Watch me go...Male, heterosexual, standard pronouns apply. Easygoing, with a moderate approach on liberal values. Raised by a flower child and a technophile. General tinkerer and shadetree mechanic at large. Purveyor of strange music, odd plants, fun games, and rip-snorting awesome stories. Quiet up until I open my damn yapper. Romantic, sentimental, with a tendency for being very intense. Definitely a Libra. Definitely a Monkey. You will either love me like family or hate my guts. A proud Tejano native - my family history makes most Republicans here look like they're the immigrants. A proud Navy veteran with a family history of military service - I was even born on a military base.
I know a lot of ppl hate this idea but I would absolutely love to have separate rooms w my spouse if I was married. like we can sleep in each others beds and probably would a lot of the time but also having your own space exclusively for your things which you can decorate however you want and don’t have to compromise on someone elses wants or worry about their mess and also can decompress there if u do want alone time would be amazing
This is something I actually explore when writing about a polygamous family unit. Everyone has their own room. And towards each other, each of their rooms is a strange mix of being both "open" and also sacrosanct. There are boundaries, and yet those boundaries are open.
You, despite being in a relationship with several other dearly beloved people, have a personal space that is entirely your own. You decorate it, you arrange it, you curate it. It's a form of artistic expression.
And once you have it just as you like, you invite your loved ones into your space. And you enjoy the things they have to say about it.
Or, in the times you need some time to yourself, you can close the door to your room, and everyone will automatically know that you may not like to be disturbed.
No one is obligated to spend the night alone unless they want to. In fact, there's even a bit of fun involved as the question, "So, my place or yours tonight?~" never stops being a thing for you.
And what's more is that there's practical aspects to this as well.
For example, if someone in the polycule gets sick, they can more easily isolate themselves.
Sometimes, you have someone who has a tendency to swing their arms and kick while they're asleep. Or someone has a terrible snore. Or they have a tendency to swipe the blankets from you.
can't stop thinking about that meme making fun of people who tell u to take a break when ur getting frustrated with a game. I saw some silksong streamer on youtube reference it being like "taking a break isn't gonna make the game design any better!!! it isn't gonna make the benches any closer together!!!!" and like....yeah dude! you're so close to getting it right now! you would like to be less frustrated, but there's nothing you can do about the game. what do you have control over? yourself. and how can you use that control to decrease your frustration.....???? come on you're ALMOST there
Getting a bit pedantic here but taking breathers from video games is important - even when it's going good and you're getting that killer dopamine rush. It's still a form of stress, even if you are having fun.
You don't have to do much. Just find a good spot to stop, get up, go to the bathroom, get something to drink, and maybe even get some food into you.
That's all you really need. Five or ten minutes every hour or so.
no matter how hard i try, nothing i write will ever be as fucked up as the stuff somebody who thinks they're creating a Wholesome AU with unexamined beliefs will make.
This is an excellent example of how people who are abused don't even realize what's happening to them. It's a "Can't see the forest for the trees" kind of thing.
Even worse is when others around you think it's normal. I can't tell you how dehumanizing it felt whenever I tried to relate to others what was going on in my life, only to be called out for it being nothing special, seeking attention, and trying to be a special snowflake.
I'll never stop complaining about stolen audio jacks, but wireless noise-cancelling earbuds/headphones are a game changer. (even cheap ones! you can get a surprisingly decent pair for under $40. the tech has improved so much recently.)
The world is LOUD, much louder than it was just a century ago (motorized vehicles, overhead music everywhere). I'm autistic and noise-cancelling tech is what allows me to exist in public spaces. For me it's been life-changing. I honestly think most people would be less anxious/stressed if they were able to turn down the sound around them.
I love the nicer ones that have special transparency modes.
Like the "Vocal" transparency mode on my Anker wireless earbuds. They will let through the sound frequencies most audible in human voices.
What this means that if you use them without music in a noisy environment, they help cut-out the interfering noise from the background so you can better understand what someone is saying.
