People love to go “ in the Soviet Union they picked your job for you 😭” yeah cunt that’s what we’re doin now too except they make you bark like a dog for three weeks straight first getting denied everywhere you wanna work until you end up somewhere you dont like anyway. Let’s just cut out that middle man why don’t we
there have been sightings of a previously unknown morphosyntactic alignment in some guy’s closet. in the past two weeks, three more theoretical frameworks for linguistics have turned into Optimality Theory overnight. the complex houses, unnamed sources say, married garden paths. “we’re still expecting the baby,” a proto-world recapitulationist is heard saying. jovial diffusions happen lexically down the mountain trail. on their father’s death, local historical linguist told us that the aging of a family is a pull chain. two undescribed sci-fi alien languages stir neighborhood controversy for trying to become real. typesetting IPA on a typewriter: is it a good idea? specialist says you’ll have to say yes very soon, but declined to explain when we asked, and when we asked how they got in the studio. did you feel that, listener? just now, all island effects disappeared for one second, then came back as if nothing had happened. a grad student won 1 dollar by perfectly drawing a spectrogram by hand. there have been reports of New Nouns. just like Newton was hit by an apple, a generativist was hit by an entire tree. and now, the weather
“The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I’m not a trannie or a fag so I don’t care, just give ‘em the medicine they need.”
“This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility.”
One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.
Someone who says they don’t care if dudes wear dresses and makeup is a better ally than someone who says they’re a safe space for women and non-binary people. I am not joking.
yeah I went to a gay bar recently with my husband tumblr user beemovieerotica, and a VERY confused capital S Southerner straight man in cargo shorts and a trucker hat showed up
apparently he (who through my drunken memory I remember only as Earl) liked some woman, and she told him that he wasn’t cultured enough and needed to attend his first drag show (she also flaked on him)
Now I’m reasonably androgynous and was wearing makeup, a short leather skirt, and black heeled boots, but still when this guy came up to me when I was standing off alone and asked “So. Do you come here often?” with a very earnest expression, I thought. Surely not. This guy doesn’t think I’m a straight woman does he????
Anyway I start talking with this guy and he has no idea what the fuck is going on but he is just a very kind and earnest dude and asked a lot of questions (while asking if it was alright if he asked those questions). I track down my husband and friends and I’m like y'all. We need to make sure that Earl has a Good Fucking Time tonight.
Man was completely out of his depth. At one point they put on a puppy auction to raise money for Pride, that started with a 6 ft drag queen in all her glory leading a leather pup out on a leash to the tune of that damned RSPCA “in the arms of the angels” song
We look at Earl. Nervous. He squints, laughs, and then goes “I was wondering why people were dressed like that!” He turned to me and asked “So they’re like dogs?” And I said yeah pretty much. And he just chuckled and went “Yeah I thought so with the tails! Never seen this before!”
When the first drag king came out, Earl looked at me wide eyed and went “There’s a dude version too?!” And I said yeah they’re called drag kings. And he said, low, “Drag kings.”
During one of the queens performances, he frowned, shook his head and told me, “Your legs are better than hers.” in a tone that implied he thought there was some travesty taking place and I should also be getting paid
When he found out I was there with my husband (and that I am not a woman) he profusely apologized and said “I’m so sorry, it’s dark in here and I thought you were a hot chick! I wouldn’t have said nothing if I knew you had a husband, I’m so sorry about that.”
When beemovie invited me to the dance floor with him later and I still had a drink in my hand, Earl said “Oh don’t worry about that I can hold your drink, you get on out there and shake your ass with your husband!” Then before we left, Earl bought me drinks for “Putting up with me all night and answering everything. Y'all helped me have a great time tonight.”
like. You gotta recognize there’s going to people who have never had interacted outside of their of their own community. This includes you. And just because your community is familiar with all the right vocabulary and how to correctly say something, it doesn’t mean they’re actually going to support you. If someone like Earl shows up, confused and out of their depth but kind and curious and earnest, you gotta have patience and truck through the small things, so when he goes back to his friends and his coworkers and they snicker asking how the drag show was, he can genuinely talk about how included we tried to make him feel and that he had a great time
The person matters more than the language
I will reblog this EVERY TIME.
Sanitized language is a tool of oppression, always has been and always will be.
And yes, I get being pissed off by slurs. I do. But in the times we are living in right now, we really need to all pivot our priorities to safety.
“Earl” will talk to all his Busch drinking, tractor-pulling, gun toting, conservative voting friends about the nice and friendly and harmless trannies he met, and they will understand him.
They do not know what gender non-conforming, trans-femme/masc, demiboy, agender genderqueer bisexual lesbians are, and quite frankly, they do not need to.
What we need from Earl and his friends is for them to feel neutrally enough about us to not become violent with us, and to spread the idea that violence against us is not necessary or warranted. They are simply not going to do that in a language that is not their own.
surely it’s not just me who finds those fucking “be nice, I’m in charge of the pills” pins you sometimes see doctors and nurses wearing in pretty bad taste right? like the *point* is a stand against being mistreated by patients but like…yea you are in charge of the pills and can arbitrarily deny care to people, not really sure why that’s something to gloat about? like the number of stories especially of black women being totally denied painkillers in hospital and stuff because the nurses were assholes it’s like….maybe you can have your snarky pins when you’re not in the position to medically torture someone? idk
like you get people rushing to defend it like “you don’t know what it’s like working in a hospital” but like…i do sure as hell know what it’s like being mistreated by medical professionals. I’m not even getting paid to be here. it’s kinda fucking evil when you think about it for more than a second.
been mainlining mythbusters episodes while i work on art stuff and this bit where they attempt to test sneakily entering a building through the air ducts caught me deliriously off guard
There’s a lot of religious imagery in the cult of the lambs fandom, which is great and all, but do you know what we need more of? RELIGIOUS GUILT.
