Sometimes I love the internet, actually. Incomprehensibly huge place but also so small. Saw a video on Instagram where Crayola was announcing they’re coming out with a box with some limited edition previously retired colors, including Dandelion. This video had hundreds of comments and almost all of them where “omg where’s the dandelion crayon girl she’s going to be so happy” and it was such an unimportant thing, but it was just cute
The tags on this post are also full of people happy for the dandelion crayon girl 🥹
Update!! Dandelion crayon girl got her promo box!!
why does my mother suddenly fail kindergarten whenever she tries to do anything on the computer
I know she doesn’t know what “the maximise button” is so I told her “click the square at the top right” and she clicked…the printer icon…in the middle of the toolbar. and I’m just like okay. this isn’t a technology thing you are flunking basic shapes and directions. I’m turning off your computer and getting you a block puzzle. you have a master’s degree
why does my mother suddenly fail kindergarten whenever she tries to do anything on the computer
I know she doesn’t know what “the maximise button” is so I told her “click the square at the top right” and she clicked…the printer icon…in the middle of the toolbar. and I’m just like okay. this isn’t a technology thing you are flunking basic shapes and directions. I’m turning off your computer and getting you a block puzzle. you have a master’s degree
still mad about smart TVs. that shit should be in a separate box like you can literally buy one of them androidtv boxes for £30. it doesn’t need its own ip address it doesn’t need its own app store it doesn’t need to replicate the functionality every device plugged into it already has
Smart TVs are one of the great evils of the modern era tbh. If I wanted spyware on my TV I should have to download it myself
i keep promising myself i won’t become another technophobe yelling about those “dang newfangled machines” or whatever. that i won’t Get Worse until going back to punchcards unironically seems like a good idea. that i’ll enjoy new things as they come out.
but so much is actively evil, hostile or otherwise enshittified. i don’t want to track my greebles with splorp i don’t want to pay a teehee subscription to get round cacophany’s file limits i don’t need 17 ways to skrimple my scronk 7 of which secretly activate scrungly plus ultimate i don’t need to link it to my flowolf account i don’t want to manage it with the flowby mowby i don’t care if poob does or does not has it for me. i don[’t care
i want a big screen whose ENTIRE job is to show me whatever device i plug into it. and also audio. i want to save my documents. on the computer. that i’m using. i want to own the media i buy. i want tech that is fat, properly cooled, simpler, serviceable by a normal person, and not forcing me to constantly select the “onlly spy on me a little bit” box every couple weeks.
More dangerous than the Pinto….an economy car….I would be hanging my head in shame
The Cybertruck, an electric vehicle with no liquid fuel on board, has more fire fatalities then the Ford Pinto. The car famous for exploding into a ball of fire if hit in the rear.
How do you fuck something up that bad?
Elon Musk is supplying these cars to american cops btw
I’ve literally said for years but the idea of mind control being real is more valuable as propaganda than actual mind control
“Brainwashing” as a concept was invented by Edward Hunter, a CIA-funded writer, to explain away why US troops captured by communist forces during the Korean War were so amenable to their Evil Totalitarian Captors. It definitely wasn’t that they were treated well (far better than the US treated its captives); with POWs allowed to cook their own food, organise sports competitions, and one black soldier even allowed to travel to Beijing to attend university - a privilege he wouldn’t have had back home - nor could it have been that any of these people saw any truth in communist theory. No, the real explanation must be that the communists had developed some nefarious means of controlling peoples’ minds, the same technology which they must have used on their own people to make them all support communism so wholeheartedly!
…
My great grandfather was a Russian POW during WWII. He was sent to the gulag.
He was one of the “lucky” ones.
He got back.
The amount of FUCKERY his subsequent behaviour caused my grandmother, and therefore my father and yes, therefore ME cannot be overstated. Like. Encanto gives a teeeny tiny idea of what generational trauma is.
The reality is fucking worse.
He was tortured. He was broken. He behaved so atrociously that my great grandmother, a woman in a country with no divorce, had to leave him with 4 children, 3 of whom young to very young.
I won’t go into the details. But the trauma of that lived in his daughter behaviour toward her son, and in his grandson my father.
DON’T. Come to me. And. Praise the URSS treatment of POW.
Fucking don’t.
Signed: somebody who had to live among the ruins
damn that’s crazy. what did your grandfather do to end up in a soviet pow camp during wwii
this is legitimately the perfect copypasta
This deserves to be in the post itself
ALT
these two should hang out.
ALT
ALT
Grueling labor camps for political dissidents in 20th century communist (Marxist-Leninist and subsidiaries) countries very much were things though, as someone whose grandparents actually lived through one, I can attest to the fact that you had to be very very careful about what you said in a public space lest you get sent to labor in horrible conditions with a chance that you won’t ever return.
While they didn’t have any problems because they never messed with politics… they were very aware of the cases where things went differently.
I’ve literally said for years but the idea of mind control being real is more valuable as propaganda than actual mind control
“Brainwashing” as a concept was invented by Edward Hunter, a CIA-funded writer, to explain away why US troops captured by communist forces during the Korean War were so amenable to their Evil Totalitarian Captors. It definitely wasn’t that they were treated well (far better than the US treated its captives); with POWs allowed to cook their own food, organise sports competitions, and one black soldier even allowed to travel to Beijing to attend university - a privilege he wouldn’t have had back home - nor could it have been that any of these people saw any truth in communist theory. No, the real explanation must be that the communists had developed some nefarious means of controlling peoples’ minds, the same technology which they must have used on their own people to make them all support communism so wholeheartedly!
…
My great grandfather was a Russian POW during WWII. He was sent to the gulag.
He was one of the “lucky” ones.
He got back.
