and we have to evacuate to our backup center, and there’s also a mass shooting incident going on while someone’s trying to deliver a baby over the phone with someone in a moving car speeding down the highway refusing to pull over and also fighting with their husband and causing multiple accidents.
Serious answer- my agency is lucky, even with handling basically every emergency and non emergency call in our county, our staffing and call volume are good enough that even a long wait for us to answer the phone is usually only like 2 or 3 rings. My coworkers are good at what we do, our training is better than what some other centers get, we can keep the calls moving, there’s about 20-30 of us on at any given time depending on the shift and staffing and such, and there have been major incidents where we’ve handled something like 1000 calls in the space of an hour or two and no one had any significant delay in getting their call answered. As a general rule, we don’t even put callers on hold regardless of how minor the incident is, or if they called 911 or 10-digit, we just handle the call and move on.
Non emergency calls, and honestly even a lot of actual emergency calls are a lot more simple than you might think. The majority of my calls have maybe a dozen or so words in the notes, many are just one or two words. I’m not taking a full report, I’m getting a location, a brief description of what’s happening, and some general safety information, giving them some brief instructions if necessary, then the callers name (if they’ll give it to me) and phone number and I’m off to answer the next call. I’m not taking a full report, I’m not an officer I’m not taking a full report that’s the cops’ job, I’m sending responders to go handle the emergency.
Every situation is different, sometimes I’ve had to stay on longer, I’ve had a couple calls I’ve been on for over an hour because the situation kept evolving and we needed constant updates from the caller, but that’s an extreme outlier. Most of the time my calls are well less than 5 minutes, often less than 2 or even less than 1 minute and between all of us we move through the queue quickly.
If we’re not busy, I can take my time, go full customer service, and help people with all of their stupid problems that are in no way a police issue. If we get busy, I can cut right to the chase, get what I need, and hang up.
Some agencies have higher call volumes, major staffing issues, and frankly are sometimes just bad at what they do, and that can cause delays. Some places it is a real issue, but I’ve had to transfer calls all over the country and most of the time it’s a non-issue. Overall, dispatchers know how to keep the queue moving, when they can slow down and take their time, and when they need to power through.
Also it’s a somewhat self-correcting problem. If there’s a long non-emergency queue, there’s probably a long 911 queue as well, and someone who doesn’t really have an emergency is probably going to hang up pretty quickly instead of waiting 2, 3, 5, 10, 20+ minutes for an answer for someone to answer. They’ll hang up and try the non emergency line, or try back later, or drive themselves to the station or hospital, or maybe just decide it’s not a big enough deal to worry about.
There are always weird exceptions and edge cases in our job, there’s very little we can say that will apply to all situations in all dispatch centers across the country. To some extent, you just kind of have to try being aware of what things are like where you are. If you’re not sure what to do, that’s what’s 911 is for, just try to keep things to-the-point, and listen to what we’re asking/telling you.
So there’s 2 aspects to this
What cops theoretically could do if they’re properly trained and motivated and working on the crime of the century with the media and mayor’s office breathing down their neck
And there’s what they’re actually going to do for anything else.
Theoretically it’s almost impossible to be truly anonymous in the world we live in today. If you make a phone call, there’s phone records the cops can get access to, security cameras everywhere, if you call from a deactivated cell phone or take out your SIM card they can try to get the the IMEI number and see who that phone was last registered to, if you submit something online they can try to trace your IP address, etc. they can try to track down witnesses who may be able to ID you, etc.
Basically none of that is ever going to happen just to trace down a witness that called 911 who’s probably not going to be cooperative anyway. People watch too many CSI TV shows.
And good luck trying to get cops to try getting fingerprints for anything short of murder, and even then they’re going to be looking for the suspect, not a random passerby who called it in. They’re also probably not going to get useful prints off a payphone because 10,000 people have probably had their fingers all over that phone since the last time someone bothered to wipe it down. And if your prints aren’t already in the system, they’re not going to be able to tie them to you anyway (although from the way you’re talking about it I suspect a lot of people probably have previous records and been fingerprinted)
The practical answer is call from the payphone, call from a deactivated phone without a sim card, call from a borrowed phone, call from a TextNow or similar service number. That is more than enough anonymity that in all but the most extreme serious crimes the cops aren’t going to put in any real effort to try to track you down as a witness. They may put in a little more effort if they think you’re a suspect, but it’s usually pretty clear if that’s the case. Most of the time, they’re probably not even going to bother looking up the phone records even if you call into the station from your own number.