I want to see the lamb read the scriptures over and over and over to ingrain them into their brain. I want to see them freak out and get on their knees when they believe they’ve done someone wrong, and PRAY for repentance. I want to see them talk to the one who waits and thank him over and over again and say they’re not worthy and they need to do better and better and better. They feel at any moment that they do not act righteously in his name that they have to fix it. They don’t deserve a second chance, to be chosen. I want to see them doubt him and question him and then snap themselves out of it, so when they were betrayed they felt shocked, but deep down they knew.
I understand the point of cotl is more of “you aren’t above the law, YOU ARE the law” and that the lamb was more unwilling if anything.
but isn’t that just it? Rug-burned scraped knees praying for forgiveness because you were given a second chance, as painful as it is, but the fact you were salvaged at all. That you want to be worthy of the love and prove that it wasn’t mistaken, you did everything right. An unwilling participant, but who else loved you? Who else cared for you? God loves you, but not enough to save you. And that’s why you must free him, that at last you can rest.
The lamb was so blinded by their guilt, seen as perhaps love, that for a moment, even a second,
For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty
oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.
“How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it” GREAT question.
To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear’s Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that’s about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.
And it’s only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits…
(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)
…that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be “driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that’s rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world…
…and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck…
…only for the ropes to snap…
…and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.
(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)
Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.
Or at least the wrecking ball.
But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.
Still, I feel it’s criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)
Wait NO-
Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.
Or at least, given that buried it wasn’t…
…to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat…
…and be fueled up.
"be fueled up”, pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.
Look at that thing, you say.
Let’s be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that’s not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.
And again, you are right.
The battery was disconnected.
Sorted that, tho
“You can’t be serious.” Oh darling I sure can! “Well the presenters can’t then” no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It’s at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!
I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.
The best part is that when they drove it into the studio, the presenters admitted that the entire thing was being held together by the body work: the chassis was snapped in half. But it still ran.
Their final conclusion was that they could, of course, keep torturing this truck until it was finally destroyed, but they figured any truck that could survive a building demolishment deserved to be put up on a plinth.
The most hilarious part is that Toyota ended up using the footage from Top Gear for one of its commercials and calling the Top Gear hosts “European Automotive Experts.” Instead of, you know, a bunch of idiots with a poky little motoring show (lol).
It’s easy to forget but normally when a person posts nsfw they don’t get fucking laser beam disappeared off the website. They just get a warning on whatever post. When a trans girl or a black person gets laser beam disappeared off the website it is targeted.
For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty
oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.
“How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it” GREAT question.
To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear’s Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that’s about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.
And it’s only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits…
(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)
…that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be “driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that’s rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world…
…and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck…
…only for the ropes to snap…
…and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.
(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)
Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.
Or at least the wrecking ball.
But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.
Still, I feel it’s criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)
Wait NO-
Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.
Or at least, given that buried it wasn’t…
…to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat…
…and be fueled up.
"be fueled up”, pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.
Look at that thing, you say.
Let’s be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that’s not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.
And again, you are right.
The battery was disconnected.
Sorted that, tho
“You can’t be serious.” Oh darling I sure can! “Well the presenters can’t then” no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It’s at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!
I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.
The best part is that when they drove it into the studio, the presenters admitted that the entire thing was being held together by the body work: the chassis was snapped in half. But it still ran.
Their final conclusion was that they could, of course, keep torturing this truck until it was finally destroyed, but they figured any truck that could survive a building demolishment deserved to be put up on a plinth.
The most hilarious part is that Toyota ended up using the footage from Top Gear for one of its commercials and calling the Top Gear hosts “European Automotive Experts.” Instead of, you know, a bunch of idiots with a poky little motoring show (lol).
Declaring open season on gay men because something something punching up made the entire culture more reactionary and you’re insane if you think otherwise.
First, the following tweet:
free condoms but not pads? reproduction is a choice. menstruation is biological. talk abt priorities.
I am very much in favor of free menstrual products, but is there a reason why so many organizations might distribute condoms? Hm, let’s put our thinking caps on. Yet anyone pointing out the greater context of HIV/AIDS activism was dogpiled on for “caring about men’s issues more than women’s.” These people are so entrenched in their own fag derangement syndrome that they forgot that it’s not just gay men who stand to benefit from free condoms. I have some shocking news to share: Most women are attracted to men. Most men are attracted to women. No, it does not strike me as particularly feminist to dismiss tools to prevent the transmission of STIs and HIV and oh, have we forgotten, pregnancy, as only a men’s issue.
As Sarah Schulman forcefully demonstrates in her book Let The Record Show, AIDS activists had to fight for the CDC to change its diagnostic criteria of AIDS for symptoms common in women and transmasc people to be recognized. To quote a Gran Fury campaign, “women don’t get AIDS. They just die from it.” Schulman is upfront about the fact that a crucial perspective was missing from her interviews: that of women with AIDS who were involved in the early days of ACT UP. This is because, overwhelmingly, they died faster than men with AIDS. But to these online contrarians, even self proclaimed feminists, women do not exist in the history and present-day reality of HIV and AIDS except as nameless caregivers. After 1996, when HIV was declared over by many because some had access to new reliable treatments, it shifted in the culture from being a “gay disease” to a “Black disease.” HIV criminalization today, based on archaic understandings of how the virus and its transmission work, is blithely racialized.
With all this in mind, it is ridiculous that anyone can see HIV as a bludgeon to “punch up” instead of down. The people who do this are so caught up in the idea of homophobia as revenge and themselves as ontologically incapable of harm that they are oblivious to, or perhaps gleefully aware of, their own transphobia, misogyny, and white supremacy. These people aren’t even fucking feminists outside the context of post-rationalizing cruelty. Even if they are firm in their conviction that every gay man should drop dead, their bigotry could never stay localized to just one subject, because all they are is bigoted and worthless to the core of their putrid souls. I’m sick of this shit.
masks and helmets that hides someone’s face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved
these are all creatures to me
Angel of War, angular and strange, gleaming silver and gold, Angel of Wonder, pure and one-eyed, looking to stars new and old, Angel of Harvest, simple and hidden, bring nature’s sweetness to all, Angel of Health, mysterious and fine, beacon when life starts to fall, Angel of the Deep, crooked and cage-like, guide us across the sea, Angel of Solace, protect us from evil, lead us to where we are free.
