Even in our increasingly homogenized world, there’s still a place for the quasi-local chain restaurant. Whenever you visit a town far away, do you get excited about meeting new people, having new experiences, seeing new sights? No. You want to eat at their Whataburger. You’ve heard so much about it from your other world-traveller friends.
Every time I go somewhere, I make sure to try all of their novel chain restaurants. I get a lot of food poisoning on the road, sure, but it’s all worth it in order to study the unique cultural contribution that these humble small businesses provide. These onion rings are slightly crispier. They throw a little garlic salt in your bag of fries here. This one forces you to look into the eyes of one of the employees while you eat, as they try to intimidate you into leaving your meal uneaten. Such diversity!
Of course, the experience goes both ways. Many people are unable to leave their home towns, and are forced to rely on the tales of those travelling through to learn about the greater world. When these poor folks find out that I’m not from around there, they ask me to tell them stories of my local restaurants. O'Shaughnessy’s, I tell a rapt audience of Culver’s patrons, puts a slightly spicier ketchup on their Irish Pounder than this one. They gasp. Tonight, I eat for free.
One day, we’ll be travelling to shitty chain restaurants on the moon. Just imagine how weird the hot dog buns will be up there! Maybe they’ll have those super skinny fries that I like that nobody here makes anymore. I only hope I can live long enough to see such a glorious future. My doctor says if I stop driving thousands of miles a week in order to eat disgusting fast food, I’ll probably get to see the first moon Burger King.
“Burger King?” I spit in his face, before toppling a cup of tongue depressors to the ground. “I recognize no such so-called royalty.”
okay guys we’ve all had a lot of fun with the whole “five day work week” thing but let’s stop joking around. we only need three. four at the absolute maximum
Really? You decide now to care about people losing loved ones? Where were you when people lost loved ones to easily preventable deaths because preventing their deaths would cause rich people to be slightly less rich?
I honestly feel like the proliferation of LED headlights was the canary in the coalmine for the general attitude we see in the political climate these days and i’m not even remotely kidding
Very much in line with the attitude of “this choice will marginally improve the way I move through the world and make everyone else’s experience SIGNIFICANTLY worse, but I don’t really care, based simply on the fact that I am allowed to do it and there’s nothing they can or will do to stop me” ya feel me?
I used to live in an apartment complex and this guy had those super bright headlights, a custom job that was WAY brighter than the norm. He would use his brights in the apartment complex and when his headlights were on your window you could read fine print with the curtains closed.
We yelled at him and told him to at least turn off his brights and he told us to go fuck ourselves. So one night after he came rolling back in at 2 or 3 in the morning someone smashed his headlights in with a hammer and sprayed black spray paint inside the holes. The reverse lights too as they were also obnoxiously bright.
Police came by the next day after he woke up and screamed blood and vengeance for an hour. I think we were all questioned and not 1 person knew anything.
Property management had to admit that the fake security cameras were actually fake.
Guy got his system fixed exactly the same and went around loudly bragging about it. Guy went back out to set up his camera to watch the car and went to bed. The camera was smashed from behind spray painted and again the headlights and reverse lights, with the added bonus of a side view mirror smashed and spray painted.
This time the only person who said anything to the cops was a guy who could confirm it wasn’t at 5 am because he went out with a gas can and a box of matches but the job had already been done. And funnily enough saying “well I was going to do it but someone beat me to it” isn’t actually illegal.
He put in much more sensible headlights and didn’t turn his brights on in the parking lot anymore.
I honestly feel like the proliferation of LED headlights was the canary in the coalmine for the general attitude we see in the political climate these days and i’m not even remotely kidding
Very much in line with the attitude of “this choice will marginally improve the way I move through the world and make everyone else’s experience SIGNIFICANTLY worse, but I don’t really care, based simply on the fact that I am allowed to do it and there’s nothing they can or will do to stop me” ya feel me?
I used to live in an apartment complex and this guy had those super bright headlights, a custom job that was WAY brighter than the norm. He would use his brights in the apartment complex and when his headlights were on your window you could read fine print with the curtains closed.
We yelled at him and told him to at least turn off his brights and he told us to go fuck ourselves. So one night after he came rolling back in at 2 or 3 in the morning someone smashed his headlights in with a hammer and sprayed black spray paint inside the holes. The reverse lights too as they were also obnoxiously bright.
Police came by the next day after he woke up and screamed blood and vengeance for an hour. I think we were all questioned and not 1 person knew anything.
Property management had to admit that the fake security cameras were actually fake.
Guy got his system fixed exactly the same and went around loudly bragging about it. Guy went back out to set up his camera to watch the car and went to bed. The camera was smashed from behind spray painted and again the headlights and reverse lights, with the added bonus of a side view mirror smashed and spray painted.
