A Random Collection of Nonsense

A lot of posts about random pop culture, politics and history stuff that occurs to me. Key Tags to filter:  "Dieting" and "calories" is for older weight loss posts; "40k" is Games Workshop related

[sreegs]

hey it's me black mold. thanks for running your window air conditioner all summer. whatever you do, do not regularly clean the removable filter. that's not necessary

you should also never ever unplug the air conditioner and stick a flashlight in the vent that blows air to see if we're in there. it's very bad, that place should not be checked

and whatever you do, if you've already made the mistake of unplugging it, don't remove it from the window for cleaning if possible. and whether it's possible to remove the unit or not, don't carefully disassemble the front panel, document where the screws go and plastic bits go, and open up the vent more to be able to get into it easily

as black mold, i'm an expert on this. you should heed my warnings: now, if you've somehow made the mistake of doing all of the above, you should not use warm water and dish soap to CLEAN the inside of the vent thoroughly. DON'T ever use a bottle brush to get into the hard to reach places. and certainly don't rinse and dry the cleaned area before carefully putting it back together

there's nothing wrong with us, black mold. we don't cause or exacerbate breathing conditions like asthma or other illnesses. it's cool, we're cool

furthermore, if you're capable of removing the window unit, DONT take a hose with the same soapy water and wash the portion of the window unit that sits outside the window and is therefore weatherproofed.

whatever you do, don't allow the air conditioner to dry before plugging it back in and turning it on again

and if you have a central air conditioner, you will definitely never ever consult a manual or sources online to perform a similar cleaning procedure on the cooling unit outside.

lastly, if you're physically unable to do the things we (the black mold) warned you not to do above, you should never ever ask someone to help you or hire a service to do it.

[garbage-empress]

Also even if you do not have the time, space or ability to do some of the the things in the OP, definitely do not clean the coils (the awful sharp flat stacks of metal) with foaming coil cleaner. That removes the beneficial black mold (us) holding the unit together. It will be completely unsatisfying to watch the foam clean out the Super Beneficial Black Mold, Mildew, Hair, Lint & Dust Combo™ (that is not only a health hazard but making the unit less efficient at cooling necessary for air conditioner function) and leave the metal shiny.

It is a lot of elbow grease and definitely not just spraying a can and waiting. Especially do not use the ones that are self rinsing via the natural condensation of water around the coils where all you have to do is let the foam settle a couple hours before turning the unit back on. These foaming cleaners are also terrible to use on the removable air intake vent covers. You definitely do not just have to spray the opposite side of all the trapped shit on the plastic mesh and let the foam push it off. Also that stuff on the cover is great for you and your air conditioner.

Trust us. We, the mold, know much more about air conditioners than the people who make aerosol cans you can pick up for like $8 at home depot. Definitely do not do this a couple times a season.

[chainofclovers]

Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that

Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[i-like-reblog-maps]

What month were you born in?

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Voting ended onMay 28

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

I have gotten the OK from my teacher to collect data using a Tumblr poll, btw. I’m also going to have to send her this post as proof of where I got the data from / proof I didn’t just make up the numbers. So. Behave

[edgar-allan-possum]

[agendermetalbender]

[orteil42]

we're overdue for a reactive wave of anti-cozy games. animal crossing but office workers. restaurant management but applebee's. farming sim but all spreadsheets. never see an ear of corn the whole game

[themainspoon]

Not where I was expecting this to go, because when I read the words "Anti-Cozy game" I instead thought of a hypothetical game that mirrored cozy games mechanically, but was purposefully abrasive in terms of style and presentation. Like 2000's edgy flash game type of subject matter, rhythmless atonal Harsh Industrial Noise OST, something that visually resembles a car crash victim more than it does a video game.

[alaric-greyson]

The "Cozy Game" and the "Barely Disguised Spreadsheet" are merely extensions of the same healthy ecosystem. "Making friends on an island* isn't the enemy of"20 years of imaginary soccer player names and accompanying statistics."