Was inspired by the previous post a while back, and had been working on this on and off for a long while.
You can see the full-resolution versions on My Patreon.
I love all of these. The angel of the the deep’s wings are canvas, held up by an anchor. The angel of war’s wings are blades, and its shield is a coffin. The angel of solace is a mutant, its arms deforming into wings. Geiger counter in hand, it guides us through the danger only it knows. Was this angel once a man? Corrupted now beyond hope, he can at least save others from the same fate.
this shit is so incredibly cool that i cannot and refuse to attempt to properly articulate it
masks and helmets that hides someone’s face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved
these are all creatures to me
Angel of War, angular and strange, gleaming silver and gold, Angel of Wonder, pure and one-eyed, looking to stars new and old, Angel of Harvest, simple and hidden, bring nature’s sweetness to all, Angel of Health, mysterious and fine, beacon when life starts to fall, Angel of the Deep, crooked and cage-like, guide us across the sea, Angel of Solace, protect us from evil, lead us to where we are free.
Was inspired by the previous post a while back, and had been working on this on and off for a long while.
You can see the full-resolution versions on My Patreon.
I love all of these. The angel of the the deep’s wings are canvas, held up by an anchor. The angel of war’s wings are blades, and its shield is a coffin. The angel of solace is a mutant, its arms deforming into wings. Geiger counter in hand, it guides us through the danger only it knows. Was this angel once a man? Corrupted now beyond hope, he can at least save others from the same fate.
this shit is so incredibly cool that i cannot and refuse to attempt to properly articulate it
where’s that masterpost of quotes that have no right going as hard as they do. I’d like to submit “Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane”
This is … Strangely true.
Like, when I was in my 20s, I was extremely aware and worried about how I was perceived by others. I cared a lot about my clothes, about my haircut, about my tastes in music or books, about… Everything.
Now I’m in my 40s and … Well, fuck It, you know? I’m out of that dumb primate race. Let the young ones compete, I’ll be on my way to the corner store to get some ice cream while wearing my tracksuit pants and without having had a hair cut since 2023
I wish more people understood that sexual assault and harassment happen regardless of whether the perpetrator is attracted to the victim. Sexual harassment is frequently a social punishment for being undesirable
Idk about this one boys, Cookie Monster always refers to Cookie Monster’s self as “Cookie Monster”.
no he doesn’t. he refers to himself as “me.” elmo’s the one that talks in third person. that’s the joke. elmo doesn’t use pronouns and cookie monster is blue. how dare you assume i made this post and didnt know my fucking sesame street history. christ
Consider: Aliens land on Earth, they are vaguely humanoid in shape and size, but there is no real way to communicate with them. They’re social, curious and friendly, though, and try to get to know humans and interact with us the same way as cats do. By mirroring.
They follow humans around - not necessarily any specific ones, but just wandering wherever people go - and do human things with them. Or at least do their best to try. In gravely serious, intensely focused, but deeply confused silence, they join human activities with this air of “I don’t understand what we’re doing, or what this achieves, but we’re doing it together now.”
When there are people waiting at bus stops, one or two of the creatures will join the group, standing in wait. When the bus comes, they’ll join the queue lining up inside, and once inside, turn their open palm into a light source and show it to the bus driver in the exact same way as the people showing their bus passes from their phones (the aliens’ ability to shapeshift this way has raised theories that they may not be naturally as humanoid as they seem, they’ve just adopted the human shape to better interact with us), and then go find seats wherever, just like humans do.
They’re not going anywhere in particular, nor are they capable of actually paying for their ride, but since there doesn’t seem to be any force to stop them from this, people just have to accept their presence. If the bus is crowded, they’ll stand just like people do - and sometimes when seated aliens see a human offer their seat to someone who is pregnant, disabled or elderly, they will unpromptedly get up and offer their own to the nearest standing human.
They go to churches, temples, grocery stores, libraries, wherever people go, and clearly try their best to do whatever people are doing. In temples and holy places, they will sometimes join hymns in their eerie, wordless howls, which follow no melody but stop when humans stop singing. They sit and stand where the people do, and copy the positions in which humans pray, and many places of worship don’t just tolerate, but downright welcome them - no matter what these creatures are, do they not have the right to pray?
In the libraries they are silent, eerily wandering the hallways, picking up books at random and staring at the pages, turning the page this way or that every few minutes. They don’t bother anyone much, once the librarians figured out how to make them put the books they pick up into the returns cart, instead of some random place in the shelves. Some of them seem to enjoy simply grabbing random books, and carrying the whole piles to the returns cart.
They don’t understand why we do what we do. We don’t understand why they do what they do. But we’re now doing it together.
las vegas is a special kind of horrifying compared to the rest of the southwest because you get three different flavors of horror all together. there’s the strip, obviously, the hypnosis of the casinos. you know they intentionally don’t put clocks in casinos? and they put mirrors wherever they can? they’re trying to disorient you so you stay inside. they’re trying to trap you. and the casinos are different but they’re all the same underneath, slots and shows and roulette wheels, the same bones in different bodies. but then you get outside the strip and you’re in the suburbs. it’s flat. barely anything outside the strip is more than two, maybe three storeys. everything is in a strip mall. the houses are identical wherever you go. even the schools - there are two major architectural blueprints for high schools in las vegas. if you’ve been inside one school you can navigate them all. it’s all the same and it’s all normal, in defiance of the neon of the strip. (you can see the beacon from the luxor from anywhere in the city, you can always find your way to the strip, but- is that better, than being somewhere that you know? somewhere that’s the same wherever you go?) and then of course if you step too far outside you’re in the desert. much further and you’re in the mountains. the suburbs are creeping out further and further, taking over, but there will always be desert. summer will always be 120 degrees. there will always be heat and scorpions on the edges and no matter how far you push out you will not be able to build on the mountains. no matter how hard you try the desert will find you. and none of these things are mutually exclusive, not as much as you think. there are slot machines in grocery stores. there are houses behind casinos. there is undeveloped desert in the center of everything, reminding you that the desert was not built to hold you, the desert was not built for this, you should not be here. you shouldn’t be here.
this one’s going around again so i wanna shout out the person who correctly determined what part of vegas i lived in based on minor details in this post
You ever think about how weird hippos are ecologically speaking?
