Tank.

He/Him. Magic the Gathering player, Legacy by choice but branching out for RCQs. Written a few fanfics, since this is the fandom site https://archiveofourown.org/users/AfroDave

[tricktster]

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

[tricktster]

it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

And thus, the Mad Dad Hour was born.

[tricktster]

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

me: hi there, you’ve got TST-

him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*

me: hey, is everything o-

him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!

me: sir i do not know you and i have never even seen you but i am in romantic love with you.

[metamorphesque]

genocide, tathev simonyan

[questcequecestqueca]

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

And the world didn’t know her name.

[clevermanka]

She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.

[3liza]

one thing everyone who is struggling with cooking for themselves needs to know is that the shittiest rice cooker, like the ones that cost $5 at rite aid, can make entire meals. you can put anything you want (except uncooked meats that need prolonged temperatures to be safe to eat) in with the rice and push the button and go lie down for 20 minutes. you will learn through making slightly over or undercooked rice a few times how you need to adjust the liquid:rice ratios. you can put rice, a bag of baby carrots, whatever salt and spices, and a can of tuna (or a can of shredded chicken, beef, etc, or tofu, or canned beans, or canned tomatoes) in a rice cooker and it will be completely edible in ~20min. it costs like $1 per batch, less if you get regular carrots and cut them into chunks yourself. you should have frozen spinach and peas and corn in your freezer, or whatever frozen veg is safe for your food allergies. this kind of meal can survive in the fridge for a while and the freezer even longer. if you make it badly it wont poison you and can be salvaged with hot sauce, if you make it disastrously it can be thrown away without losing more than a dollar or two. if you make it okay it fullfills the Just Need Some Real Food requirements completely. if you need more calories you can add butter or oil, or eat sour cream on the side. if you forget about the rice cooker or fall asleep it will dry out on the bottom but wont burn. they should teach you this in 5th grade

[it-grrl]

If you enjoy an odd cookbook, Roger Ebert wrote "The Pot and How to Use It" in 2010. It's a rice cooker cookbook but also just an ode to the rice cooker. It's out of print but worth looking for at your local library; it's also available on The Internet Archive

[3liza]

thank you!! also i forgot to mention: when you are too sick or depressed to do dishes, you can eat your dinner out of the rice cooker pot itself. just dont touch a metal or ceramic utensil to the actual pot because it will scrape the nonstick coating which causes a lot of problems for another post. wooden or plastic spoon or chopsticks, or just eat carefully out of the middle of the pot without touching the sides. or you can use the actual rice paddle, who cares. ive done it! if youre too sick to cook "properly", making a one pot rice and veg and protein bowl and eating it directly out of the pot in your pajamas is 100% fine. you will recover and function so much better after eating a hot meal made of actual ingredients.

[aropride]

please god let chatgpt die out like nfts did. With a fast and graceless fall into irrelevancy

[bladespark]

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[atwotonedbird]

This spell has a very low hit ratio, so we need a lot of us to do it.

[afro-dave]

Promos I received for playing Store Championships the past few weeks

I went to 6, won 3, played Jeskai Control every time. Turnouts were… a little lacking overall

[wifegideonnav]

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

[redstonedust]

its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Chinese wushu technique, shuang-jie-gun. (CR 楚儿霸王)

[my-blog-is-a-sideblog]

[girl-detector]

[afro-dave]

Illegal to be this good at anything, straight to jail

[closet-keys]

when thinking about how oppression works, on a structural level, my guiding principle is that I must spend at least as much time looking down as I do looking up.

what do I mean by this? here's an example. when my surgery is delayed multiple times, I spend a little time looking up (there is only one surgeon in the entire area who will perform this surgery on trans people, so every trans person's surgical timeline is bottle-necked and delayed by months every time he goes to a conference or takes a vacation or experiences an injury. in other words, if I was cis, I would not encounter this difficulty in accessing surgery). and then I spend time looking down (due to nonstop harassment and legal threats, this practice now only treats adults and will no longer perform surgeries on minors. in other words, my access to surgery is predicated on adult privilege I have at the direct expense of trans youth's lack of access).

if you do not build a habit around thinking in this way, you will become the person Audre Lorde describes as "so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face." If we are seeking to dismantle structures of oppression, rather than to simply use and climb them, then we absolutely must make a practice of looking in both directions, especially when we feel like we're on the bottom.

[downwithpeople]

you and me are going to outlive this website. you and me are going to outlive everything. one day it will just be you and me

[downwithpeople]

some people have tagged this with their various favourite fictional characters or even worse, their friends and lovers. let me be crystal fucking clear. it’s going to be you. and me.

[afro-dave]

When it’s finally down to just downwithpeople and myself: “Do you like memes?”

[pixelartpeach]

E—m—d—a—s—h—N—e—c—k—l—a—c—e

[pixelartpeach]

Y—o—u—P—e—o—p—l—e—W—i—l—l—R—e—b—l—o—g—A—n—y—t—h—i—n—g

[seven-oh-four]

needs an em-dash at the beginning and/or end, otherwise the first or last letters will be right next to each other

[pixelartpeach]

϶—O—h—T—r—u—e—ϵ

(added clasps)

[pancake-blogging]

϶—F—r—i—e—n—d—s—h—i—p—B—r—a—c—e—l—e—t—ϵ

[too-many-blorbos]

϶—C—U—R—S—E—D—A—M—U—L—E—T—ϵ

[bees-official]

Cursed amulet necklace that doesnt have a cursed amulet its just the phrase cursed amulet

[sentientballofpeas]

϶—C—U—R—S—E—D—(¤)—A—M—U—L—E—T—ϵ

[pixelartpeach]

϶—T÷h÷a÷t÷s÷A÷G÷o÷o—d—P o

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⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀K

⠀⠀⠀⠀M⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Y

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀B⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀EA

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[loveridden1999]

in a way i am my own dead wife

[afro-dave]

Fridging myself to see if it helps character development

[help-me-yes]

[princesssokphanny]

A once-in-a-lifetime shot — the moon perfectly framed by a rainbow. Caught at just the right time. 🌈 🌕

[lemonsweet]

Very fascinated by this Walmart shirt. Could they not use the actual phrase or something? It's not even specifying "when you're mean to me" it's just when you're mean in general this particular bunny gets hurt. She carries all suffering. This bunny experiences all evil in the world.

[free-my-mindd]

[diedoffscreen]

[mornington-the-crescent]