[Video Description: An ad with piano music over it all, showing an elderly woman in her home, knitting, when two younger men walk by her window, which catches her attention. She stares out her window at them as they kiss each other while walking, the old lady staring in disbelief. Cut to the old woman approaching a residence with a broom in hand, staring up at the second floor window where a small rainbow Pride flag is hanging. The old woman stares up at it and mutters "Ridiculo", before getting up on a ladder with her broom to remove the flag. Focus on the flag fluttering to the ground as church bells chime. The scene then cuts to the couple from before, approaching their home with grocery bags in hand before one stops and stares at the second floor, stopping his partner who then drops the groceries as he too stares up. It's then revealed that the small pride flag had been replaced with a gigantic, hand-knit pride flag. It then cuts back to the old woman's home, where a tin of rainbow-colored yarn sits on her table. The hands of the old woman are holding and fondly touching an old black and white photo of two young smiling women, leaning against each other. Cut to the old woman's face as she stares out with a look of happy pride on her face. At the end of the video, the name "Idealista" appears on screen, followed by "buon pride" along with a rainbow. End VD.]
The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".
In this case, thankfully, the Strong Opinion™️ is that those two men are ridiculous with their teeny tiny flag for ants.
andrew is the fakest idgafer because there’s no way he was chill about his sexy situationship (love of his life) giving him a QUARTER OF A MILLION DOLLARS in stolen yakuza blood money to buy him a maserati. his dream car.
he is but a simple gay man. i know damn well he had to sit on the roof and smoke for three hours while blasting complicated by avril lavigne on loop before he was chill enough to be seen
I'm in a little local cafe and the women behind the counter started griping to each other, "Oh Christ, Stephen's back again," "It's him, is it? I thought he'd stopped coming," "It's definitely him, look, it's bloody Stephen on a Thursday morning," "Do you want me to get rid of him or are you going to do it?" and so I was peering outside, trying to spot this nightmare customer, this pestilence of a person, this pox upon the cafe trade, and then one of the women from behind the counter ran outside, clapping two trays together loudly and yelling "GET OUT OF IT, STEPHEN!" and it turns out that Stephen is an absolutely gigantic fuck-off seagull who hangs around outside, menacing people for crumbs
Dragon age origins is like…. You’re nineteen, new in town, and it’s your second day at pizza hut. You don’t even know how to work the register yet and you just watched your manager get carted off by the paramedics. You have no contact info for him, his next of kin, or corporate. The only other employee is the guy who’s been here for two weeks and is a bit of a doofus, and neither of you really know what you’re supposed to do now. You both desperately need this job though, and the doofus at least has a drivers license and *kiiinda* knows how to use the oven so you just. Shrug, and start taking orders and making pizzas and praying to god that the bills are on autopay.
And weirdly enough you’re really good at this: making pizzas and dealing with shitty customers and breaking up fights in the parking lot and pretending to be Duncan’s cousin on the phone so the utility company doesn’t cut off the power. But running a store is a lot of work for two dumb kids, so slowly you start accumulating a bunch of competent weirdos to help out, like the nun who left her convent because god told her to help you make pizzas, and the elderly school teacher who just survived a mass shooting, and the guy the papa johns down the street hired to run you over. And really there’s no way any of this should be working as well as it is - you’re absolutely committing fraud of some kind here - but you’ve managed to dodge the landlord every time he’s stopped by, and the health inspector never shows up to tell you to stop letting your dog hang out behind the counter and you’re all still kinda looking at each other and asking ‘are we allowed to just do this?’ before shrugging again and continuing to make pizzas, until somehow, through a series of unlikely technicalities, your doofus coworker ends up on the ballot for governor.
And after like five months of this the regional manager wanders in out of nowhere and you’re sure he’s about to chew your ass out for this mess, but it turns out he’s pretty chill and honestly kind of impressed with how you managed to keep the place up and running all on your own. So now you’re all thinking ‘thank god, there’s someone here who actually knows how to run a Pizza Hut’ only for him to get hit by a car two days later on the night of the Super Bowl.
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.
There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber
English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.
Iceland does! They are the illhveli, literally “evil whales”, and they live to kill you. They love nothing more than killing and eating humans and sinking their ships. Their greatest enemy is the steypireydur (that’s blue whale to you), which is the greatest of the good whales and the protector of sailors.
All evil whales are, well, evil. So evil that if you speak their name at sea, they will hear it and home in on you. So instead you use all sorts of euphemisms for their names. Also if you try to cook their meat it literally disappears from the pot. That’s right, they’re so evil, you can’t even eat them.
They include such types as the hrosshvalur (horsewhale), with big eyes and a red mane and tail. This is probably the best known and most feared of the lot.
The raudkembingur (redcomb) is especially cruel and bloodthirsty even by illhveli standards. If you manage to escape it, it will die of frustration.
Good luck escaping the mushveli (mousewhale) though, it has legs! And will clamber onto the beach in pursuit!
Or what about death from above? The stökkull (jumper) leaps high into the air and pile-drives boats to pieces.
Meanwhile the skeljungur (shellwhale) sits in the path of boats and lets them get wrecked on its shelly hide…
… while the sverdhvalur (swordwhale) slices through boats with its dorsal fin.
The katthveli (catwhale) is relatively harmless though. It meows.
The same can’t be said of the lyngbakur (heatherback), a classic island fish that lets sailors get on its back and then dives, taking them to a watery grave.
The nauthveli (oxwhale) on the other hand specially targets cattle, attracting them into the sea with its bellow before tearing them apart.
How can you avoid all these murderous whales, like the taumafiskur (bridlefish) here? Any of a number of ways, including getting a steypireydur to help. There are substances, ranging from angelica to sheep dung and chopped fox testicles, that they find abhorrent. And you can distract them with loud noises and barrels.
For more, I assure you this link will answer all your questions.
it's pretty easy to imagine that you are one of some fractional holdout against AI while everyone else has fallen into some misguided love affair with LLMs, and I am so happy to tell you that this is not the case.
the US public is deeply suspicious of AI's impacts on jobs and education. Kamala Harris and the Republican party are both polling better than AI. 8/10 gen zers are concerned about AI's impact on education and only 18% are positive about this technology. there is widespread, bipartisan grassroots organizing against data centers. 97% of Britons are against Grok's "undressing" technology. the majority of Americans are concerned about AI in arenas like self-driving vehicles and healthcare. Even polling data from companies centered on AI shows significant concern around generative technology. OpenAI isn't meeting internal growth bench posts. On top of all that, Musk and Altman are currently both making fools of themselves in a very public trial.
I wrote this to ground myself because within the last month my workplace and gym have become overrun by AI graphics, then I logged out of Tumblr and immediately discovered that my Chemistry professor has switched to transparently AI generated exam feedback
just some stuff @ass-and-crafts - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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