There’s literally no other megafauna on earth that spends the entire day lounging around in water, mostly just socializing, only to come onto land to feed at night.
I remember when I used to do education programs on hippos, most people assumed they ate aquatic plants, and that that’s the whole reason they were in water. Meanwhile, hippos are basically just giant nocturnal cows that eat only grass.
most animals that start adapting to live more of their lives in water:
“i must grow my bones lighter and less dense so that i don’t get trapped on the bottom and may float easier in this new environment”
hippos: “denser. heavier bones. MOAR dense. Make sink the most.”
mother nature: but how will you get off the bottom when you sink?
hippos: Make muscles more too, give all muscle.
mother nature: and to stay warm in the water? a big layer of fat?
hippos: no! no fat only muscle.
mother nature: o….kay. And, you eat aquatic plants, that’s why you spend so much time in the water?
hippos: lol no. eat land grass, like cow.
mother nature: i see. right. You eat mostly grass, so, flat grinding teeth?
hippos: hell no. big spike teeth. sharp big teeth. Biggest
mother nature: what, like lions? 3 inch fangs?
hippos: course not. giant fuck-off teeth, 18 inches. Also, not just one pair, three pairs of giant sharp teeth. give
mother nature: but you eat… grass?
hippos: yeah. lol. Sometimes eat a zebra tho. Or a antelope. Maybe eat a crocodile, you don’t know. Give all teeth, giant fuck-off teeth. Most bone! most muscle! most teeth! Me.
mother nature: y'know what? fuck it, sure, here you go
hippo: …
hippo: i’m very angry now
so idk about layers, and they are not all the same size, but they have three pairs of large sharp teeth on each side of their mouth, or you could say six pairs of …? anyway they have a bunch of molars you can barely see through the gums, and then they have these teeth:
looks like this in the mouth
so those are their, yeah i guess actually six pair of giant fuck-off teeth
We all got that one vassal who’s read a few too many warrior tales… Trying to get a little freaky with it on the down low… Won’t shut up about his loyalty unto death… Saying shit like “my liege, I am your blade….” Bitch I sent you to guard my isolated holdings in the eastern provinces for a reason!!!!!!! #REBLOG!!!!!
I miss when library books used to have little paper pockets inside with a list of all the people who borrowed it and when… I hate that this is now exclusive knowledge of librarians. I do care that a miss Mariana borrowed this book in 1985 and then Dario in 1997. They’re my brothers and sisters
but really, there’s a million reasons why it’s an issue for users and staff of the public library to have immediate access to a record of who has borrowed a specific item and when.
and that’s not even about keeping the information “privileged” to the library staff, these days they don’t even keep a digital record of an item’s history of borrowers; once you return a book, there isn’t a list of everyone thats ever taken that book out that your name gets added to (though they probably take a tally of how many times it is checked out for circulation statistics).
i think the card system is a remnant of a culture that could only exist in the world before the internet as it exists today, where this identifying kind of information wasn’t always readily at your fingertips, even for those at the “information professional” level.
don’t get me wrong here, i do understand the nostalgia factor to it as being part of a different time, but i think it’s always important to understand why this kind of system has its flaws and has been (at least in north america) taken out of practice
bear in mind that US public libraries spent most of the past twenty years fighting off lawsuits that they were prohibited from disclosing to the public because when 9/11 happened the federal government wanted a list of every person who read certain books and the librarians had a really bad feeling about where that kind of policy would end up going, for some reason.
not keeping the records in the first place is a way for the libraries to protect themselves when they stand up for your privacy.
Senshi and Uncle Iroh would be such good friends guys can you imagine
I have decided that if the Gaang met the Dungeon Foodies (Doodies) then the following would likely occur:
Iroh, and Zuko would mesh beautifully with the group, RIGHT up until someone mentioned eating dragons, at which point Iroh and Zuko’s storyline would abruptly become a psychological horror
Marcille and Katara would either become Bee Eff Effsies or Claw Each Other’s Eyes Out and I cannot decide which
Toph and Izutsumi would immediately become Worse together
Sokka and Laios would immediately become Worse together
Aang would regard Senshi with the respect befitting of an Air Nomad Elder RIGHT until he has to watch the guy butcher and field dress an animal. They would then go on a life changing road trip thematic of consuming ethical meat. Aang would remain a vegetarian but would learn a lot about alternative sources of iron and protein, after which he would finally hit a growth spurt to rival Sokka.
Laios would drink poison cactus water.
Sokka would drink poison cactus water again.
Catty Bitch Besties Azula + Kazu Agenda feat. Azula Redemption Arc: Homocidal Rage Trauma Demon to Healthy Low Empathy Teen Queen Transformation. Kazu remains the same but learns to say bitchy shit straight to people’s faces instead of repressing it
(Always Sunny title card) Laios Eats A Turtleduck
(Always Sunny title card) Toph Masters Black Magic. feat. Legally Blonde voice: “What, like it’s hard?”
Senshi is an earthbender. This part is never fully explained.
Chilchuck and Toph start an illegal gambling den that Sokka righteously moves to shut down for about .5 seconds until he learns that he is a FANTASTIC at counting cards.