This time the only person who said anything to the cops was a guy who could confirm it wasn’t at 5 am because he went out with a gas can and a box of matches but the job had already been done. And funnily enough saying “well I was going to do it but someone beat me to it” isn’t actually illegal.
He put in much more sensible headlights and didn’t turn his brights on in the parking lot anymore.
It’s 1am and I was just about to go to bed but I’ve suddenly remembered that I’m almost out of food and I need to buy groceries online. If I leave it until morning I won’t do it. Dammit.
I never feel as autistic as when I’m carefully selecting which groceries I will or won’t accept substitutions for. You can give me different apples, sure, but dear god if you send me the brand of dim sims that come out a slightly different texture to what I’m used to I’ll kill us both, Coles. I can’t eat those ones they’re Different.
every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them
-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients
-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle
-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that’s beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats
Roman soldiers literally spun as they walked using kickspindles
every merchant marine I know can knit a rope hammock on broomsticks in a couple hours tops.
We have literal photo evidence of shepherd men knitting on stilt stools while watching their grazing flocks. Because knitting or spinning yarn was relatively easy and portable, kept them occupied enough to avoid boredom but also left them enough attention to make sure their flocks remained safe, and resulted in something they could sell to supplement their income from the fleeces, milk, cheeses and meat of their flock.
Once the knitting guilds dissolved as economic powers (partially due to the advent of semi-mechanised knitting machines, which outsourced knitting to “unskilled” croft and cottage-dwelling families rather than restricting the industry to select trained guildsmen), knitting throughout Europe was more likely to be an activity relegated to socio-economic classes than to gender roles, especially prior to the mid-19th century when it was slowly embraced as a leisure activity by wealthy women (in much the same way that embroidery had been embraced in earlier centuries).
And sure, there’s an entire conversation to be had about how patriarchal structures have forced women to be more economically vulnerable than men throughout Western history, which therefore meant that once knitting was spread beyond the guilds’ tight regulation, a lot of women began knitting because they were poor and it was a relatively portable form of work to earn an income.
Just as there’s a conversation to be had about why various occupations and activities are devalued once enough women begin practising them - and especially once the activities are practised by “ladies of leisure”, who were seen as being especially frivolous - and why we then collectively develop amnesia about the respect our society held for that occupation or activity just a few generations earlier (think also about teaching, nursing, secretarial and administrative occupations - all previously male-dominated careers that were paid well and seen as respectable, but have been steadily devalued as more women entered the field).
But if that conversation ignores the fact that men are punished and constrained by patriarchal and socio-economic demands, that men have just as much place in the history of fibrecrafts as women, but have been erased from that history by people whose ideology demands that they never have taken part in “feminine” duties… then that conversation will be disingenuous and only half of the true conversation.
I want so badly to get back into fibercraft demonstrations/living history and be an example to little boys that anyone can enter these crafts. I’ve done some needle felt demonstrating at a few craft shows this last year and children and adults were DELIGHTED to see the level of craftmanship and the niche I work in. Because even those who had SEEN needle felting before had largely seen starter kits, and when it comes to professional grade stuff, in general cutesy and “rustic” rough style art. (My niche is… 1lb+ smooth dense felts, super detailed without being Hyper Realistic). Felting can be whatever you want it to be. You can go super cutesy, you can go gorey. Fantasy, sci fi, horor, whatever. It’s the wild west out here, the stuff in mainstream promoted videos aren’t all there is to make.
Tangentially related, one of my fondest memories is when I was knitting in a lobby while my partner got a haircut and a dad pointed me out to his son and said look! he’s knitting. boys can knit. YOU could knit.
Since then, my partner (also a guy) has taken up darning and crochet! He’s in his thirties and has only just started and is going. While I’ve been at it since I was little, you can pick these things up at any point in your life!
Break down stupid gender roles and stereotypes and keep these crafts alive and thriving.
But what if half your ocs are softys and not made for fighting?
dating sim
this post changed the game
Hey btw if you don’t know how to program, you should check out [novelty], which is a free Visual Novel creation software. Absolutely no programming required, and it’s super easy to use, I played with it some when I was a teen but the only reason I didn’t do much with it is cuz I made my story complicated and had like 5000 different branching routes that kept spawning new routes and made myself confused LMAO
But yeah, it’s a WYSIWYG with a really straight-forward GUI, if I remember correctly.
It even comes with some free backgrounds and characters and stuff, and this is what it looks like:
Did I mention it’s super duper free? It hasn’t been updated since 2010, but it has basically all you’d need to make a simple visual novel.
Just make sure your DirectX runtime is updated, cuz it can act buggy if it’s outdated, but this program is so old that I doubt it’d even be an issue lol
holy shit
This is so cool? Can you imagine fanfic in this format?
