[sticksandsharks]

Danse Macabre & Danse Mystique

(prints here)

[homunculus-argument]

a vampire, wrapped tightly with indestructible enchanted threads: No weapon forged against me shall prosper. a blacksmith using the vampire as an anvil while making a sword: Shut the fuck up.

[wizardarchetypes]

it’s sooo funny when rude customers encounter employees who can deny them service for the first time.

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

And he was so astonished he didn’t even argue he just turned around and left 💀🙏🏻 it was like he suddenly became self aware

[carolinalaurel]

One summer I was running ferry rides across a lake so people could see the waterfalls without walking 6 miles when a guy snapped my bra strap as he was boarding the boat. So i immediately threw him off, he started yelling for my manager, my boss cheerfully informed him that, yeah, she’s the captain of the boat and she can kick off anyone she wants. He goes to storm off, looks expectantly at his girlfriend, and she just goes, “Well, I’M not walking six miles, Michael! I’ll meet you back at the car!” and sits right back down!!!!

The expression on his face when he was told that he couldn’t get on the boat, then immediately told that his girlfriend was ditching him? PRICELESS. he just blinked at her and then stormed off like a child. I gave her a free hat and was like maybe rethink this relationship…….

[hickeywiththegoodhair]

i once had this fucker come up to order a beer. while i pour it he shows me the wanky fucking chemical structure tattoo on his arm and he’s like “hey. you know what this is” i was like “nah sorry” (never cared abt chemistry in school, plus having to look at a some rando’s pretentious tattoo gives me the douche chills). he decides to respond with “heh. you must not read many books”

i immediately stop pouring his beer. i reply: “heh. you must not want this beer.” thirsty boy immediately starts groveling like a worm “please please no i do want the beer im sorry im sorry” believe me when i say it was one of the most pathetic things ive ever witnessed

[lezbadeez]

gotta love people immediately backpedaling when they realise that there are Consequences To Being Mean

[lastvalyrian]

I genuinely believe that part of why it has become so normalized to be openly callous and evil in politics is that customer service culture has trained affluent people that they can treat everyone they consider beneath them however they want and still be treated kindly.

[athena5898]

More like the other way around. Modern politics were always going to get this way because the system enforces the type of behavior that leads to customer service culture. Most western systems are designed to create power over others, which means asshole behavior.

[headingtowardsdirt]

I love this and the idea of how common and effective this could be in a post money society.

Right now there's an expectation from most owners that it's your job to do whatever you can to get those precious dollars. And that's largely accepted because yeah obviously the business needs money to survive, and you need to keep your job for the same reason. But in a world where that's not true (or to a smaller degree where the boss cares more about the employees than profit maximization) these kinds of consequences could be the standard method of attitude correction.

When your job is just what you do and not how you support yourself, it becomes way easier to withhold that work. When you take away the profit incentive, it becomes so much fucking easier to freely associate based on your values and who you want to do business with instead of just chasing those with the thickest wallets.

[deepetch]

This is awesome on so many levels.

Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenter’s The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children’s animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes. Noot, Noot.

[junkyardddog]

Oh my fucking god.

[novella-november]

This is an absolutely amazing demonstration of skill and artistry with claymation, absolutely stunning, and absolutely as bloody, gorey, body-horror filled as the original film!

(aka, please do not click play if you cannot handle very graphic body horror and blood.)

If you can handle viewing the original 1970s “The Thing”, you should be able to handle this, and will be in for a treat!

[2productive]

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

[copperbadge]

I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.

[tastethebloodofmeatthawsmoth]

"Brave, brave child of revolution; timid, timid child of tears -- are they one and the same? I look at myself and wonder." - Kanno Suga, poem written while awaiting execution

[loveyourlovelysoul]

What you call self-sabotage might just be your body saying: "Familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar peace"

What you call procrastination might just be your body saying: "I'm overwhelmed and everything feels too much"

What you call anxiety might just be your body saying: "I've been in danger before, and I don't know if it's over yet"

What you call neediness might just be your body saying: "I didn't get what I needed, and I'm still longing"

What you call overreacting might just be your body saying: "This feels like danger to me because it once was"

What you call emotional instability might just be your body saying: "I was never taught that feeling emotions could be safe"

What you call resistance might just be your body saying: "I don't feel safe enough to do what you want me to"

What you call laziness might just be your body saying: "I'm frozen because I had to work hard for too long"*

What you call numbness might just be your body saying: "I had to shut down to keep you safe"

What you call avoidance might just be your body saying: "Im not ready to face this yet. I need slower exposure to it"

(the.trauma.educator on ig)

*gentle reminder that body gets tired also after doing mentally draining work/job (which includes feeling stressed too, not just studying or working 9-5 in front of a computer -which holds responsabilities, anyway)

[an-ruraiocht]

there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now

please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection

[contrivedchaos]

I don’t think people truly understand the scope of the damage Sony is about to do to physical media. They literally invented the compact disc. They are the reason why Blu-ray as a format won the HD wars over HD-DVD. They have gargantuan influence over manufacturing disc-based media. If Sony as a company stops making physical media for their next gen gaming consoles, this is going to affect movies and music as well. If you buy CDs, DVDs, or Blu-rays, those are next on the chopping block.