Laois Blue Spirit Fanboy Agenda
Literally anyone accuses Laois or Zuko of misinterpreting a social cue / weird dumb metaphor / nonsensical story / tradition and the other immediately backs him up like “what are you talking about he’s right” and “this is the only guy here who makes any sense, the rest of you are freaks”.
(Always Sunny Title Card) Aang Adopts A Dirt Homunculus
Iroh gives Chilchuck The Talk
Oh wait I’m not done
17. Reverse “Half-Foots Look like Childrento Tallmen” issue where Chilchuck learns Toph is the Blind Bandit and a master earthbender who invented metal bending and was once a champion fighter and just assumes Toph is a full-grown half-foot. Only learns otherwise after they have pulled off several drunken crime sprees
18. Toph, on the other hand, is fully aware that Chilchuck is a grown ass man and just figures he’s cool
19. Katara and Marcille bond over Forbidden Evil Magic; Katara learns to use blood bending for not-horrific things (medicine, first aid, prepping wild-caught meat, etc) and Marcille learns to heal more efficiently
20. Laios can see and communicate with literally all the previous avatars but just kinda pretends he can’t since nobody else has brought them up yet and he doesn’t want it to be a whole Thing
21. Group runs into a platypus and each gang thinks it’s an animal from the other’s universe. Everyone proceeds to act as though they know exactly what it is in hopes of not appearing ignorant. Neither of them actually knows anything. Through a series of misunderstandings, it is given a nonsensical name and is believed to be an immortal, telepathic incarnation of a heavenly spirit. Laios is the only one to question this and is immediately stung by its venomous feet, which only cements the legend
22. (Always Sunny title card) King Buumi Defeats The Mad Mage
Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go “Wow, that was… wild.”
Today’s topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it’s not the only game in town, it’s an entirely different thing now.
(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)
for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability– and you didn’t– you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)
Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing “*69”. There’s no way that was an accident.
If you moved, unless it was in the same city– and in larger cities, the same PART of the city– you had to change phone numbers.
As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say “Guess what? You have a new area code now.”
The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive… but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.
Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.
The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.
For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.
All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).
Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.
Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with “A”, and “Aardvark” was a popular name.
Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.
One phone line per family was the norm.
Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.
A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn’t realize who they were talking to.
And of course, there were the times where you couldn’t leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.
Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven’t gone away, but who pays them?)
Since you can’t do secondary bullet points, I’ll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.
these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.
The first generation of consumer answering machines didn’t reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.
due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.
they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.
Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.
Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.
Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn’t get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going– thus recording some or all of the phone call.
Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn’t figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn’t know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend’s machine– and her current boyfriend’s– and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.
And, of course, there’s the nightmare that was long-distance.
Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.
This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.
Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper– with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.
Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.
At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.
“Would you like to change your long distance plan” was the 80’s and 90’s equivalent of “We have important news about your car insurance.”
Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.
Next tell them about calling “collect” and the commercials it spawned in the 90s.
Oh, right.
If you needed to call someone from a payphone and didn’t have the quarter, or you needed to call someone long distance and not pay for it yourself, you could place a collect call. Originally, this meant talking to the operator, who would call the person, ask if they would accept the charges on THEIR bill, and if they did, put the call through.
Eventually, this got automated– you’d call a number, punch in the number you wanted to dial, and record your name, and a computer would call the other person.
Charges for a collect call were higher than if you paid them directly.
Even before this was automated, people had ways of getting around the charges– “If I give my name as ‘Charlie’ it means I arrived okay, but if I give my name as 'Chuck’, decline the charges and call me back.” Once it was automated, you could actually give a two-second message.
Oh, yeah, and payphones. Until the early aughts, there were phones everywhere that you could put in coins and make a phone call. The phrase “It’s your dime” is left over from when it cost ten cents, and continued well into the age where the call cost a quarter. (In that age, we developed “Here’s a quarter. Call someone who cares.”)
Payphones were everywhere and completely unmonitored, making them the method of choice for lots of illegal or just annoying activities, since you could trace the call to the phone and still have no idea who placed the call.
Originally, payphones were enclosed in a booth for privacy, but between the fact that these booths got used for non-phone activities– sex, drugs, changing into superhero costumes*– and the fact that, with such privacy, people would tie up the payphone for extended periods of times, the concept of the “phone booth” got redefined to what we would call a kiosk today.
*this was a staple of Superman comics. I can’t remember which movie it was, but there was a scene where Clark pulled at his tie then suddenly realized it was a MODERN phone booth– a kiosk– and that wouldn’t work.
Landlines were household numbers, not individual numbers the way cellphones are. (occasionally a teen might have their own line but this was rare)
Kids were expected to be able to answer the household phone reasonably politely from a young age.
As a kid, I got drilled on “I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?” to obscure the difference between Mom is busy, Mom is in the bathroom, and I am home alone and thus at risk.
Managing the long curly phone cord took skill. If you stretched it around a corner, it would sweep things off tables. The spiral would invert in places, making it look ugly and move less predictably.
Kids were expected to memorize their home phone number from a fairly early age. (not as much to call themselves as to tell an adult if they got lost or otherwise needed help)
You could have an unlisted (not in the phone book) number in most places. Single women sometimes put their first initial instead of their first name.
Schools sometimes made phone trees for efficient spreading of information like snow days (for schools too small to have that information on the radio). They were written-out paper trees where one person would call the next two or three, and each of them would call the next two, and so on.
Babysitters were sometimes left with the number of the restaurant the parents would be at, for emergencies.
And all of this is for later landlines, from the 60s-90s. Before then, things were different!
Party lines. The first several decades of phones being common, they did not have a single dedicated phone line to each individual house, because that would have been too expensive. Instead, there was a single phone line that went to every house on the street. Every house had a different ring pattern so you could tell which house was being called, but anybody who misheard it (or was nosy) could pick up their phone and listen to anybody else’s phone conversations any time they wanted to. There was usually a slight click sound as they picked it up, but you might not be able to tell. This was another reason for using phone booths for any sensitive conversation.