A healthy ecosystem needs both to encourage biodiversity. Otherwise you end up living in a vast monoculture of WW2 FPS and dark and bloody ARPGs.

[i-like-reblog-maps]

What month were you born in?

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Voting ended onMay 28

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

I have gotten the OK from my teacher to collect data using a Tumblr poll, btw. I’m also going to have to send her this post as proof of where I got the data from / proof I didn’t just make up the numbers. So. Behave

[neosatsuma]

truly "the next pdf struggles to be born" is my favorite sentence of 2026 but the layers required for anybody normal to understand it.... utterly tragic

[witnotwitchcraft]

layer one; there's a quote that goes "the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born".

layer 2; like a decade ago the ceo of tumblr said they wanted to make it the "next pdf". people made fun of them for this.

that's it that's all the layers.

[neosatsuma]

layer 3: so the way tumblr works is that [basic explanation of the reblog system]

layer 4: but recently staff announced they were going to update the site so [explanation of the update]

layer 5: but everyone got so verbally and cohesively upset that within 24 hours staff announced they were going to hold off

layer 6: then the next day, someone made this post...

[monsterpotion]

layer 1: there's a quote that goes "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." It is commonly attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but is a paraphrased translation into English (by Slavoj Žižek) of a translation into French by Gustave Massiah; a more direct translation of Gramsci's writing from Italian to English would be "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." (In Italian it reads "La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati." And it was written around 100 years ago!)

This quote has gained a lot of attention in the last ~decade (rough estimate), likely as a result of people relating it to current events. Lots of those events that look like the old world dying, after all, and the new world struggling to be born (or you might seek to actively make implications about such events via this comparison). And there truly is no dearth of monsters to be found.

layer 1.1: In Revolutionary Girl Utena, student council president Touga Kiryuu quotes Hermann Hesse’s 1919 novel Demian in a poem that opens with the line "If the egg's shell does not break, the chick will die without being born." This poem is repeated several times during the Student Council arc of the 1997 anime, and ties in heavily to the show's themes, especially the first arc thereof.

layer 1.2: The poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (written in 1919, in the aftermath of the Great War and on the tail end of a global pandemic) ends with the lines:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(Neither layer 1.1 nor 1.2 were intentional references on the part of the post's original author, but they are undeniably present within the metatext of the post.)

layer 2: in 2016, QZ.com (Quartz) posted an article about Yahoo's 2013 acquisition of tumblr, in which an anonymous tumblr employee reported Yahoo's Simon Khalaf saying that the site was “going to be the new PDF.” This became a sort of user shorthand/injoke for the idea that executives who are trying to direct tumblr's growth or change are out of touch with user desires or even the practical functions of the site.

layer 2.1: the anonymous tumblr staff member who reported Khalaf's words added: “It didn’t make any sense. We’d walk away scratching our heads.”

layer 3: so the way tumblr works is you can either make posts of various types, or reblog other users' posts. the chronological sequence of posts you make and reblog (based on the time you posted or reblogged them, rather than when they were originally made, in the case of reblogs), functions as the "output" or "content" of your blog. the output of however many blogs a given user "follows" is organized, again chronologically, into that user's "dashboard", wherein they can scroll through the accumulation of posts and reblogs from people they follow.

posts have "notes", which are the sum of every comment, reblog, or like that a user has added to the post.

layer 3.1: when you post on tumblr, you can add tags to that post that are a sort of metatext that is not maintained when someone else reblogs a given post. you can also do this when you reblog someone else's post.

layer 3.2: alternatively, when you reblog someone else's post, you can add a comment directly to that post in such a fashion that it becomes "part of the post" for anyone who reblogs it from you, or from someone who reblogged it from you, ad infinitum. this, combined with layer 3.1, combines to create a sort of post ecosystem where individual posts mutate into different versions and are spread around when they have qualities that tumblr users who see them want to perpetuate for some reason.