If the department has it, you can also try an anonymous tip line or submit the tip online. Those may not be checked very often, so I wouldn’t necessarily count on that if you have an emergency you want to be addressed quickly.
Really, just call, they’re not trying to bust people for other stuff for calling in an emergency, they’re not ratting people out as the one who called, that’s all counter productive and just makes more work for themselves in the long run. Make the call and leave the area if you want, we can’t make you stay there and you should have at least a few minutes to skedaddle before the cops show.
Edit: call from a nearby business’ phone or a borrowed cell phone, and just don’t leave your name and try to stay off a security camera while you’re doing it. Unless you’re really distinctive looking, odds are the person who let you use the phone is probably not going be able to give much of a description of you if cops ask for some reason
My thing is that I get so many callers who are really bad at making a determination for themselves what is and isn’t an emergency or who to call. They’ll call a 10 digit police non emergency line because someone’s having a heart attack or their house is on fire or something else really urgent instead of just calling 911 or even instead of calling the fire department or ambulance station, or someone got stabbed and they call the wrong towns non emergency line, maybe even a town with the same name in a completely different state or even country (I once got a call for a town in Australia with a similar name to one of ours) so we kind of have to act like those non emergency lines are also potential emergencies.
Yes, they do go to the back of the queue, and in some places that’s more of an issue than others. In my jurisdiction, if the phone rings 2 or 3 times before it gets answered, emergency or not, that’s a lot for us and we’ve been fortunate that our staffing and call volumes haven’t been bad enough for that to really come into play except for some really bad major incidents (mostly severe storms and such, in which case, most people aren’t bothering with non emergencies anyway)
Some places do have longer queues and it could come into play, but I’ve had to transfer callers all over the country, usually those transfers end up going through on a 10-digit non emergency line because of how the transfer works, so we’re going to the back of the queue, and it’s pretty rare that we have to wait long for an answer. It’s less of an issue overall than you probably think.
Those non emergency calls can also often be handled very quicky. For a basic non emergency call, I’m getting an address, name, phone number, and like 1 or 2 short lines of notes, I’ve entered probably thousands of meet complainant calls (officer just needs to go out and meet with the caller to take a report) where the only thing I put in the notes was “RE: FRAUD,” “RE: HARASSMENT,” “RE: ONGOING ISSUE WITH NEIGHBORS, NOT IN PROGRESS” etc. If the caller is even marginally cooperative and not too long-winded it can take me like 30 seconds, they’re not tying up the queue for long.
One of our neighboring counties does have staffing and call volume issues, and it’s not uncommon to have to wait a minute or two for someone to answer, and sometimes even longer (they got hit hard during the George Floyd riots a few years back, and a couple times I had transfers to them during that that had we wait like 10 minutes in the actual 911 queue)
But a lot of the callers for them tell me that they tried calling the station directly or 311 only to be told to call 911 instead, even for some things that our stations could handle directly (and again, ours can’t handle much)
Location is also a big thing, having a landline address or cell phone location is a big time saver and we don’t get that on non emergency lines. A lot of our callers have no idea where they are, what police department covers their area, etc. (you’d also be amazed at how many people don’t know their own home address) and so a lot of times just trying to verify the location where something happened/is happening is the longest and most difficult part of the call.
It’s also sometimes surprisingly hard to find local contact info. Even with access to a database of other 911 centers, Google, etc. I’ve occasionally struggled to find the contact info for some other jurisdictions when I’m trying to transfer a caller, once or twice I struck out from the usual channels and had to call a neighboring jurisdiction and ask them to be transferred or get the correct number from them.
It pays to be aware of any special situations in your area, if they do have high call volumes, staffing issues, etc. and calling with a non emergency can actually create significant delays
Or we have a couple departments that have chosen to opt out of using our county PSAP for police dispatch (although we still handle fire and EMS for them) so in those areas it is often preferable to call them directly instead of needing us to connect you to them, although that location info is still very useful and again they don’t get it if you call them directly, so there’s been cases where someone calls them directly, but can’t tell them where they are, and they end up telling the caller to call 911 so we can get that location info for them.
But at the end of the day, the point of 911 is that no matter where you are, even if you don’t really know where you are, you know what number to call to get in touch with police/fire/EMS. Hammering on people about what is/isn’t an emergency is kind of antithetical to that, and overall most areas are moving away from that.