Calls were connected by a living person (almost always a woman). You told the operator who you wanted to call (which might be a name, and might be a word+number, like “Pensylvannia 6-5000” of the famous song) and they would physically plug in a cable to the phone line you wanted to reach. There were automatic switching machines starting in the 1880s, but most places didn’t have them until fairly late–the last manual switchboard in the UK wasn’t replaced with a mechanical one until 1960. And even if your area had automated calls for local numbers, a long-distance call would require an operator. On early phones, you got the operator by picking up the phone; once you had an automatic switching machine, you had to dial zero, but there was always an operator on duty and easy to reach.
Operators, redux. A large apartment building or office building might have separate lines for each apartment or major office. But they didn’t have separate phone numbers for all of those different extensions! Instead, they would have an operator for the building whose job was to connect people. This led to answering services. If a person lived in such a building, they could pay to have the operator take messages for them when they weren’t home.
Monopoly. Pretty much all telephone lines in a country would be owned by a single company, in the US it was AT&T, sometimes called “Ma Bell,” because it had originally been called the Bell Telephone Company. AT&T was forced to de-monopolize in 1982, leading to the development of competing phone companies.
Billing. Local calls were included as part of your monthly bill, but long-distance calls were billed as separate line items, so you could look at your bill and tell every single long-distance call from your phone that month. And it added up, so people did look a lot of letter-writing. You’d call long-distance for an emergency or big news, but people rarely called long-distance just to talk. Instead, they would write letters.
International calls. International calls were crazy expensive.
For quite a good run of time there, the phone lines were their own distinct thing, which ran along the same poles as the power. So quite often, the power to your house would go out, but your landline could still make calls. You could in fact call the power company about the outage.
A lot of that wiring is still physically there afaik, but modern landlines are VOIP and generally run through your modem, so when you lose power you also lose phone, which has definitely given cell phones a clear utility boost.
You can see the characters in the Andy Griffith show using the Party Line to eavesdrop on their neighbors conversations, and everyone there was aware that their neighbors might be listening in. Most were okay with it, but if it was something very private or important they would specifically tell anybody else on the line to hang up. They anticipated their neighbors being nosy and not announcing that they’d joined the call.
The neighbors could eavesdrop on each other without getting caught by putting their finger on the receiver before raising the phone off of it, and then slowly releasing it afterwards. This prevented the other people on the line from hearing the telltale click of them picking up the phone. In order to remain stealthy they would have to carefully and slowly lower the phone back down when hanging up as well.
I just wanted to add stuff I remembered.
when I was a kid (the 90s mostly) I wasn’t allowed to leave a certain defined area around my home without enough change to use a pay phone. we never did the collect call scam like a lot of people are talking about, though I knew people who did. this was true of a lot of kids- usually you had a quarter or two in your pocket, if you were going too far from home, in the 90s.
I remember being incensed about the price for the pay phone going up from a quarter. (I think it went up to 35 cents, I was outraged)
beepers (aka pagers) were a thing where you could call a number, put a phone number or code in, and it would show up on the beeper screen. a lot of people wore them on their belts. my mom was disabled and stayed at home, she had special codes to send to Dad’s beeper to let him know if she was leaving the house and when she was home (she was disabled and on heavy medication for years, he actually did need to be able to tell if she was out, or at home and not answering the phone- she passed out in the kitchen a couple of times). mostly they were in use in the 80s to 90s, but some places still use them (they’re popular at hospitals).
the internet ran off land line (I think this is common knowledge but idk anymore) and you could knock someone off the internet by picking up the phone. we actually had a second land line to our house that was dedicated to the modem for this exact reason. It was probably very expensive to install. I have no idea, I was, like, 9 when we moved into that place.
when we switched to I think cable internet? or dsl? whichever, after that, I had my own phone number in my room when that was still a cool thing for a teenager to have. (I was the least cool teenager imaginable) it was so cool because it meant you could have your own private conversations and be a lot more sure they were private. I used this to have the dorkiest conversations possible because, as I’ve said, I was the least cool teenager imaginable.
phones had actual bells in them, for a long time. they ring because they used to have actual bells that were rung when a call went through. I don’t know when this stopped happening, presumably the 80s? but, anyway, if you weren’t sure about that terminology, now you know. literal actual bells.
(I found a diagram that called them gongs? maybe there’s a technical difference, but gongs are also rung)
phones used to be stupid heavy. I remember the first time I used my grandma’s cordless phone I was shocked by how light it was, and we had a fairly slim handset at home. if you ever see someone hit someone in the face with a phone in older action movies, that was genuinely heavy enough to be used as a blunt weapon (and probably could still make the call afterwards, old rotary phones were fucking tanks)
map showing the way europe played 5d ping pong with its words for vampires. had to do my own damn map of this so i thought i’d share it cause why not
some words of explanation:
the root of most of these, excluding the blue ones, comes from Turkic languages (most likely Tatar, but we aren’t exactly sure, so for simplicity i just made the slightly redder starting point in eastern Turkey, I am ready to face death at the hands of professional linguists) from words like “ubyr”, “opyr”, “uber”, and other variations of that. the general consensus is that they initially meant “witch”.
“strix” is Latin for owl; “striges” were owl-like female demons from ancient Rome who fed on human organs, mentioned for example in the Satyricon. “strega” is Italian for “witch”.
the Greek “vrykolakas” comes from the Slavic “vukodlak”, technically meaning “werewolf”, but in reality it was used for vampires as well. the vrykolakas were definitely more vampires than werewolves, being dead bodies who rose from the grave.
the Russian “vurdalak” appeared only in the 19th century with Pushkin’s works, because he read Byron’s “The Giaour” in which there is a footnote explaining that the Greek word for vampire is “Vardoulacha” (close enough, I guess) and he made his own version based on that
Everyone now uses “vampire” and variations thereof due to pure chance, because it just so happened that the first reports about the living dead reached western Europe from Serbia thanks to Austrian officials recording the panic surrounding Petar Blagojević. It eventually circled back to Eastern Europe in that form overthrowing most of the regional variants like upyr. This map is focused on Poland in this regard because I am Polish and this map is intended for a presentation for a Polish audience.
