Blergh

Randomness at it's epitome

[throwbackblr]

[animentality]

[coffee-mage-sans-caffeine]

Seriously though, do most Americans not know that the reason you can mock the shit out of public officials without getting charged for libel is Hustler Magazine? No really. In 1983, Hustler Magazine ran a fake ad that Jerry Falwell (yes, that Jerry Falwell) went to bone-town with his own mother in a dirty outhouse. This was in response to Falwell's Moral Majority, a puritanical organization that tried to put prayer in public schools, ban abortion, ban homosexual acts, ban any 'anti-family' news outlet or magazine, and convert Jews to Christianity. For obvious reasons, Jerry Falwell's Moral Panic PAC (not the actual name it was definitely called the Moral Majority and NEVER represented the majority of Americans) represented a threat to Hustler and its ilk. The ad itself was a parody of a Campari ad that was running at the time, asking people to describe their 'first time'. The original would be a bit risqué and end with people revealing they were talking about Campari, an alcoholic drink, not sex.

In the ad, there is a fake interview wherein Jerry Falwell supposedly confesses to banging his mom in a fly-ridden outhouse while drunk on a Campari based cocktail called a "Fire and Brimstone" after chasing a goat out of the outhouse. The ad concludes with fake Jerry Falwell saying he's always drunk when he preaches and he calls his teachings bullshit. At the very bottom of the ad, in very fine print (too fine to be legible on the image I found of the ad) it tells the reader that this is a parody and should not be taken seriously. Well, Falwell was pissed and took Hustler (and its editor Larry Flynt) to court for libel. From 1986-1988, different courts said yes it was libel or no it wasn't libel until, in 1988, the case made it to the Supreme Court. In an 8-0 ruling, the Supreme Court said 'Yeah, being accused of incest in a parody ad probably hurt Falwell's feelings, but the First Amendment protects free speech that is critical of public officials and public figures.' Without Hustler Magazine writing a distasteful porn parody about a homophobic, anti-woman, anti-semitic man who wanted forced government-sanctioned Christianity to be the state religion of the United States, your free speech wouldn't be protected. Pornographers aren't 'the devil' but our friend John Waters up there is correct. Pornographers protect our rights. Whether you agree with porn or not, if you live in the United States, you ought to thank a pornographer for your free speech and the best way to thank a pornographer is by rallying behind pornographers' rights to exist and distribute porn. So next time someone on any platform comes for the pornographers, remember that you owe the pornographers for your right to mock politicians and other public figures. Thank pornographers and back them up.

[red-enby]

have my favorite one i’ve made

[prokopetz]

Frankly, the weirdest thing about Columbo from the perspective of modern network television isn't the narrative structure – it's the episode length. I'm checking Wikipedia right now to make sure I'm remembering this correctly, and apparently episodes of Columbo range from 73 to 98 minutes in length. Like, the shortest episodes of Columbo are on par with the longest episodes of Game of Thrones. The minimum length to be classified as a "feature film" is 80 minutes, so 50% of the episodes are technically movies. Including commercial breaks for broadcast television, this show would have originally aired in a two-hour timeslot. When folks remark on how weird it is that Columbo himself often doesn't even show up until the second act, you need to understand that what we're talking about is a show where the title character is often first strolling on screen thirty-five minutes in.

[moss-sprout]

I'm starting a collection

[speedlimit15]

why didn’t gandalf just carry the ring to mordor himself with these tongs

[speedlimit15]

like i’m picturing him being really careful and looking at it and carrying it exactly like this while walking or riding through the woods and across rivers and up mountains and through valleys and he doesn’t drop it even once except at the very end where he tidily drops it into the volcano. frodo sam and the crew and even gollum wholly undisturbed. sauron can’t find him bc of the meditative aura surrounding him which is generated by his immense focus on not dropping it

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

World's most tense egg and spoon race

[green-great-dragon]

this somehow became the funniest thing on earth in my head and I had to draw it so

[keatxu]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[omikronsoul]

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

[justletmeremember]

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

[aprilcodescrap]

[oddjoblin]

Remember that the entire reason the internet forced you to fill in Captchas for the past 14 years is because they were using your answers to train AI in image and text recognition. Of course the AI can read the text because the entire human race has been unable to use the internet without being forced to train it for over a decade. The fact that they are still trying to keep up the facade so they can keep charging for their captcha services is laughable since they have made the service useless by using it this way.

[hellsite-yano]

@daxite are aware of what exactly?