"Nah, I'm not listening to anything right now but you. These are cutting out all the noise so I can only hear your voice."
I have fun imagining the paradigm shift that causes in a person when they realize that the thing they thought is exclusively used to shut out the world is actually actively assisting the user to better tune into what they're saying.
no listen to me vampires are only "cold" compared to living humans who have a pulse built-in heating unit. but it's not like they have built in refrigeration. the undead aren't actually "cold" per se at best they're room temperature. lukewarm vampires
Because this would make the assumption that vampires completely lack any sort of metabolic process. Because that's the real "heat engine" in just about every living creature on earth. About the only things that don't have metabolic processes are things like viruses. (Though I'm sure I'm forgetting about some real weird thing that exists in some incredibly inhospitable environment on Earth.)
ideal living situation is what i call the 'sitcom special' : having all your closest friends live in the same apartment building or neighborhood where you each have your own space but can wander in and out of eachothers homes at will, seemingly always welcome and never at bad times. and also all of you only have jobs when its important to the plot.
I had a great time living with a bunch of friends in a single large house in Richmond, Virginia. We all more-or-less had our own spaces, and we were always hanging out or making meals together (Fizban's Fireball Chili in bread bowls and gobs of sour cream and cheese for the goddamned motherfucking epic win), inviting each other into our spaces to see this neat thing one of us found, and even getting high as a fucking kite.
We were all artsy types of one stripe or another. One of them even created a completely from-scratch character for MUGEN, with all his own animations and voice work. Dude was like a human anime character and major furry. We didn't care, he was always cracking us up with his zany zoominess.
One of the more entertaining happenings for us was when one of our roomies discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer and became an absolutely hopeless Spike-Buffy shipper. (Disclaimer: this was LONG before Jos Whedon's public image got imploded.)
And then there was just a general, delightful weirdness in the area we lived - a part a Richmond known as Carrytown or "The Fan" for how the roads splayed outward like a paper fan.
Old veterans that hot-rodded their mobility chairs and would go zooming down the street at 30mph.
A guy we called Rasta-Claws because he rocked out an awesome Rasta aesthetic along with some incredibly gnarly finger-claw jewelry.
Random witches, one of whom once stopped me and told me with the most dead-serious look in her eyes that I had ancestors following me around.
The Byrd Theater with its French Theater House aesthetic, and the Almighty Wurlitzer Console that would rise up out of the orchestra pit and remotely played a piano and a harp in alcoves that flanked the stage. We got to see Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail there - before the movie started, someone in the audience stood up and belted out the entire "I'm a Lumber Jack and I'm Okay" song, which was a fucking hoot.
World of Mirth, the toy store that had all kinds of weird, funky, and even naughty toys, guaranteed to have something that will be a perfect little gift for a friend.
For the Love of Chocolate - a candy store that had rare and hard to find candies alongside the more usual stuff. They even had Kinder Eggs - the real ones from Germany before they were banned here in the USA because too many parents are stupid and let their kids choke on the toys inside the chocolate eggs.
The Galaxy Diner with its art deco flying saucer diner theme. I will never forget that Toxic Waste Burger of theirs - an all-beef patty, chili, pineapple rings (trust me, IT WORKED), battered and fried onion rings, and fried cheese patty, all forming into a glorious artery-clogging mess. (Sadly, it's no longer available on their menu).
It was the most colorful time of my life and I will never forget it.
i think we need to bring back calling people internet famous instead of calling them influencers like there needs to be something borderline derogatory injected back into it
Unfortunately unintentional homoeroticism often beats out intentional lgbtq romance because it’s allowed to be more toxic because they don’t have annoying bitches yapping in their ear that it’s bad lgbt rep
It was a very strange experience. I was living in Bremerton, Washington at the time, and it was something like a 5.5 or a 6 on the Richter scale at the epicenter, some thirty or forty miles away.
