He was married and had kids. He never showed any violent tendencies and was physically very non-imposing. I always assumed that manipulation and mental games were his primary tools, but one can never really know.
His eyes seemed pretty normal, but I remember that they were always moving. He wouldn't look you straight into eyes for more than a second or two.
I did this with my friends when we went to Thailand. We were enjoying the delicious taste on a beach, two Australian guys were wanted to try it. They both spat it out instantly and the other one got so mad we thought he's actually going to attack us.
After he calmed down a bit he demanded to see us drink it to be sure we hadn't tricked him to drink poison. So we downed the entire 1 litre bottle to appease him. It was the start of a great day that lasted for few days.
I tried American chocolate once. It tasted like vomit aftertaste.
Never again.
Black licorice is the only licorice. The colourful ones are foul creations.
Salmiac and licorice are the superior candies.
I do not find your questions odd, fear not. In retrospect his case is quite fascinating.
Like I said, our duties rarely overlapped and I mostly met him at staff meetings and occasionally at the coffee lounge. He rarely expressed strong emotions - except frustration, since something was always being done "the wrong way" - and the only time I saw him express anger was when I called him out. He was often smiling, but in a weird way where his lips formed a smile but his eyes weren't fully in on it.
He was the total opposite of impulsive. If you knew when to look, you could see him calculating the next steps before taking action. But he loved attention - he was in charge of the office christmas party planning and he made himself the central figure of the entire show. If there ever was an epitome of cringe, that was pretty much it. This was an apparent blind spot for him, his corridor charisma did not work at all on stage and his act was just plain bad.
I don't know about the favours. But he would not help others if it wasn't his job. This one time our old (one year to retirement) janitor was moving desks to another floor and asked me to help him out, since he had a bad hip and the desks were too big for the elevator. I was young and always happy to help, so we started carrying them up. The creep happened to see us working and walked to me and said "Don't you understand that it is not your job to carry desks? That's what the janitor is for." And he said this out loud while the janitor was right there, holding the other end of the desk mid-stairs. I responded "I do understand. I like to help my friends."
Then he just left and we hauled the desk up. The janitor was pretty much ready to go and punch the creep, but I talked him down.
I'm cautious by nature and playing it safe seemed the wisest course to take. The guy built his schemes very cleverly and handled his own duties well, the only mistake he made was when he attacked my reputation.
I was also very lucky to have a boss who trusted me and saw things as they were. One of my co-workers ran into the creep a few years ago and found out that he had kept leaping from job to job until he had landed into a leadership position.
An ex-colleague of mine.
The guy kept up a nice guy act, but was fully self-centered, tried to subtly force his religious views upon the workplace, actively formed cliques to sow disorder and refused to help anyone in any matter that "wasn't in his contract". He openly criticized anything that didn't "meet his standards" and did so in an extremely condescending way.
His charisma attracted many and kept them from seeing through his act. His only goal seemed to be to gain power at any means.
I don't know why, but I found him suspicious at first handshake. Somehow he just felt totally fake to me. His duties rarely overlapped mine, so I just kept my eye on him from a distance. After about 6 months a leadership opening appeared and he instantly tried to recruit me to his clique. His warm, joyous eyes turned to ice when I turned him down and told him that I'm aware of the game he's playing.
In retaliation he started a smear campaign against me, but since I had done my duties well and had helped everyone whenever I could for the last decade, there was nothing for him to abuse. His attack backfired gloriously.
Soon after our boss called me to his office to discuss "reports of degligence in my performance". I knew that these were fabricated, but I was still a bit concerned when I entered the office. Boss told me to close the door and went straight to the point: "How are we going to get rid of this lying asshole? These reports he gave to me about you are complete bullshit, but they are not enough to fire him." The old sly fox had also been keeping his eyes and ears open and was as aware of the creep's machinations as I was.
We made sure that the creep didn't get the leadership position and started to insulate key personnel from his influence by informing them of the faked reports. In the next few months the word got around and his clique fell apart. The fucker was left pretty much alone and after that he resigned.
I taught myself to play the guitar and electric bass by learning the chords and reading tabulatures, I got good enough to play decent bass in a rock band. I also learned the basics of playing the piano. For the first ten years I had only a very basic understanding of the underlying theory and I never felt the need to learn more. I didn't know the names of the scales and modes I could play and I just knew in which order chords worked or didn't, I just couldn't explain why. Nor I needed to do so.
Then I chose music pedagogy as one of my university minors and suddenly I had to learn the theory and reading/writing notation in just a few months - it was not easy but in the end it paid off big time. I finally understood why things worked the way they did and it opened up a world of new ideas for me.
I'm happy that I learned the theory after I had already learned to play an instrument. Knowing the theory backs me up, it does not constrain me. Few of my friends went through the formal music education and some - not all - are really bound by "the rules", breaking them in any way is a big NO when we play together. One can play almost anything with the piano if you hand him the notes, but he's totally unable to improvise or pick tunes by ear. Which is quite baffling to me.
And I'm not saying that the route I took to learn music is better, it just worked for me.
EDIT: Typos.
The headline of the article is misleading. No one is laying "pre-emptive" minefields at their borders for civilians to waltz in, withdrawal from the Ottawa agreement means that anti-personnel landmines are an option if Russia starts massing troops on their side of the border.
I've trained with landmines during my military service and they are truly horrible things. I hope we never have to use them again.
I'd hug my mom. Then I'd go ask the pretty next door girl for a date; I lesrned later in life that she also had a crush on me at the time, but since I was plain looking and slightly overweight nerd I never thought I'd hsve any chance with her.
After getting that out of my system I'd do the obligatory investing.
Lemmy only. I quit Reddit when the third party apps fell.
I do miss some of the niche hobby subreddits, but fuck Spez. If I need to find some info, I can access it via search engines.
Otherwise I'm perfectly happy with Lemmy, people are generally much nicer and there's more than enough content. Reddit was so overbloated that this smaller universe is quite enough for me.
Tervaleijona 4-eva, man!