This isn't "conspiracy", this is all very easily verifiable information and has been for at least half a decade

[frottinq]

not to be that bitch, but the original captcha project was used to train computers to read badly printed words in newspapers and books that were being digitized. this changed in like 2014, about 5 years after captcha was bought by google

[inthefallofasparrow]

Bill and Ben | Tom Cardy

[drsarcasticraspberry]

punchlines that take me out like a fucking sniper

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Okay so as you all know I’m extremely cool and clever and also a published scientist, so let me tell you about my latest research.

In the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the continent of Hyrule is one of the biggest open-world maps ever created, even beating games like Skyrim and the Witcher. But, HOW BIG?

Obvs it’s very hard to get a precise size because the in-game map does not have a scale bar (terrible map skills from that cartographer). HOWEVER, if you climb the Ridgeland Tower there’s a guy up there who is a weeaboo for the Rito, who begs you to glide for him in the name of “research” (what a fucking dweeb am I right?) If you do so, he tells you how many metres you’ve flown before landing. This includes if you simply step off the tower and plummet to the ground in a straight line, and happily for my in-game ankles, the tower is surrounded by water to cushion the many landings I made to bring you this information.

Ten drops gave me a mean average height for the tower at 63.83, median 64.2, so I’m taking it as 64 for ease of Maffs.

For a flight from the tower, I picked a strip of land on the same contour line as the tower base and then flew along that. There was a slightly higher standard deviation in twelve flights because sometimes Link would step nicely over the edge and start gliding and other times he would yeet himself bodily into the sky and then start, and one time gave me an outlier because I got zapped by an electric Wizzrobe that saw me. But over all, flying the same line and hitting pretty much the same landing spot, I got an average of 250.1 metres. I took this as 250, again for ease of Maffs.

Pythagoras’ theorem hit then, so I worked out that the distance from the base of the tower to the landing spot was 242 m. Putting that into Adobe Dreamworks, I could then translate that per pixel of the map I was working with (2.42 metres per pixel.) From there, that allowed me to calculate the area of Hyrule’s land mass, roughly, in pixels and then convert it back, so having done that GUESS WHAT FOLKS

Hyrule is 25,454 km2, or 15,816 sq mi.

Wales, by contrast, is 20,735 km2, or 12,884 sq mil.

So the continent of Hyrule is, it seems, bigger than my entire country to the tune of about one and a quarter times the size.

Thank you all for listening, I will now take questions.

[earlgraytay]

Wow, this is super cool!

What’s the biggest area of Hyrule in terms of pixels? (Like, counting “places the player can’t reach for whatever reason”).

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hmm, depends how you define “area”. The majority of the continent is a single landmass, so technically “everything that isn’t an island” counts? But, I’m assuming you’re after something a bit more specific.

My latest research is focusing on mapping Hyrule’s weather systems, though, which has yielded some PRETTY INTERESTING RESULTS already, and that certainly falls into areas - the largest of which covers central Hyrule (i.e. Hyrule Field and Ridgeland, the Great Plateau, Lake Hylia and the Faron Grasslands). I attach the following figure for your consideration.

Rainfall, sunlight hours and cloudiness are identical across this region, although temperature varies. I shall publish these very important results soon. Thank you for your question.

[commiemartyrshighschool]

Does this mean that Hylians have a UK level grasp of distance? That Link would just die of boredom on a 6 hour car trip?

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I would posit that they have something closer to a Wales level grasp of distance specifically, which probably also explains why they have perfectly easy trade routes on foot or donkey but every village Cannot Fathom actually walking over the mountain to the next one. If I am correct with this hypothesis, a six-hour car journey would be seen as not an activity for boredom, but an Undriveable Distance that one would have to tearfully kiss their relatives goodbye for in the manner of a colonist heading out to Mars.

Thank you for your question.

[aromancy]

So wait, there’s five nations all occupying a single landmass just a little bigger than Wales?

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Aha, well, we’re veering into sociology/anthropology a little here but I would argue that there are, in fact, seven:

Hylians

Gerudo

Gorons

Zora

Sheikah/Yiga

Koroks

Lizalfos

And I KNOW, I can hear people recoiling at that last one, but hear me out

Alone of all monster-classified species, Lizalfos have mastered metallurgy. Their weaponry (shields, boomerangs and bows) are all metal-reinforced; and not just any metal, but steel. Even if we assume they’re just nicking the steel off some Gorons, they’re still then reshaping it into their own designs. And they make good stuff! They’re gifted metal workers and smiths. Very impressive. This suggests a level of sapience we don’t see elsewhere - moblins and bokoblins both use bone to reinforce wood weapons, which puts them on par with/a little smarter than crows.

In the Zora monuments we’re given a historical account of a battle between the Zora and the Lizalfos. There is repeated reference to a Lizalfos general. For them to have a general, they have pretty complex military structures, plus the ability to assign roles. Maybe it’s just the Zora word? But the account also suggests more sapient behaviour than just “angry lizard”. It all reads like advanced warfare, not just a scavenging party.

