Stumbling Mostly Upwards

Here, look at some stuff I like!  They/them. 

[evergreen-femme]

had to share this

[wizardshark]

In every way this is set up to be a joke like any other short video, it even uses the trope of main character in a wig to represent their mom, but it isn't funny at all. It's just sweet and nice

[wordfather]

i am not immune to a well choreographed fight scene with a fun song in the background

[thestuffedalligator]

I used to think “soupçon” was a French word for crouton and I used it as the French word for crouton for a long time and nobody stopped me.

Soupçon actually means “suspicion” and the reason nobody called me out on this is because I would use the word to imply the idea of something sprinkled on top of something else ala croutons. If someone said, “A soupçon of homoeroticism,” I thought it meant “Someone sprinkled homoeroticism on this story like croutons on a delightful Caesar salad.”

I wrote multiple essays that used soupçon as a noun with this translation in mind and I got a degree and this haunts me.

There’s no point to this post, it’s just very important to me that you know that I can be quite stupid

[finnglas]

...OP I thought it meant like a soup ladle. Like a spoonful. I used it similarly. I was a professional editor for fiction presses for years. We are shaking hands about this.

[ariaste]

op ur fine you used it fine

[stormsbourne]

usually when you have a stomach bug your body is like yes sir we'll get this punk out of here, 48 hours tops. then you get a cold and your body is like I dunno ... between a few hours and eleven months ... maybe a week minimum .... you gotta understand we're short staffed

[tibli]

tbf to the body, stomach bugs are easier to flush out since they are already in The System That Flushes Things Out From The Body, and that includes BOTH ends.

with a cold you gotta wait for the macrophages in your blood to start Eating Everything, and they are. not big. it takes them a while. please be more considerate of your macrophages in the future, theyre doing their best

[marlinspirkhall]

I've got to find myself more macrophage

[acesexualspock]

Now Hiring: macrophages

[daughter-of-sapph0]

immunesystem.com/careers/macrophage

[drawballa]

Sleepy boys 💤

[waitafrikk]

i hate when a book describes a pause as pregnant. get your dick out of the pause

[lunyselene]

terry pratchett is the only person who actually knew how to use a pregnant pause

[hidefdoritos]

BTW today I met a person who's at least 50, uses they/it pronouns, and named themself Wyvern. It looks like if Santa was a biker and it plays D&D at the local library. Just a reminder that you can do whatever you want, forever.

[kedreeva]

I offered to come check on my friend's animals while she's away for the long weekend

She thinks I'm joking

But I'm ready

[eunyisadoran]

Wait. Are there 200, but to be numbered 1-250? Did I read those tags right? 😲

[kedreeva]

Yes there are actually 202 of them, the company sent 2 extra in the package, and I will be numbering them on the bottom with sharpie marker 1-250. This will ensure even if she manages to find all 202, she will never truly stop feeling like there might be a tiny duck somewhere unknown in the house. Lurking. Waiting to appear at the strangest time.

[talesfromtreatment]

#sometimes you must be gently evil to your friends#so they know you love them enough

very very important

[ifririt]

hey op i don't think those are frogs like you said

[armayes]

they're right those arent frogs op.

[kedreeva]

I meant to prank my friend by hiding hundreds of small ducks after saying I would hide small frogs, but it turns out due to some quirk of only 3 people on the entire Internet knowing what a prank is, it seems I have pranked hundreds of other people by saying I would put 100 small frogs in my friends house, when in fact the prank was that it was 202 small ducks.

[kedreeva]

an update. it has been over 4 months and they are still finding ducks

[kedreeva]

1 year and 7 months later:

[kedreeva]

#imagine the dread she felt when she found the first duck and realized op wasn't joking (via @robyn-goodfellowe)

The key to a good prank, imo, is that the person you're pranking should not feel bad. They should feel delight. My friend has 2 kids. She walked in the door from her vacation, and instead of having two cranky children to deal with as soon as she got home on top of everything else, she got two children excited to run around finding small ducks. My friend knows me well enough to know that when I say weird things there's always a chance I'm not joking, and she would have said no (and been respected) if she didn't want this. The prank was never that I was hiding the toys, just which toys they were, and how many would be hidden.

[wheeloffortune-design]

my publisher: Good morning! Huh did you advertise for the pre-sale yesterday? Because we launched twelve hours ago and we already made sales!

me: yeah, i posted on tumblr

publisher: .........tumblr?

me: that's where the gays are.