“East European Vampires” by Felix Oinas (this one is slightly outdated, but the etymological parts seemed fine when compared to other sources)
it is also still simplified a lot as i omitted other words in other languages about similar phenomena, like the romanian moroi and vârcolac (which is also related to vukodlak, wilkołak etc), the other greek type of “vampire” that was the tympaniaioi and a lot of polish regional variants that i know of like łopi, upierz etc etc
As someone who is absolutely not anything even close to an archaeologist, and has only a passing knowledge of history and its study, here’s the detail that really stuck out to me.
For the sheep bones they found, of creatures that died in the disaster which destroyed the settlement, there’s lambs in a particular age range; and from THAT, they conclude at what time of year this happened.
Just here to say that I’m not seeing enough people talking about the fact that Just Stop Oil is literally funded by the Getty family, specially Aileen Getty, the oil baroness. That’s probably a good reason why a lot of their tactics in the news lately have seemed strange.
IT IS NOT A PSYOP
Just Stop Oil: Is the UK-based climate movement in the pocket of oil billionaires (on jpost)
Aileen Getty is one of several heirs to the $5.4 billion Getty fortune, which the family acquired through their oil company, founded in 1942. While the company no longer exists today, having been sold in the early 2000s, the money certainly still does, and so people have started questioning if, in reality, Aileen Getty still has active links to the oil industry.
However, unless Getty is investing in oil ventures so secretive that there are no records of them available to the public, the opposite appears to be true. In 2012, she founded the Aileen Getty Foundation, which, according to the foundation’s objectives, “supports a wide range of local and global organizations and initiatives that enhance the environment, our communities and the lives of individuals through innovation, preservation, connection and kindness.”
Based on this, it would appear that the heiress to an oil fortune has been using her money to combat the very business in which her family found its fortune.
In 2019, Getty provided the foundational grant to establish CEF and has pledged over half a million dollars to their cause, citing her belief that civil disruption is the only way to make a change on the climate emergency front.
Here’s some actual journalism there about Getty’s involvement with the oil industry.
And from a NY Times article These Groups Want Disruptive Climate Protests. Oil Heirs Are Funding Them.
Sharing these goals with the Climate Emergency Fund is the Equation Campaign. Founded in 2020, it provides financial support and legal defense to people living near pipelines and refineries who are trying to stop fossil fuel expansion, through methods including civil disobedience.
Strikingly, both organizations are backed by oil-fortune families whose descendants feel a responsibility to reverse the harms done by fossil fuels. Aileen Getty, whose grandfather created Getty Oil, helped found the Climate Emergency Fund and has given it $1 million so far.
…
The Equation Campaign started in 2020 with a $30 million pledge, to be distributed over 10 years, from two members of the Rockefeller family, Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert and Peter Gill Case. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870 and became the country’s first billionaire.
“It’s time to put the genie back in the bottle,” Mr. Case wrote in an email. “I feel a moral obligation to do my part. Wouldn’t you?”
The statement in the Guardian in 2021:
Fossil fuels made our families rich. Now we want this industry to end by Aileen Getty and Rebecca Rockefeller Lambert
and in comparison the Fox News talking point you’re all regurgitating:
Big Oil heiress funding ‘Just Stop Oil’ group that threw soup on Van Gogh painting
So in summary:
Getty Oil no longer exists, and hasn’t done for 20 odd years.
Aileen Getty had no involvement with the company when was operating, her wealth is inherited.
The Greepoint oil spill took place in 1978.
At this time Aileen Getty was 21, dropping out of university, becoming an anti-war protestor and artist.
She was an AIDS activist in the 80s, and has been an environmental activist for many, many years as well.
There are no public records of her currently, or ever, being involved in the oil industry at all.
Her foundation donates to many environmental causes, including Sea Shepherd, who are the farthest thing from phony.
They also funded the scientists who chained themselves to government buildings not long ago.
Fox News is running many articles about how they are funded by Big Oil, discrediting one of the largest environmentalist action groups out there.
The attack on the art gallery is because they accepted sponsorship from oil companies, which they say is hypocritical as preserving art is pointless when society is due to be destroyed.
This is the same rationale behind the attack on Stonehenge
So maybe you should think about what propaganda you are not immune to.
Just because you don’t like how a particular protest is performed doesn’t make it a psyop for fucks sake.
Just Stop Oil began with a campaign of trespass and sabotage to disrupt fossil fuel infrastructure, occupying oil depots and blockading trucks to attempt to force concessions from the government. However, as the group’s focus has shifted towards more public-facing forms of disruption they are often asked why it doesn’t pick targets more closely related to fossil fuels. Most of the people I interviewed were frustrated by the idea that the group should go back to targeting depots, feeling that a lot of armchair generals were unaware that this approach had already been tried. One young woman who agreed to an interview expressed her frustration with these criticisms:
“I’ve been told so many fucking times: Go to Parliament Square, go to an oil refinery or whatever. I’ve locked myself to an oil tanker for 36 hours. Nothing. I was just at Parliament Square for three days with 60,000 people, nothing happened. But my best friend throws soup on a fucking Van Gogh and we’re in the news for months.”
…
There is an attractive simplicity to the idea that environmental activism should focus on the things that are destroying the planet. For activists anxious about their own role in the climate crisis these moral justifications were often deeply connected to their initial motivations to “take action.” The use of militaristic language to describe fossil fuel infrastructure as a “legitimate target” was also a common theme in the interviews.