And I know, I know, they’re listed as monsters in the compendium. But firstly, so are Yiga warriors including Master Kohga, a man who has a full conversation with Link, and secondly, the compendium was compiled by the Sheikah and bias automation is a thing.

Also I guess there’s a good argument for separating Sheikah and Yiga into two separate nations, if not races, so actually all in all there’s eight. All in a land a little bigger than Wales.

[aromancy]

You’re really gonna do my bois the Rito like that, huh

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

WHOOPS LOL absolutely right, and I should have double checked before posting. Thank you for catching this egregious error in peer review.

A correction from the author: there are eight, possibly nine nations.

[songbird-and-her-fos]

If we count Hyrule Warriors as canon, it is fair to say that Lizalfos are a subspecies of dragons, given that in HW, they are being led by Volga, who is a dragon capable of turning into a human, and refers to them as “his people”. So the Lizalfos general might have been a similar type of being, if not a direct descendant of Volga or even Volga himself (we don’t know how long someone like Volga would live, after all)

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

EXCELLENT point! I mean, Lizalfos are, on the whole, a semi aquatic race, and I think it’s possibly worth pointing out that the other aquatic race - the Zora - have an interesting quirk whereby royal males keep growing, eventually reaching a good twenty times the size of the rest of the species. Additionally, Koroks, Twili, Deku and Gorons all display almost no polymorphism outside of the Royal lines.

So arguably, could Volga be a Lizalfos Prince? It seems to fit. Bigger, more physically developed as a hominid, possessing stronger magical powers…

[alternatefuturesao3]

I don’t even play Zeldorb and I need OP to marry me immediately

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Our wedding shall be held in an area whose weather I have mapped and presided over by a retired fish man

[littlescratches]

Re-reading this post and especially the bit about Zora royal males growing uncharacteristically large, I realized something… do we ever see a royal female reach the same age we meet their kings at? Has there ever been a reigning Zora queen in any of the games?

In the games I played you only ever see juvenile princesses.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Yes! Sort of. Twilight Princess - the Zora Queen Rutela was executed in front of her people by Zant to break their spirits, so we don’t meet her in person. But her ghost comes and leads you to the Zora helm after you save her son, and her ghost is pretty huge relative to you

So it seems it is just a feature of leadership among Zora. Monarchy invokes gigantism

[lanayru-bay]

I originally had this in the tags, but I’ll go ahead and mention it here, actually: I’m curious to what degree Lynels have sapience.

They, too, have rather impressive weapons, and they generally seem more skilled than other monsters. They’re fearsome, not just because of strength, but because of their intelligence.

Lynels just fascinate me in general, honestly, in the ways they compare to Ganon’s other monsters, at least in Breath of the Wild.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Yes, I’d forgotten about Lynels when I wrote the above post. But, I stand by the original assertion, I think. Intelligence wise, they’re about on a par with Lizalfos? Other than the evidence of their metal working (which is unspecified, but does not seem to be steel), they display no sapience at all beyond any other monster species, not even to build their own equivalent of the monster tree houses you see about Hyrule - but, unlike Lizalfos, they’re big angry centaurs and therefore human-looking, and that does trick human brains into thinking there’s more sapience than there is.

And the other difference is that they’re a solitary species. We never see them tolerating the presence of other monsters, much less others of their own kind (given certain revelations about the origins of monsters in TotK, I suspect they don’t sexually reproduce, so mate selection and tolerance is not necessary). So, as such, they don’t come close to the definition of ‘nation’.

Whereas Lizalfos appear to be super social, often forming little camps with Bokoblins and that as well as other Lizalfos, and of course they sometimes even build structures. Plus, that reference to Lizalfos generals, and of course the apocryphal presence of Volga…

TL;DR, they’re clever but not a nation.

[laineysbucketlist]

I think Lynels are definitely smarter than Lizalfos, because with the Lizalfos Mask you can fool Lizalfos into thinking you are one of them so long as you don’t attack, but the Lynel Mask only fools Lynels for a short period before they catch on and attack. Furthermore, they have magical capabilities greater than most of the rest of BotW’s enemies, possessing the ability to teleport as well as the ability to teleport their arrows after shooting them.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Well, stronger magic doesn’t mean anything at all, really - it’s a magical world, and magic is inherent to them as creatures. Nothing at all suggests magic has to be linked to intelligence. All it means is that they’re inherently more powerful.