[life-on-our-planet]

eepy mourning dove cupping its wings under its belly for cushion ©Ella

[byjove]

Movie about a depressed and rather morbid autistic man planning to commit suicide and picking up a number of odd jobs in an effort to raise enough money to meticulously plan and prepay for his funeral so his mother doesn’t have to worry about it after he is gone. He begins to connect with people and enjoy life for the first time while working part time as a greeter in the funeral home, helping an eccentric old lady organize her basement, walking 7 dogs and maintaining a feral cat colony for a guy with a broken foot, playing a number of bit parts in local ads and stocking the shelves at the convenience store at night. In the end, he has befriended many of his neighbors and he decides he does not want to die and goes back to school to become a funeral director instead.

[byjove]

He is popular at his funeral home gig because he keeps accidentally saying things that are very reassuring and death positive. Because he wants to die. He eventually donates his funeral fund to the old lady’s granddaughter after her sudden death so she does not have to sell her grandmother’s prized possessions to pay for her funeral.

[byjove]

The old lady gifts him one of her ceramic cats at the beginning of the film which he reluctantly accepts out of politeness. Near the end of the film, he adopts a friendly cat from the cat colony that looks remarkably like the ceramic cat and names it after her, signaling his commitment to surviving and caring for his cat the way the old woman lived for her ceramic collection.

[inkskinned]

my most ungrounded and unresearched fear is that so many companies are pushing AI in part because it builds them a pathway towards a subscription model for a huge number of things that should not be subscription, but theoretically could be:

do you want to talk to verizon's help desk because there's an error on your bill? to access a real agent, you have to pay for Verizon Access+, only 5.99 a month.

want to filter out all the fake job postings from the real ones? subscribe to Indeed: Advanced Tactics and only verified postings will appear on your dash.

sick of the infinite ai slop? buy Google Premium; it'll automatically detect ai within a site and gives it a credibility score. with premium plus, you can shuffle high-credibility results to the top.

do you want a "luxury" experience? well, you'd have to pay for that luxury, and since the company sure doesn't want to pay its employees; the cost would fall to the consumer.

when automation has made every experience unpleasant; the experience of genuine humanity will be commodified.

[marzipanandminutiae]

This is already happening – one of the softwares used by a museum I work at only lets you talk to a human help agent if you have their premium subscription. It's such bullshit

[inkskinned]

the fact you are not the only one in these notes saying "no this is already happening; i have to pay money to speak to a representative" is just... really awesome! you said a software used by museums is doing this shit? okay! great! wonderful!! anybody know where i can scream

[thegodgaze]

At them, into their models, break them. Destroy and overload their datalogs used to talk to you, every time. Force their chat agents to accept a broad number of ridiculous rules until they cost too much to function and/or they're forced to give you a person to talk to. If they want to commodify human contact, we need to incentivize it through their nonstop suffering.

[mangonetics]

Dogs serve as a kind of virtue eater for Americans to pour all of their kindness into without the risk of improving society or being nice to someone with any agency

[lookinggoodinplaid]

(In a Werner Herzog voice) The perpetual references to Lassie in popular culture, an archetypal savior of the family and its children, positions the dog as an enforcer of the status quo. Beneath those watery irises is an endeavor to sequester the latent kindnesses of society into a furry, lovable vessel rather than allow individuals to direct it towards each other. Lassie is an evil, borne from our innate cowardice towards the prospect interacting with one's fellow man. Perhaps it is easier for the American to die than to reach out a hand in fellowship. Under the prevalence of canines, cruelty is a preferential morality.

[footage of police dogs is shown over the last few sentences]

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

in zis sense, we arr all little timmy, down hiz well

[boringkate]

Someone somewhere is the best in the world at sucking dick and it's meaningless. They aren't famous. There's no prize. It's not a competition. None of us are competitors. You don't have anything to prove. All that matters is that you keep sucking. Maybe we can even suck on it together.

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

Gifted

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[these-violet-delights-fic]

People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!

[kaylmao]

idk i would personally rather give up access to certain products seasonally or locally than have people enslaved to give me the ability to have any product any place any time. i think i can go without tomatoes in january.

[zombilenium]

In Pennsylvania...

Courtesy: Abandoned Buffalo NY