The amount of FUCKERY his subsequent behaviour caused my grandmother, and therefore my father and yes, therefore ME cannot be overstated. Like. Encanto gives a teeeny tiny idea of what generational trauma is.
The reality is fucking worse.
He was tortured. He was broken. He behaved so atrociously that my great grandmother, a woman in a country with no divorce, had to leave him with 4 children, 3 of whom young to very young.
I won’t go into the details. But the trauma of that lived in his daughter behaviour toward her son, and in his grandson my father.
DON’T. Come to me. And. Praise the URSS treatment of POW.
Fucking don’t.
Signed: somebody who had to live among the ruins
damn that’s crazy. what did your grandfather do to end up in a soviet pow camp during wwii
Any government that wants to privatize a publicly-owned utility or resource is dumber than a bag of hammers. Or complicit. The public good and monopolistic profit-taking are pretty much incompatible.
it disturbs me that a significant number of people think that the issue with sexual violence, gendered violence, and misogyny is sexual desire rather than dehumanization, so they are relentlessly suspicious of others’ (and their own) desires while simultaneously never at all interrogating others’ (and their own) dehumanizing beliefs about other people, both within and outside of sexual contexts
asking people to be mindful of others when sharing a communal space (especially one you cannot just up and leave from) is not selfish or misanthropic. come on now
ALT
yeah
And there is a vast yawning chasm of difference between Weird & Unusual and Fucking Inconsiderate.
stimming, talking to yourself, being a bit smelly: unusual, uncontrollable, literally just a fact of being a person in public
playing tiktoks on your phone at full volume with no headphones: shit-head behaviour
i’ve been saving this in my inbox for months because i don’t feel like i have the words to match this. it’s a shameful breach of my humility to answer yes, yes i do consider myself an intelligent and sensitive pervert. i love how you worded that. this is like a therapist’s screening question.
The more you look into a lot of famous tumblr Kickstarter scams with your thirty-something brain the more it’s like. Man these weren’t even scams they were just incredibly poorly managed creative projects that fizzled out. This is a thing that literally happens all the time it’s just people outside the immediate team/investors aren’t usually paying attention to it. And also everyone involved is like 19 so they don’t know how a complex, multi-year creative project works.
okay so I know slur song was banned from the club chart BUT fun fact: to make it into the lower end of the itunes charts you only need to sell like 50 songs in a day so if you have 50 friends with a dollar to spare and an iphone ... well
I hate I when I get an idea for a novel. Like oh no here starts the slow sad slip n’ slide to dissapointment again.
You ever been 30,000 words and hundreds of research hours into a project when you realize hey wait a minute. I don’t like this. This is bad.
Ok adding to this though that even though it is extremely relatable, this is a KNOWN thing with professional writing. 10k is often referred to as “having a pot boiling” or “having a stew” - it’s the point where you often see an idea coming together and it’s exciting! But THEN… 30k-50k is the point where that fun has to start coming together. In theatre, it’s usually week 3 of a 5 week rehearsal period where you have to stop talking about the play and really get it all up on its feet and cohesive. In art, it’s committing to what are going to be the final visible layers of colour and texture, in sculpture the moment where you’re truly at the point of no return with carving out the shape.
It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It’s so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it’s truly not going to be anything or you’re just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to… write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can’t, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can’t fix nothing!
(I say, fully looking at my latest draft of my book and considering throwing it in the bin. But my editor said exactly this to me, so I’m passing it along.)
this is 100% true. I’ve written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can’t sleep. I keep going even though I’m convinced I’m going to fail. And then… It’s like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren’t working have obvious fixes. I “can write” again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It’s not. You just gotta get out of the woods.
Ah yes the Slough of Desponds. Professional author with 13 books, and this is normal for me as well. (Checking for tension issues usually helps!)
Lmao I literally wrote a whole blog post abt it once.
i think what bothers me about a lot of “girl power” narratives is that they function on the implicit idea on the idea that women can become worthy of respect. and i happen to think that really caring about women means believing they already are worthy of respect. that historical seamstresses and soccer moms and forgotten sisters and sweet polite little girls and someone’s weird grandma matter just as much as the warriors and politicians, even if they, personally, never accomplish anything “cool.”
INSPIRING: This woman pioneered the concept of the computer program, making her nearly as noteworthy as a random upper-class man whose only accomplishment was his inheritance!
My DM for our weekly DnD game recently moved to California. It’s been sad and we miss him. He DMs now via Zoom and we’ve got a really nice set up so he feels very present. Today while DMing he had us rolling investigation in a library. He said the books title was Is Sex Necessary? When we all seemed puzzled he prompted, “You two should know… Is Sex Necessary?”
My girlfriend and I were stumped. “We should know or our characters should know?” I asked.
“You!” He insisted.
We looked at each other in bafflement repeating “Is Sex Necessary!?” “Is Sex Necessary…?”
“It’s on your bookshelf!” He exclaimed. So we went over to investigate and sure enough, a slim volume stood on the shelf titled Is Sex Necessary? The whole group, all four of us, clustered around to inspect the book.
It honestly didn’t occur to me to investigate the book for clues, I opened the cover hoping to see a hint as to its origins, and inside found a paper note with my DMs distinct handwriting that proclaimed, “Secret! Do not open!”
It turns out he planted notes in several books over two months ago specifically for this eventuality. Each note had a hint for defeating beholders (which he knew we were gunning to fight after being extorted by one) and were sprinkled through many books. He’d say, “An earth genasi explorer wrote this account called Feet of Clay,” and I’d go pull down my Terry Pratchett book of the same title. Or “A sea faring elf wrote about their study of leviathans in Ship of Magic,” and I’d grab my tattered Robin Hobb to find another note.
It was really cute and immersive and it made him feel a lot closer finding all the little notes he left in our home.