At first, it sounded like someone had started up a huge diesel engine outside - like the kind on a bulldozer. Then I felt the vibrations, but I thought again it was just some heavy equipment outside. Which was weird because it was well-past sundown.
Then the vibration intensified and that was when I knew it was an earthquake. Fortunately, it wasn't bad because we were so far out from the epicenter. But it did make a lot of people panic a bit.
As for how it felt? Well, like I said, sound and vibration at first like heavy equipment with a big diesel engine. That steadily intensified until the floor under my feet was starting to jump and shudder. It lasted for only a few seconds before it began to taper off.
The sound itself was strange because it literally comes from everywhere at once, and how it sounds depends on the material that is vibrating.
We’ve had access to small-scale radio antennas that only transmit over a small area for a long time now (it’s the technology that makes drive-in movies work, after all). And yet it’s SO underutilized in themed spaces!! Imagine if Main Street USA in Disneyland had its own old-timey radio station that you could only tune into in the park! Imagine if Tomorrowland had its own station of like, goofy Jetsons future music where it’s all just doo-wop songs with space-themed lyrics? They could have little skits and in-universe interstitials like GTA! The transmitters are cheap enough that a hobbyist could reasonably buy them, too— imagine it at one of those weird large-scale LARP events!
you’d need permits to use the frequencies in question and radio frequency spectrum is insanely expensive. I mean there are license free bands but the receiver would need to tune to those, if you want the FM broadcast band that’s gonna cost you a lot. idk how drive in movies did it.
Ya'll do know that those posts in between the parking spaces actually used to have corded speakers that hung off of them, right?
Like, you'd pull in, roll down your window, reach out and unhook the speaker from it's stand, bring it in your car, then raised the window and hang the speaker on the top-edge of the window.
They eventually went out because paying for that radio frequency was less expensive than repairing/replacing speakers that people drove off with - either by mistake or on purpose. These speakers were tanky things so they wouldn't break if dropped by mistake. And car stereo tech had improved to the point where the car's sound system was vastly better than the corded speakers.
"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
"Evil is boring. Right? I kinda believe in the banality and mundaneness of evil. Evil is just selfish impulses, which at the end of the day are really easy to understand. It’s easy to understand why people do bad things. It’s like “yeah, ok, you’re selfish and scared and cruel, I get it”. Being good is complex and beautiful and hard." - Brennan Lee Mulligan
Sorry that I gotta be a combo breaker here, but I feel like sharing my own personal experiences with cruelty rather than simply quote someone else on that matter.
Trigger warnings for below the cut: child abuse, animal abuse, and psychological abuse.
My situation growing up was Cinderella-like. I had a stepfather who could not really accept me as a son, and let me tell you the double-standards were for real.
How bad?
"Fishy needed a bath and a haircut."
No. That's not some weird code or some kind of crazy exaggeration. That was the excuse that my younger half-brother gave when he killed my pet beta (aka Siamese Fighting Fish). He thought of those long, flowing fins as "hair" and literally decided they needed the good old shave and a haircut.
And it happened three times.
What did they get? They got a scolding.
What did I get? I lost the "privilege" to own any sort of pet at all.
Oh, sure, I could have had a lock for my room. That would have kept them out of my room and unable to harm any pet fish I had. That would be the sensible thing to do, right?
Well, I wasn't allowed that because if I had a lock, then that meant I could hide things from my stepfather.
Please, just sit there and let this sink in. Instead of actually disciplining his son (despite showing signs of behavior that could be charitably called "psychopathic" in nature) and taking preventive measures like putting a lock on my door, it was more important to him that I had absolutely no way to hide something from him. It didn't matter what it was, just the idea that I could possibly hide anything at all was utterly anathema to him. Thus, the solution was that I just shouldn't have anything nice like a pet fish.
And all the while I was the one who was branded for being weird, out of control, and maladjusted.