If you are absolutely certain that your call isn’t an emergency, you have the time to look up the phone number, and you’re ok with very likely being told to call someone else, or call back at a different time, maybe getting transferred around a few times, etc. then by all means please try the non emergency line. If you’re not sure, if you can’t wait, if you don’t have the phone number, if you need a cop to go do something now, then probably call 911.
If you really want to remain anonymous for some reason, call from a payphone (they still exist,) use a burner phone, borrow a phone from a random passerby, wear a mask so no one can recognize you in case there’s security cameras, make sure you’re not seen getting into your own car or walking home, change your clothes somewhere in the middle, etc.
If you call from your own phone number, if we and/or the cops care enough, it’s not all that hard to get phone records and get your info.
But I’m also going to let you in on something- we’re not going to care. The cops may have a couple follow up questions for you (like maybe “how often do you walk this way,” "so they can try to establish how long it’s been there,) that I’m probably not going to ask on the initial 911 call. My job isn’t to take a full report and investigate and interrogate everyone, my job is to make sure cops are sent out to do all of that, and if you don’t give us a way to contact you back, you’re making it harder for them to investigate the incident.
And why? They’re not going to tell anyone who the random passerby was who found the bag, they’re not going to try to blame it on you, and honestly wanting to remain anonymous probably makes you sound a lot more suspicious than if you just gave your name and they’re probably going to put more effort into figuring out who you were and trying to drag you in for questioning than they would have otherwise.
It varies a bit from one area to another, but a lot of places have moved to a central dispatch model where basically everything goes through the 911 center one way or another. It’s usually best to just call 911 and cut out the middle men, worst case scenario they’ll tell you it’s not an emergency and who to call, maybe even connect you to them directly. Even if your area works differently and they do actually want to dispatch non emergencies from the station, you really need to be a nuisance before anyone even dreams of trying to get you in trouble for misusing 911, no one wants to do that paperwork or go to court for a one-off call.
Source- I am a 911 dispatcher.
If you do call the non-emergency number, one of 4 things is usually going to happen (in my county)
The call comes right into us anyway, a lot of stations aren’t staffed 24/7 so when they’re not there to answer the phone it rolls over to us, or sometimes they even publish or give out a direct number to us instead of their actual inside line because most of the time we’re going to have to deal with it anyway.
The station forwards you to us
The station tells you to hang up and call 911.
The station takes down the information, then after they hang up with you, they call us and relay it to us (and usually misses half the details we’d like to have)
Pretty much the only things the people answering the phones at the station are good for is answering general administrative questions- “can I get fingerprinted for my job?” “did anyone turn in some lost keys?” “How do I get a permit to…?” “How do i get a copy of a report?” “How do I pay my fine?” “Where was my car towed to?” Etc.
If you need a cop to do something, even if it’s just to take a report, your best bet is usually calling 911.
Call 911, tell them where it is, explain that you found a trash bag somewhere and you’re concerned it has a dead body in it, don’t disturb it any more than you already have
I work in 911 dispatch, from my end of things this is a very straightforward call. Verify your location, one or two short lines of notes, send a cop out to check it out.
I’ve taken a few calls like this, luckily it’s always just been trash or at worst a dead animal.
One time the responding officer found some bones in the bag and was pretty sure they weren’t human, but called out our on-call coroner to be sure who confirmed that it was just a deer or something.
Similarly I once had a call from an off-duty coroner reporting a “strong smell of decomp” from the woods near a gas station or something. I guess if anyone would know it would be them. Sent a cop out, sure enough, it was a dead deer.
It’s very rare that anything like this is ever as exciting as your imagination makes you think it might be. Still, always better to call if you’re unsure.
For what it’s worth, I work in 911 dispatch, so I’ve heard pretty much every reason someone could call the police, some good, some not so good, and there’s always weird exceptions or edge cases where a situation that I normally wouldn’t personally think warrants police involvement can get tipped over the edge (regardless of whether I think they’re needed or not, if someone calls asking for police, I’m dispatching them, if the cops want to ignore the call, that can be on them)
My general rule for fights/domestics, is I’ll call for situations that are or look/sound like they’re about to become physically violent, neighbors yelling at each other next door-not my problem. If I start hearing them throwing things around, I start hearing mention of weapons, they’re suddenly out in the street, etc. then I’ll call.
I’ll also call when it’s just a verbal argument in a situation where that sort of behavior is totally uncalled for, like an irate customer yelling and screaming in a store, manager is asking them to leave and they’re refusing.