(link to Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a sapphic western)

[wheeloffortune-design]

update

publisher: And what is your marketing strategy on... tumblr?

me: idk, i shitpost at 2am?

publisher: .....and it works?

me: depends on what the gays find funny at that point in time.

publisher: Could I have a link to your tumblr?

me: .......absolutely not.

(link to Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a sapphic western where 50 year old women kiss and murder)

[wheeloffortune-design]

update!

publisher: I've been looking into tumblr, have you thought of using Blaze to promote your book?

me: NO

publisher: But it seems like an efficient way to get this in front of more eyes-

me: people on tumblr hate Blaze.

publisher: There is no algorithm and you can't pay to promote a post? I don't understand how anyone advertises anything on tumblr.

me: That's the best part. They don't. They can't.

(trying to make him understand that we do not control the attention. We just have to show something shiny and gay enough and if people are interested, they'll reblog.)

(Mrs. Victoria buys a brothel, a deconstruction of the colonialist cowboy mythos dressed up as a sapphic romance.)

[ariaste]

Yeah, that's the key: You can tell people about your book. You cannot *advertise* your book to them. You can politely ask people to signal boost to support an author writing queer books, or to recommend it to their friends. You *CANNOT* advertise to them.

It's kind of like the difference between a company with dozens of locations versus a farmer's market. Tumblr is the farmer's market. People here *do* want to buy things, but they often want to buy things in a way that directly supports the people who made them, and they want those products to align with their values and ethics, and they want the person behind the folding table to be a familiar face who is actually a genuine part of the community, not some slick outsider who doesn't give a shit about them.

[cryptic-forge]

made a little wind-up porcelain dragon.

the patterns are paper napkin decoupage again, and this time i took some progress pictures, so a That is incoming, in response to a bunch of asks i got months ago.

[apricops]

the partition of the Mongol empire sounds like the background of a JRPG. “Long ago there was this guy who ruled the whole world and then divided it up into four parts: the Cold Slavic Forest realm, the Hot Persian Desert realm, the Vast Steppe and Mountain Pass realm, and the China realm” oh let me guess, then he gave each realm a magic crystal that controls the elements

[max1461]

Also he named them shit like "The Golden Horde". You can't leave that detail out.

[saphronethaleph]

So funny story about that magic crystal thing...

The use of the jadachin* continued long after the Mongols ceased to be primarily shamanistic in faith. Boyle notes that in the late Yuan or Northern Yuan period, the Mongols (who were Buddhist at this time) used them against the Ming. In the Islamic world, jadachin appeared at the Battle of the Mire (1365), in which the Amir Timur (1335–1405) was defeated by the Chaghatayids of Moghulistan. Abu Sa’id, a Timurid, employed jadachin in 1451, not in battle put to produce rain in a desolate area.62 Other evidence suggests that the use of the jada stones became prevalent throughout Central Eurasia after the Mongol Empire, demonstrating once again the cross-cultural importance of the Mongol Empire. Molnar notes that while weather magic appears to be a global phenomenon, the use of weather stones as a “meteorological weapon” appears to be a particularly Inner Asian phenomenon. Furthermore, while there are no pre-thirteenth-century examples of the Mongols using weather stones, the Mongols’ use of bezoars as weather stones spread throughout the empire thereafter.

Lee, Wayne E.. Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition (p. 86). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.

*jadchin - a bezoar used as a "weather stone" to cause inclement weather

So yeah, they actually did have magical crystals that controlled the weather, at least if you asked them about it...

[apricops]

I actually had no prior knowledge of jadachin but I'm glad to know I give off the vibe of 'well of COURSE he already knew about 13th century central asian weather magic'

[inbabylontheywept]

my roommates car is named barff. it was originally bought from a dealership called garff, but then she tinkered with the g on the license plate thing so it looks like a b and now the car is just called barff.

my wife once asked our roomate where she was parked in a group chat. but she messed up the word "parked" and instead spelled it as "garked". and then me and my roommate just started referring to parking as garking because its just really fun to give my wife shit. its just part of the professional little brother playbook.

but also, at some point it stopped being ironic and we just started calling parking garking.

then today me and my wife were looking out the window and we saw our roommate struggling to do a three point turn into a parking space. and as fun as it is to give my wife shit its also really fun to give our roommate shit. so we ran outside and we ran around her car while chanting GARK THE BARFF. GARK THE BARFF. GARK THE BARFF. and then she did, eventually, gark the barff. theres no moral to this its just a surreal part of my life that i really enjoy. maybe tease people more? find your barff and gark it and never ever stop?