layer 3.3: the transmission of posts from OP to dashboard to reblog to dashboard can result in a post that is particularly striking, timely, influential, or controversial accumulating thousands or tens of thousands of notes in the course of a day or less. this may even happen to a post that was made months or years ago, under the right circumstances!

layer 3.4: tumblr users fucking love reblogging references they understand, references they think they understand, references they vaguely recognize, and juxtapositions of multiple references

layer 3.5: there's also the for you page. its got an algorithm. if anyone tells you tumblr doesnt have an algorithm they're wrong.

layer 4: recently staff announced that they were updating the site so that each uniquely commented branch of any given post accumulated its own set of comments, likes, and reblogs. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.

layer 4.1: this change, much like "tumblr will be the next pdf", can be interpreted as the result of upper management being deeply out of touch with the needs and culture of the site, as well not understanding the site's core function.

layer 5: a lot of those unhappy people explained why they thought it was a bad move, at length, in reblogs of the announcement post, comment on the announcement post, and freestanding original posts regarding the change.

layer 5.1: the change was rolled back the next day. there's an announcement about it but i've just about run out of steam on this bit. also they banned a bunch of trans women the same day, which sucks.

layer 6: then the next day, someone made this post... i heard she's hot... i heard she has a really nice rack...

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

very disappointing when someone says "the bird app" and for one lovely moment I think they are talking about Merlin Bird ID by Cornell Lab, the free app that allows you to identify birds by appearance or sound, make a list of birds you have seen, and explore all the birds native to your region.... and then I realize they are talking about twitter.

[poneystoney]

REBLOG IF YOU'RE 40 OR OLDER :)

Let people know you're here!!

[mckitterick]

[littlealexhorne]

[maverick-werewolf]

Werewolf Fact #17 - The Wulver is probably not actually a thing

So you’ve probably heard of the wulver, if you’re into werewolves on the internet. It’s supposedly a Scottish legend about a wolf-headed guy who left fish on the windowsills of the needy. How kind.

Well, frankly, I’m not at all convinced the wulver was ever really a thing in folklore. Hear me out. This is a tidbit about checking your sources.

I’m a folklorist. That means I professionally study this stuff and have degrees in it. I’ve given lectures and taught classes on subjects in folklore and mythology, especially werewolves. I’ve defended my research and my work from boards wanting to find some kind of hole in my work to prove I was wrong about something.

When it’s your job, it’s very important to check sources for accuracy - and to double-check them for authenticity. If you can, find the primary source. This means find the original documentation or the oldest possible occurrence or recording of the myth. If you can’t find one? It may not actually have been something people believed in.

This is where things get complicated. Lots of folklore and myth came from oral traditions, and as such, we’ve doubtlessly already lost tons of great things. That means people often didn’t write this stuff down, in part because these beliefs were occurring in time periods wherein literacy was hard to come by. When it comes to this, the best you can do is to find secondary proof in artwork or artifacts from the time period, or else a medieval monk’s chronicle of what the locals believe in, just to give a few examples.

All this said, let’s get back to the wulver…

As mentioned, the wulver myth of the kind, fish-giving werewolf supposedly comes from Shetland. It’s caught on on the internet to the point that when I mention werewolves, it often gets brought up by someone at some point. There were even some wacked-out ridiculous spiky silly monsters in the latest God of War game called wulvers (but they are, predictably, brainlessly malevolent and aggressive, so whoever randomly pulled the name “wulver” off the internet for the game’s development couldn’t even be kind enough to respect that supposed legend, either).

But finding “wulvers” mentioned in professional werewolf studies by academics in the field publishing well-researched work is virtually impossible. Wikipedia will claim to you that there are a few articles that mention them, but some of them actually don’t. Do we ever hear the big names in werewolf studies mention wulvers? No, nor do they ever mention anything like them.

Do we have a primary source for wulvers? No.

We have no monk’s account and no ancient piece of writing from the region that indicates any belief in wulvers, nor do we have any kind of illuminations, bestiaries, engravings, woodcuts, paintings - we have nothing. No proof at all.