Or if I witness a crime where the victim is a person, small business, or public property.
Situations where a person is or might be in significant danger or distress.
Reckless drivers if they’re really excessive, not your run of the mill bad driver or asshole speeding and running shop signs, you need to be a couple notches worse than that- swerving all over the road, or speeding to a ridiculous degree.
Certain road obstructions and other traffic hazards.
When in doubt, I say err on the side of calling. Take a deep breath, keep a level head, stick to the facts, and answer the dispatcher’s questions, and please, for the love of God don’t start your call off with anything like “well I guess it’s not really an emergency but…” that’s basically our “it didn’t scan, so it must be free” and don’t apologize repeatedly for calling, if you feel bad about tying up an emergency line, all of that apologizing just makes the call longer which means you’re just tying up the line even more.
The situation is different from one area to another, but overall a lot of places have moved to a sort of central dispatch model, more or less everything is going to go through the 911 center and very little gets dispatched from your local police station. In a lot of places, even if you call the non emergency number there’s a good chance it’s coming to us, and if it does go to someone at the station there’s a good chance they’re going to transfer you to us, or just take the information and call us after you hang up. In most cases I’d prefer you just called 911 and cut out the middle man, especially if you don’t know exactly where you are so I at least have a landline address or cellular location to work with. The station can handle administrative things, getting a copy of a report you already filed, answering general questions, lost & found, etc. but if you need a cop to do something, even if it’s just give you a phone call, that’s probably going to come through us.
In your situation, I probably would have called when someone was banging on your door. That kind of tells me that the situation was out of hand and was potentially even presenting a threat to yourself. You seem to understand that as well since you went for your gun. If there’s a situation where you think you may need to defend yourself and you have the time to do so, you should probably be calling 911.
I probably also would have called the front desk about the yelling. Cops may not care about your noise complaints, but the hotel probably has their own noise rules, and if the guests are breaking them, management can have them trespassed, and the cops will care a bit more about that.
Final thoughts, since I’m somewhat on the inside, I have a pretty good handle on the overall attitude of the cops in my county. Overall, I trust them not to show up and shoot someone having a psych episode, or be too unreasonably racist, or otherwise do something that’s going to end up on the news in a bad way. Certain officers/departments I trust more than others, and I’d be more or less willing to call about minor issues based on that. In a situation where I don’t know the local cops I’d err more on the side of not calling. My overall guidance of “if your not sure, call” still applies through.
I bite my nails, have as long as I can remember, and honestly don’t care particularly whether I continue or stop.
That said, I once accidentally kicked the habit for a couple weeks in probably the strangest way possible
I’ve heard of people getting small magnets implanted under their skin in order to sense electrical/magnetic fields. This idea was always interesting to me but I’m not ready to commit to implants.
But curiosity got the best of me at one point and I got some tiny neodymium magnets and super glued them to my fingernails.
It worked, probably not as well as implants since the magnets couldn’t react as well since they were glued down and couldn’t wiggle around under my skin, but I could definitely feel some things (strongest reactions I got were probably the forklift charger at my job and an electric pencil sharpener)
I didn’t do the neatest job of gluing them on, so there was a bit of super glue covering a good bit of my nails.
And that bit of weird texture from the glue was kind of off-putting and every time my hand absentmindedly went to my mouth it gave me a reminder not to do that.
So for a couple weeks until the magnets fell off and the glue wore away and I got sick of reapplying them, I had nails for the first time I can remember.
Slipped back into my old habits pretty quickly though.
I didn’t feel like my life was in any particular way better by having nails, though to be fair I don’t have the worst or most-extreme nail biting habit out there, and I didn’t particularly appreciate having to trim and file my nails and the crud that managed to accumulate under them.
I never had much luck dating, tried shooting my shot with a handful of female friends I thought I was getting vibes from, never even got a first date, but stayed friends with them.
The only 2 times I successfully ended up dating someone, the girl took the initiative and kissed me first.
First one was someone I’d just recently met, didn’t really pick up on any vibes, maybe she was putting out a ton of them and I was too much of a dumbass to pick up on them, I just thought she seemed cool and wanted to hang out with her, didn’t really have any romantic intentions in mind. Then she kissed me, I kind of had to quickly rewire my brain and I decided “ok, let’s see where this goes.” Didn’t work out long term, but we had some fun for a while. I did not stay friends with her, she got kind of weird towards the end, and I found out years later that she was very likely cheating on me towards the end, I wasn’t my best self at the time either but I wasn’t a cheater just a stupid teenager, I tried to leave the door open to remain friends but she wasn’t having any of it.