[inbabylontheywept]

@bashircore downloading "getting spoofy on the bloot" to my vernacular.

[thequeeninyellowlace]

An underappreciated part of this story is wheee OP implies that he is his wife’s little brother.

[inbabylontheywept]

professional little brothering is a lifelong craft that requires no blood relationship to the people you inflict it upon. all it really requires is a willingness to show your deep affection for someone by annoying them.

[dontbelasagnax]

Mentioned to my mom I'm asexual a couple months ago and today.... we got into the car and she hit me with, "So you use they/them pronouns now?"

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"

"Yes, mom."

[savetheworldkissaplushie]

[cleanlenins]

🥚

[scunthotter]

So as much as Ilya likes being domesticated, I cannot believe that man has given up clubbing. He's been a little clubrat since he was able to get in the door of Moscow clubs at way too young of age.

Ottawa has a fuckass nightlife but whenever they're in a city with good clubs Ilya goes out and drinks and dances and at the end of the night (the agreed upon negotiated time) Shane shows up and Ilya "picks him up" then they go back to the hotel for nasty hook up sex.

For Ilya this feels like having his cake and eating it too. He gets to be his sleazy clubrat self, then he gets to take home the hottest man in the club and have nasty sex with him, then he gets to end the night snuggled up in his husband's arms.

[whitepeopletwitter]

Is it the freedom

[aralintheobsessive]

It's the venting. In the USA, dryers have massive exhaust vents to the outside of the room/building that take the hot wet away and leave hot dry behind. In many other countries, dryers do not generally have external exhaust vents, and simply fill the room they are in with the hot wet, which may or may not be enough to actually remove the hot wet from the clothing depending on how well ventilated the room itself is.

[whetstonefires]

for this reason 1) you generally can't leave the dryer open in winter without causing a draft and 2) sometimes when you're walking around outside in the US the world will suddenly smell of clean laundry because you're near someone's house and their dryer is running

[zaprowsdower27]

And 3) Eventually your drier stops drying things so well and you have to hire somebody to bring a ladder up to the vent (either high up an exterior wall or on the literal roof) and clear out the accumulated lint and cruft blocking it

[ayellowbirds]

You ought to do this regularly even if the dryer efficiency remains the same, because dryer lint is fantastically competent at burning your damn house down if you let it catch fire.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'm in Australia (no exhaust vents), and I've found that if your dryer starts making hot wet laundry, you first clean out the lint trap that you already know about and clean every time, and then you go looking for the second secret lint trap that nobody told you about and clean out the year's worth of lint in there that you were blissfully unaware of. The dryer will now mostly dry your laundry again, and give you either hot dry laundry or hot just-very-slightly-damp laundry.

[bladesofaura13]

This reminds me of the story about the couple who kept cleaning two different dryer vents and were confused why their so never cleaned the lint

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

That post was what first prompted me to go looking for a possible second lint trap

[em-dash-enthusiast]

I'm genuinely appalled that dryers outside the US are not vented to the outside world. That much moisture just...builds up in your house/apartment every time you use your dryer?? Does that not lend itself to mold growth over time?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Mine recondenses the water into a little tub that I empty into a sink after use. I could also get a plumber in to vent the water directly into the greywater but I prefer being able to have the dryer in a part of the room with no direct water system access.

[em-dash-enthusiast]

That makes much more sense tbh. I was envisioning a steam room and the associated drywall moisture damage every time you do laundry, like "at that point I would just opt for a clothesline" lol.

(Which we do still use in the US, despite the popular conception that we all have dryers. Not as common as it once was, but I've lived several places where we used a clothesline bc we had a washer but no dryer.)

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

In Australia most people use clotheslines all the time, and even those of us who have dryers tend to only use them when the weather is too wet to make line drying practical. Electricity is expensive and sunlight is free. Can't speak for people living in city apartments and suchlike though.

[bucketofdeltav]

I grew up in Aotearoa and formerly lived in the US and now live in the UK and yes every dryer I have ever seen is absolutely vented to the outdoors???

What are the Australians doing?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Line drying, mostly.

[if-only-we-could-read-it]

I’m in the uk and every dryer ive seen has either had a removable condenser or has been piped into the wall/grey water like derin said. Most people over here use a clothes line or horse.

[chibisquirt]

I'm sorry, a clothes line or a WHAT?

[shiftyarchfey]

This

[chibisquirt]

oh thank goodness, I was picturing one of these: 🐎

[keasusreevsus]

They're literally gonna be in love all next season! I'm gonna throw up!