Yet most people I spoke with admitted that — while they did not like inconveniencing the public — actions that focused solely on infrastructure were ignored by both the media and the government. A more senior member of JSO explained why he felt the actions at oil depots had been ineffectual:
“With the infrastructure, it was brilliant because we shut that shit down. The problem was nobody reported it. Nobody heard about it. It didn’t get out there because the media won’t cover you if they can’t vilify you. We hate having to rely on the media, but right now we need our messages in the heads of as many people as possible, and that doesn’t happen without the media being used as an amplifier.”
The discussion around Ariel TheLittleMermaid baffles me bc if my dad literally destroyed a bunch of stuff I collected in front of me in a terrifyingly violent display of anger and I had a witch offer me an out if I could score the boy I thought was hot, my name would be on that dotted line before you can say “poor unfortunate soul”. What do you mean she’s stupid, her dad ravaged her Special Interest Cave like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum, I would also run the fuck away
The smartest move would have been to become Ursula’s co-conspirator (rather than property as stipulated by the contract) and overthrow him, then overthrow Ursula, but I understand why she did not do this because few 16 year olds have the stomach for murder
There should be a comic or manga about a maid who is very annoyed with her coworkers because she’s trying to clean the mansion and make sure dinner is served on time and all the linens are put away, but she’s the only one who is here to do all that. She’s an actual Victorian-style housemaid, but the rest of the maids are maids in the hentai/erotica sense.
So she’s going to check and see why the paintings in the east wing haven’t been dusted, and walks in on the maid responsible getting eaten out by a scullery maid on a pile of dirty laundry. She’s like “sigh, just try to do your duties when you’re done?”
She’s having to work late into the night mopping the kitchen floors because the maids who are supposed to do that have been tied up in the dungeon by the lady of the house for like four days now.
She never gets involved in all this hankypanky. She’s way too busy for any of that, since she’s having to do all the tasks that are getting interrupted by all the damn sex.
She has to do the grocery shopping herself because everyone else she’s tried singing just comes back with alcohol and whipped cream and condoms and that’s not going to help with Thursday’s lobster bisque dinner, now is it?
She did try to ask the head chef what ingredients they needed for the meal but he just listed off every aphrodisiac food he could think of. She sighs. “The French”, she thinks while rolling her eyes.
She is very overworked and sighs a lot. I kinda love this character and she’s only existed for the duration of this post. Ace maid!
the Salem storyline in Sabrina the teenage witch is so so good bc like the wizard supreme court or whatever is like ‘this man is the most dangerous war criminal in history. he has tried to commit genocide and become a dictator in many different dimensions. we can’t give him the death penalty bc he used dark ancient magic to make himself immortal so we’ve trapped him in the body of a feline for eternal torture. it is the Spellman’s duty to hold him prisoner for us’. and then the Spellman’s are just like kitty,,,………..we’re gonna get him a special pillow to sit on and buy him funny little outfits and cuddle with him while we sleep. he’s the glue holding this family together we love him so much
So I just went with my buddy while he got a rib tattoo, and they hurt like a lot, so he’s over there grimacing and being a huge manbaby so I just reach over and grab his hand so he can squeeze it because I’m a good person who helps others
And he’s clinging to my hand like it’s a life preserver and I’m being me and talking about nonsense like Grimace from the McDonalds commercials and how R2D2 is always ready to throw hands, and whatever, and the artist keeps glancing over at me and I’m like do your tattoo bro I’ve got my buddy handled
But then I realize he’s like, looking over because he can’t tell if he’s seeing something or not, and I glance down and I see my rainbow scalemail bracelet, and how I’m talking to my buddy all fondly and I’m like stroking his arm like he’s a wounded animal, and right as it clicks in my head the tattoo artist asks in his most nonchalant voice possible, like intentionally bland, I’m just talking about the weather haha what do you mean voice:
“So, are you guys close?”
And my gay ass is over to the side internally screaming because yeah, I am gay, but like this is just me being a good bro and my buddy is COMPLETELY OBLVIOUS TO WHAT IS HAPPENING BECAUSE HE’S A GARBAGE STRAIGHT PERSON AND HE SAYS
“Yeah of course, that’s why I asked him to come”
SO NOW THE TATTOO ARTIST THINKS HE’S RIGHT AND HE HAS A GAY COUPLE GETTING A TATTOO AND MY BUDDY HAS NO IDEA AND I’M AWKWARDLY SITTING HERE LIKE SHOULD I STOP HOLDING HIS HAND??? SHOULD I CORRECT THIS TATTOO ARTIST??? SHOULD I LET MY BUDDY KNOW??? MY GAY ASS DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE BEING INCORRECTLY ACCUSED OF BEING GAY, WHAT DO YOU DO
So that tattoo artist is like “Cool man, that’s great. Good for you.”
So then my buddy is like can I get some water, and the guy comes back with one bottle of water and my buddy takes a drink and then hands it to me, and I’m like obviously he has to lay down and needs me to hold his water so I just hold it in my hand, but turns out he was offering me water, so he turns to me and is like Colton, drink some water, and I take a drink and my garbage lizard brain is like “You’re drink sharing in front of the tattoo artist, now he KNOWS he’s right”
So we’re talking about tattoos with the artist and I mention that I’m getting a tattoo in September and my buddy is like “Yeah I’m gonna go and hold HIS hand for that one haha” and the tattoo artist FUCKING SAYS “I mean, I should hope so”
I MEAN, I SHOULD HOPE SO
I MEAN, I SHOULD HOPE SO
AND NO ONE ACTUALLY BROUGHT IT UP. I KNEW WHAT THE TATTOO ARTIST WAS THINKING BUT DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING TO CORRECT HIM. NOW WHEN MY BUDDY GOES BACK AND GETS HIS NEXT TATTOO IN THE FUTURE AND I’M NOT THERE HE’S GOING TO GO “OH WHERE’S YOUR BOYFRIEND”
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