The second time I’d been friends with her for a good long while, again, no romantic intentions on my part, she was cool, we hung out mostly with other friends, sometimes not. She kissed me as we were both leaving a party at the same time getting into our own cars. Really short circuited my brain a little and could not make sense of it. Kind of had to take a day to process it and talk to her to confirm that we were gonna try it out and see where it went. She’d apparently been laying on the flirting extra heavy and I picked up on absolutely none of it. I ended up marrying her, coming up on 6 years married and close to a decade together.
For a 3rd data point, there was a girl I really liked in high school. I’m pretty sure she was flirting with me pretty hard, and several other people even told me in pretty straightforward terms that she liked me. Never quite got out of my own head enough to make a move beyond some clumsy, mostly-joking-but-not-really flirting. I think I was kind of waiting for her to make it clear to me what she wanted in an unambiguous way, and she never quite did it in a way my brain interpreted as an “all systems go” signal.
For some context, the first time I was about 18 or 19 years old, and I started dating my wife in my mid 20s, my failed attempts were all scattered around my early 20s. I’m probably a little neurodivergent in some way, some very mild degree of autism if I had to guess, and depending on who you ask I’m either a shy extrovert or an unusually outgoing introvert (the bit in Clerks about Randall hating people but loving gatherings resonates with me.)
I think the takeaway here is to go for it and don’t beat around the bush. Keep an open mind that he may not be into you that way, but that means he doesn’t want to lose your friendship either. If it’s going to happen, one of you needs to make a move, and there’s a chance that he’s just as stupid as I am and hasn’t even really considered you romantically but if you force his hand he may go “oh shit, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, why didn’t I think of that”
And even if stuff does implode, it doesn’t work out, and you don’t manage to stay friends, it’s probably better than spending the rest of your life wondering about what could have been. I love my wife, wouldn’t trade her for the world, and I’m confident that there’s no one in the world who would be a better match for me, but I do wonder sometimes what sort of fun I could have had with my high school crush, even if it wouldn’t have gone anywhere long-term. A couple weeks, months, or years of fun times would have been worth it. With the other girl I dated, even though things didn’t work out, and I think we mutually dislike each other now, I still think fondly of the times we had together regardless of the unpleasantness that came after, if I got stuck in a time loop and ended up back then, I’d still date her even knowing it wasn’t going anywhere.
Unfortunately I have no particular tips for improving conversation. Somehow I seem to do alright, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, explain how I do it.
I think by the definition I gave they’d qualify as a franchise, although for those 3 properties it kind of feels a little wrong to me and maybe I need to rethink my definition a little because they’re kind of self-contained shows, they don’t really branch out into anything larger than themselves.
Personally I think the IT crowds appeal is somewhat limited, at least in the US (it may have more widespread appeal in its native UK, I genuinely don’t know,) to sort of the nerd/techy demographic. The lines certainly get blurry because nerdy types have a lot of influence on how memes spread, but I don’t know that it has the same impact on pop culture in general as the other two.
I’m also not certain how much staying power friends has outside of the people who were watching it or at least remember it being on when it first aired. I’m not exactly plugged into what gen z and alpha are watching, but i don’t think I hear it come up amongst them very often, and I’m not even sure younger millennials care for it all that much.
The office I think has probably cemented it’s place in pop culture whether we consider it a franchise or not. Which is kind of a shame for me personally, because I could never get into it.
They probably haven’t seen a lot of them and may not recognize the names off the top of their head, but I have a hunch that if/when they do see them, damn each and every one is going to give them a couple little aha moments where they recognize that something else they’ve seen has parodied or referenced these movies, or that it’s where a meme comes from.
And I’d agree that Silence of the Lambs is probably the most important of the series by a longshot, but one book and a movie adaptation does not a franchise make in my mind and I think that Hannibal Lecter is a big enough character in the public mind (because the Silence of the Lambs movie) that the series as a whole kind of gets a pass
Child’s play- Chucky the killer doll
Dollars Trilogy - A Fistfull of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I did kind of waffle on this one a bit, but I ultimately decided to include it if for no other reason than because whether youve actually seen it or even realize it you probably have The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly’s theme song seared into your head as pretty much the western movie song.
I haven’t, but I live in PA, so we have scrapple which sounds pretty similar.