YO
@becausedragonage@ashidoodle can I recommend Choice Script? It’s like a choose your own adventure coding program. The finished product looks like this, where every option sends you down a different path:
They are literally books you can play. You can even insert your own character’s name and pronouns and that would make writing reader inserts so much easier And as a writer who can not art, writing and making dating sims and games is more convenient.
The coding is also super simple and easy to learn and all it requires other than the program files is a text editor. And just like that you can start typing up like you would your own fanfics or stories. Plus it’s very versatile so you can make your game/book as simple or as complicated as you want, and even implement stats and inventory systems.
AND CHOICE SCRIPT IS ALSO SUPER DUPER FREE. THE COMPANY EVEN PUBLISHES YOUR FINISHED GAME FOR YOU AND GIVES YOU ROYALTIES IF YOU CHOOSE TO SELL IT. THE PROGRAM STILL GETS UPDATED AND THE COMPANY PUBLISHES BOOKS EVERY MONTH INCLUDING THE FANMADE ONES. THERE’S ALSO A FORUM FOR PEOPLE TO POST WIPS AND TALK ABOUT CHOICE SCRIPT AND GET HELP.
does anyone have fucked up cruise ship stories like im kinda obsessed with them. like people mysteriously disappearing and whatnot
Hi I work on a cruise ship as a navigator in training;
People mysteriously disappear off cruise ships all the time. It’s happened to me (I won’t go into detail for privacy reasons but it was a crew member in my case.) We have a special procedure for when this happens. On the navigational side if the man overboard is declared immediately, we will press a button on our GPS which marks our exact Longitude and Latitude so we can relay that as a search area for rescuers and ourselves. We will then throw life rings off and most vessels will do what’s called a Williamson turn, which basically means whacking the rudder hard over to do a tight turn to come back. On a cruise ship we generally don’t do it instantly though, as at high speeds turning so hard will cause a list of over 30 degrees which is fine for the boat but will cause everything to slide and fall which will hurt people. Which leads onto my second point;
Most people who fall offdo not survive. There have been a few cases where people have (that guy near florida i think who went 20 hours) but thats VERY unlikely. Most water is cold enough that you will drown in 10 minutes if you’re wearing regular clothes. It’s hard to do it by accident, most are drunk people doing drunk people things or deliberate. Because cruise ship’s won’t instantly do the turn maneuver, they can be like 3 miles away before they start coming back around. If you fell off and people instantly released life rings and such you have a decent chance, but unobserved you will drown. Some modern cruise ships have sensors installed for this but many don’t.
Continuing on, people die on cruises. A lot. Especially on cruise lines where the main customers are elderly. Strokes and heart attacks and random death are common. We do indeed have a morgue. The medical care on cruise ships is pretty good (some even have kidney dialysis available so people with that need can come onboard). But alongside having all their needs like room cleaning, food, and entertainment covered sometimes cruise ships can be treated like a floating hospice. You end up with a lot of very ill and elderly people on cruise ships who are very fragile and shouldn’t really be there. Believe me, I can’t count how many times we have diverted or turned back to port or called the coast guard for a helivac.
Other creepy parts of cruise ships are the watertight doors. Passengers never usually see these because they’re on low decks but they’re these massive hydraulic powered things and will HAPPILY cut you arm or leg off if they get caught. They also make a very ominous loud alarm.
Also don’t drink the water from the taps. It has either been run through the desalination plant and is gathered seawater or has been pumped in from a random port anywhere via a hose we prop up on wood to keep from touching the ground. It is all tested ofc, but it’s so heavily chlorinated it’s horrid just get the bottled stuff.
We regularly dump waste water, sewage, and food waste overboard. (If you want to know how this is regulated google MARPOL) And by sewage yes shit and piss. Food waste gets dumped in the middle of the night so passengers don’t see or smell it.
Ships make a LOT of noises that sound very scary when there’s stormy weather. Waves do not treat the hull nicely and and all vessels are designed to bend and stretch so the metal creaking sounds are loud and obvious. The anchor chain is also very loud (most cruise ships will do the ‘let go’ anchor release method which is just letting it run free because the other method is too long and annoying) when it’s running out it is EXCEPTIONALLY loud and we can tell if the anchor is dragging based on the sound the anchor and brakes are making.
The mooring deck is very dangerous. The ropes have to hold tonnes of tension and go so tight you can walk on them like a tightrope. If they snap and hit you they will cut you in half. It sounds like a bomb going off and has the force of one too. Google rope snapback if you wanna know more. They will decapitate you.
No ship has a deck 13 even if they have 13 or more decks because sailors are superstitious as fuck. (I have been scolded for whistling on the bridge before lol)
The crew all go through a massive hallway spanning the length of the ship. This connects to the food storage area and the crew accommodation, and usually the engine room. It goes further than you can see. It’s usually called the I-95 or M1 depending on what you call your highways
Other non scary facts:
I saw you mentioned the low crew wages. This is true, but from talking to my colleagues they all come from places that amount is a very solid living wage compared to back home. It’s still not fair, but that’s why people do it.