My childhood was a living hell were I had absolutely no rights whatsoever. My stepfather didn't want a son, he wanted an appliance - something that could be programmed to follow his directives faultlessly, and trouble him for nothing more but the most basic needs and necessities. Something that would cause him no embarrassment whatsoever by being a literal Stepford Smiler, and a mockery of what it means to be alive.
I'm upset about it, sure, but I don't really hold any ire towards him because he was, as strange as it sounds, ignorant of the real harm he was doing.
How do I know?
Because his own father did even worse to him and his brothers. He raised them in the most horrifyingly toxic perversion of patriarchy you can imagine.
While he dined on steak and potatoes, they got hotdogs wrapped in slices of bread. If they took a road trip, they did not stop for anything except gas. Food for the trip was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and water, which can be made and distributed by the mother while he drove. If they needed a bathroom break, they had to hold it until they had to stop for gas again. And dealing with them was their mother's job, and hers alone. If there were any issues he had to personally deal with? It meant that all of them were brutally punished.
The only times he voluntarily interacted with them was mainly to teach him what he considered men's matters: how to camp, hunt, fish, and lay with a woman.
Even worse was that he was one of those types who believed that the Communists would one day invade the USA, so he was actively teaching his sons to fulfill specific roles for when the family hunkered down. My stepdad's younger brother was supposed to be The Builder and The Store Keeper. His older brother was supposed to be The Charming Face and The Negotiator. And the role he intended for my stepdad? He was supposed to be The Assassin and The Stone-Cold Killer.
That does things to a person when they're raised like that, and it clearly explains why my stepfather thought that what he was doing to me was not only justifiable, but also perfectly fine. He never thought of it as being cruel or abusive. To him, I was wrong, and I needed to be corrected. Any suffering on my part was, to him, just a natural consequence of going against his directives.
To me, this is the face of true evil. Where cruelty is something that is not just normalized, but even expected. Society itself deemed my treatment as being tolerable because I was a "difficult child".
Oh the other hand, where you have people who actively try to be cruel? Oh, they're nasty people alright. But they're also incredibly pathetic.
Whether it to feel a sensation of having power over someone, or playing some terrible game of "Who can be the most heinous without getting caught" among their friends, it's all the same.
It's evil, yes. But just plain pathetic. Because not only are you apparently so lacking in things to do that you have to use cruelty as a pastime, but also that you have to make a game out of it to make it interesting to you and your friends.
To me, these people are little more than pretenders.
Cruelty is something I'm very familiar with. And let me tell you, it is so fantastically easy to be cruel that often you wind up doing it without even thinking of it.
But I will admit, it's hard to tell which is worse:
The ones who are cruel without realizing it because that's how it's supposed to be?
Or the ones who know it but do it anyhow just for fun?
Either way? To me, you're nothing special if that's your way.
if I wrote a dystopian novel where the corrupt evil megacorporation that controls society has a fucking smirk for a logo, my editor would tell me to use a less heavy-handed metaphor
I love this because if I were to write a literary novel in the Western cannon that described the image of an apple with a chunk bitten off, any high school English student would tell you it is a Bible reference meant to represent the source of all evil and downfall of humanity and YET
Gotta throw out some info about the Apple logo because I don't like misinformation, and that talk about Eve's Apple can be misconstrued as saying, "The Apple logo is Eve's Apple, so the company must be evil."
Thing is, that's supposed to be Newton's Apple.
In fact, the original "logo" for Apple Computers was a very detailed portrait of Sir Isaac Newton scribbling notes while sitting under a tree.
A tree with a single apple hanging directly over his head.
Of course, this was just a bit too much extra for a company logo, so they hired someone to do a new logo for Apple. What they came up with was something much simpler - a rainbow-colored apple.
But why the bite?
Simple. They thought that without the bite taken out of it, it might look like a cherry to someone not paying close attention. Granted, you could take a "bite" out of a cherry, too, but generally we just pop the whole thing into our mouths and spit out the pit.
Just wanted to put that out there.
Eighty Thousand Feet and Climbing @blackaeronaut - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