And I would argue that the mask evidence is just as easily explained by my assessment - they’re a solitary species. It may well be that they’re so solitary and intolerant that, although they can be temporarily curious about the weirdly small two-legged Lynel you represent, their natural territoriality then steps in and they decide that you should probably be a thin red paste now, whatever the fuck you are; by contrast, the super social Lizalfos are happy to pal around with any monsters at all, and so may not think you’re a monster but also not especially care. Either way, it’s not solid enough evidence to say they’re any cleverer.

As such the true answer is clear: research funding to try to capture a Lynel and see if it passes the mirror test

[thatdamnokie]

[evilscientist3]

Target audience

[belladonnaprice-deactivated2025]

[taffybuns]

skyfish go!!!!!!!!!!!

[brink182-deactivated20120906]

Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from—things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the processed frozen chicken in the stores is made from it. Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve—bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this. There’s more: because it’s crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color. But, hey, at least it tastes good, right? High five, America!

[sensorydeprivationprincess]

oh my god

[lord-smaug-the-impenetrable-dea]

bitch that’s the tubby custard machine

[heritageposts]

date of origin: 2012

[breathdeepseekpeace]

A classic

[caldraws]

this just makes me wanna get some nuggets from mcdonalds for some reason

[mannequia]

the fact op thought they could even get away with that blatant misinformation in the first place when the graphic they used was the fucking Tubby Custard machine amuses me like.

Even if you didn’t know what Teletubbies was that thing does not at all look like something you’d find in a factory, it’s colorful and colors cost extra.

[xsix8990-deactivated20260423]

that’s because OP’s post is a joke

I feel weird that I’m been here long enough to remember the original context–OP is mocking this post:

the picture clearly looks like some sort of strawberry ice cream, so OP did a copypasta of the original text and replaced with picture with something even funnier.

Both posts went around a lot, but it’s funny that the second, mocking post is now being reposted like OP is some kind of idiot instead of a comedic genius

[xsix8990-deactivated20260423]

the original post is actually still here: https://early-onset-of-night-blog.tumblr.com/post/1206666159/say-hello-to-mechanically-separated-chicken-its and apparently the original OP is a satire blog, anyway. So nobody was serious in the whole exchange

Early Onset of Night

Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from—things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the

[raven-reconciling]

Getting new context for this ancient meme in the year of our lord 2021 is giving me whiplash.

[shower-raccoon]

they removed the fucking tubby custard machine

[elisamaza]

Pizza delivery drivers of Reddit, what are some of the craziest reasons people have ended up on the “no delivery list”?

gameryamen

I worked for a pizza place that was near a very large software company. Deliveries to the neighborhoods or offices where all the tech workers lived was usually pretty awesome because they'd tip rather well. But there was one apartment that started to become a concern for us drivers. The man ordering was always polite, always paid, always tipped $4, and he would have been a perfect customer. He'd order breadsticks and a salad twice a week, and sometimes he'd include a bottle of root beer. Except when he opened his door, you could see an alarming amount of our breadsticks boxes stacked everywhere inside. Not like a few on the counter and a couple by the trash, stacks and stacks of them. Even worse, it was only our boxes in there. He wasn't just ordering from us often, we were the only place he was getting food outside of work. Now, I've worked in some of those tech offices myself, I know that there's enough decent food options just hanging out in the break rooms that this guy was probably not malnourished, but the way his living space was a shrine of greasy cardboard was a clear sign that this guy didn't have a healthy relationship with our food. Our manager was a really cool dude though, and he heard the drivers joking about the boxes and asked a couple of us "Is this like a messy guy or a guy who needs help?" We agreed it was probably the latter. So on his day off, the manager went to the guys apartment with an envelope that had gift cards for several other restaurants that delivered in that area and chatted with him. Manager found out that the guy was an immigrant on a Visa who was struggling to find American food he liked, and too socially awkward to ask anyone. So he talked with him through a few menus and helped him with some recommendations. Then he helped the guy load all the old boxes into his truck to take to the dump, in exchange for a promise not to order from us more than once a week. For a little while, the manager had a note on the calendar showing the last time the guy had ordered, and a couple times he had to hold his ground and refuse the guy's order. But after that chat, I never saw the stacks of boxes again, and the guy would boast about the different meals he'd had.

what the fuck dude, this is so sweet.

[memequeen-official]

[difty-dift]

[genericalosers]

[lizbukchoy]

[sophisticatedoyster]

[glorious-spoon]

one of the most challenging skills i've had to learn as an adult is the art of figuring out whether i'm proportionally annoyed with someone or just tired and overstimulated and looking for reasons to be pissed off

[glorious-spoon]

congratulations to the only post i've ever had breach 100k notes without any real discourse or fighting, just a lot of people wearily going, oh, god, same

[prismatic-bell]

This, but with the addition of “or are my ovaries planning a mutiny?” because PMS is REAL and good lord.