True, this doesn’t entirely mean that people didn’t believe in them. Maybe they did. But without a source, we can’t responsibly claim in a professional work that wulvers were ever a thing in folklore.

But wait, Mav! There is a source!

Every single article I have ever seen on the internet (because I’ve never come across the wulver in professional werewolf studies) only ever cites just one source for the wulver: Jessie Saxby’s Shetland Traditional Lore, published in 1932.

It’s bordering on impossible to reasonably get a copy of this book. It’s not available digitally. It’s been out of print for years. The only print copies available range around $100 in price and are essentially falling to pieces from mishandling, at least the ones I’ve encountered.

Virtually every other werewolf legend you can name has multiple sources and often at least one primary source - sometimes multiple, especially in the case of Greek and Roman werewolf legends. The wulver doesn’t have even one.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to try to discredit Saxby’s work. If someone out there can offer me some good proof that people in Scotland ever actually believed in the Wulver, then… awesome.

But at this point and after years of trying to find one, I still can’t find any reliable historical source to actually say with confidence that the wulver is a legitimate folkloric belief.

Even if someone were to suddenly present to me a Scottish writing from whatever era that has overt mention of wulvers and prove me wrong, though, the principle of this idea still stands.

You really shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet (haven’t you ever heard the Abe Lincoln quote about that!? Oh wait…), especially about folklore. The internet is a vast and rich source for false information - and that seems to apply even more where folklore (sometimes especially werewolves) is involved. Always check your sources!

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff!

Patreon — YouTube — Wulfgard — Werewolf Fact Masterlist — Twitter)

[palaeoplushies]

It looks like the Shetland Museum has done some digging on the Wulver and has the true answer to it’s origins!!

In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about the ‘wulver’, Shetland’s ‘kind and generous werewolf’, as someone has described him

https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/blog/the-real-story-behind-the-shetland-wulver

Turns out it was likely the invention of a single person in the 1930s!

[shithowdy]

from a certain standpoint birdwatching is a sort of gacha

[shithowdy]

-reliant on RNG random encounters

-instills a deep sense of fomo

-seasonally-cycled releases

-becomes increasingly financially prohibitive the more you want to expand your list and/or document your encounters

-achieved goals sound meaningless to those not in the hobby

[shithowdy]

never give up!

[francesca-feasts]

Finally watched The Outsiders for the first time and...

... it certainly was a film.

[alaric-greyson]

Just went to the musical last night and was very confused when they were going to get to NYC to fight the other gangs.

Took three songs to realize I was remembering The Warriors.

[catchymemes]

[link-the-feral-anon]

When you remember the anti-vax movement

[burger-prince]

[tatsutahimet]

I first reblogged this in January, and here my ass is in March 2020 self-quarantined at home.

[reaperrmancer]

Ur right and u should say it

[ap-kinda-lit]

Reading this in 2021

[ssv-raven]

Reading in 2026

[dovewithscales]

Y'all, we as a community have got to get better at dodgeball if we’re gonna keep tempting fate like that.

[n1-adora-fan]

Never change Brennan

[truelovevip-deactivated20190324]

being as i am an idiot, and having been one my whole life, i just wanna say that i find it very easy to do nothing, and go nowhere. i eat chocolate late at night in the dark. i stand in the garden also. and i’m often waiting for something to happen. and i’m stupid.

[elbiotipo]

introducing a new character, Sun-Tzu But If He Sucked

[elbiotipo]

we have to hit them harder and they'll surrender no half measures time to take the gloves off

if you kill their leaders they'll just surrender trust me bro it happens in Age of Empires

the more you spread your logistics around contractors that have a monopoly on your weapons production the more you produce bro

you know what wins wars? having the most badass manly soldiers they should all be like total badasses with cool guns

you just have to strike bro no half measures gloves off don't care about what comes after you just have to declare war just declare war what are you a pussy