If you wanna befriend the crew buy them cigarettes (And wooly hats. For some reason the old lady passengers kept donating knitted hats and all the guys loved them and wear them constantly. The sea is cold!)
The hardest working people are the kitchen and hotel staff thank them
At night the navigation bridge is totally dark so we have good night vision and it’s kinda funny because we can be dead serious talking and not see each other at all.
Cruise ships have a safety officer who’s in charge of well, safety. They are all bonkers and laugh at videos of people falling over they get sent to review.
Engineers just sit in a nice cool office looking at flashy buttons pretending to work and then complain because they 'don’t have air con in the engine room!!!!’
Also the crew constantly have affairs and love triangles. No one is 'married’ or has a 'family’ on a ship. Penises will be stuck where the sun does not shine.
Thank you for letting me shout at you. I love boats
this is a very relatable meme but i cannot stress enough that if you haven’t watched the good place you’re going to be very surprised to learn what words are being replaced here
Keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico or whatever your term is for it. Do not allow the Republican regime to label that body of water the Gulf of America to the world. The name came from a the term Mexica, what the Aztecs called themselves. It’s been called the Gulf of Mexico since the 1600s.
Keep calling it Mount Denali. The original name before it was Mount McKinley. Don’t let the First Nations be erased.
It may sound stupid and petty. But it is an attempt to rewrite history and make us forget the origins. It is a literal white washing of history. This type of censorship is a beginning to greater evils.
This goes for everyone who works in writing. If you write for a website, social media, blog, if you make marketing emails, it’s called the Gulf of Mexico. If you’re company is having discuss about how to interpret the style guide on this issue, you have to double down on the Gulf of Mexico. There’s no neutral or apolitical way about writing about geography and your voice matters.
A social media business renamed itself to a single letter and everyone thought it was annoying but most writers reluctantly capitulated because they wanted to use the official name. We can’t let that happen with a sovereign country’s sovereign waters.
there is NOTHING like the rage of searching for a post you KNOW is on your blog with a highly specific phrase and then not only can this website not find it but tumblr says something fucking stupid like ‘please don’t be mad. please’
pov you are a skittish horse in the wild being offered kindness for the first time by the farmer’s eccentric child who has full confidence that you can be the one to win the big race and save the farm
Rudi got to be part of some experimental archeology today! Testing if this large comb found in the Oseberg viking grave could have been a horse brush/comb! It was super interesting to see how well it actually worked on her shedding winter coat.
(This one was a beautiful replica made by Knut Roger Brekke, not the real one obviously)
in case no one’s told you in a while. you are valid.
hey babe are you okay you reblogged the daily fucking reminder that you are allowed to want attention and that does not make you a bad person. several times
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn’t. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it’s not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it’s meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don’t have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don’t have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can’t wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren’t just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there’s room, but where there isn’t room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn’t a replacement for trees. It’s replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it’s needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can’t sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there’s actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I’d take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I’d be delighted.
Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.
Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.
Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.
Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.
Sneer. I’m not even going to bother explaining this one. “SNEER” ISN’T EVEN A SOUND.
Choked is not meant to be taken literally, an obstruction in the throat. It means they’re having difficultly speaking, they’re forcing the words out with difficulty. Often used when the character is convulsed in tears or laughter.
Hiss is a low, threatening whisper. Raw, guttural, vicious. It is NOT a literal hiss like an animal, it is a tone of voice that serves the same function. Someone will hiss that they’re going to cut your throat- a message from one person to the other.
Snarl is the same kind of thing. Not literal, it’s a tone of voice that serves the same function. It’s raw and gutteral like a hiss, but more savage than vicious. It’s loud, it’s showy, it’s intimidating. It’s very alpha male, big man, look at how fucking dangerous I am. I’ll take ALL of you on. Even if they’re snarling at one person in particular, nobody better back them up or they’re gonna get fucked up too.
Shriek. Come on, seriously? We’ve all heard people shriek either in fear or outrage. High pitched, loud, out of control, feminine. Men can shriek, but it’s funny and emasculating. Think angry italian women throwing pots and pans or ladies on tables who just saw a mouse.
Sneering is contempt whether it’s a facial expression or a tone of voice or both. There are a hundred different ways to sneer with your voice, but it all adds up to the same thing.
How descriptive words work 101
Op radiating cinema sins energy with that list lol
OP tagging this as “reasons they stop reading a book in ch 1” yet not grasping like the most basic form of figurative language is… something
over-psychoanalyzing blorbos is healthy and needed enrichment for the girlies in order to avoid over-psychoanalyzing themselves. like giving a dog a chew toy in order to redirect chewing on its hind legs
“Am I evil for resenting well-meaning displays of affection?” No. That’s Sasuke. Be safe out there
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