you're supposed to title these things???

...

[kaijufluffs]

She's being so big and brave.

[kaijufluffs]

The long awaited sequel.

[trek-tracks]

When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense...

call that the Ship of Thesaurus

[trek-tracks]

Any educator who doesn't feel this on a visceral level has never had to experience the psychic pain of reading the phrase "Unused York City."

[trek-tracks]

This is the fifth anniversary of me receiving the paper that contained "Unused York City." With ChatGPT slop invading my classes like original thought-choking kudzu, I now look back on the copy-paste + Spinbot days with a surprising amount of rosy nostalgia.

I was once in the office and another professor called me over. She was teaching a course on global citizenship.

"I can't figure out what this student is writing about," she said. "She keeps using the phrase 'perspiration stores.' Perspiration stores this, perspiration stores that."

I glanced at the paper and read a paragraph.

"Friend," I said. "She's writing about sweatshops."

[headspace-hotel]

i just spent like 20 minutes scrolling through the notes for examples and I'm screeching with laughter

[katelyn-danger]

How much are we making fam?

Unemployed

$20,000-$30,000

$30,000-$40,000

$40,000-$50,000

$50,000-$60,000

$60,000-$80,000

$80,000-$100,000

Over $100,000

Remaining time: 2 days 12 hours

[wifegideonnav]

gonna be honest i don’t know how many more ‘enter the 6 digit code we sent to your phone’s i got left in me

[dinovelvet]

[shatterpath]

The view from Calvin's neighbor's house.

[pocketss]

leave your laundry on the floor for them

[thechekhov]

absolutely not

[synth3ticanimal]

[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]

@thicketscratches you get it

[innerchildabortionclinic]

getting kicked off love island for just swimming in the pool and not talking to anyone

[wizardshark]

So fun fact from when I worked on multiple reality shows, names redacted for NDA purposes.

Gay people are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for production when they are on reality shows cause they always do shit like this. Reality shows pick their cast specifically for people who will create drama, so it tracks that bringing in some gay people (in the era that I worked, 2013-2018, this was considered to be new and interesting) would diversify people enough to create some conflict. To a degree, this was true.

But what actually happened was that the gay person, or worse, people, would end up estranged from the other people because Straight People Who Are Fucking Nuts in a way that would be ideal for a reality show are very different from Gay People Who Are Fucking Nuts.

There's one particular instance I remember in which our Gay Person tm wasn't getting into drama and no one could figure out why. Any time anything happened it would just defuse almost instantly. Eventually we prodded during a solo interview and one of the guys said something along the lines of "Mayn gay marriage just got legalized n shit if I yell at this guy I'm being a homophobe". This meant that our gay was COASTING along in this reality show cause no one would vote him out!!

But you know what the PINNACLE of this was?

DATING SHOWS.

One... Very popular dating show I worked on (you know the one) has an unofficial, unwritten rule: you can only have 1 queer woman in the cast of ladies. This is because for a solid few years, if ever there were two bisexual women in the show, they would ALWAYS abandon the man and run off together instead. You can't have contestants saying shit like "this guy has no personality and sucks ass. I prefer this girl I met who actually listens to me". Like this was an actual epidemic in the casting. It happened over and over for YEARS and they couldn't find a way to stop it without literally separating the women from each other, which obviously wouldn't be good for the show. They also couldn't show this was happening because that. Uh. Would be pretty bad to reveal to audiences.

Eventually they just decided to subtly prod and see if women who were going on the show were gay and then avoid having two on the same season at the same time. To my knowledge they still do it this way.

Anyways the summary is that gay people are fucking crazy in a way that heterosexual tv just does not know how to handle

[askthegrandhearthmother]

I love(hate) how their first solution was to be blatantly biphobic

instead of getting men that don't suck

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

today I found out my mother doesn’t know what dandelions are and now I’m wondering what other strange secrets she’s been quietly harboring

[krystal-prisms]

Where do you live that you don’t have dandelions?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

So after extensive interrogation I have an update:

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

gosh I enjoy this website

[authoratmidnight]

For comparison, this is a daffodil

[quietlygrousing]

See, folks in the southern US will tell you up and down those are buttercups, actually.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i don’t think so? i’m southern and buttercups are what we call these things (much tinier)

[maejacrezz007]

Wait I thought those bigger cup ones were Easter Lillies???

[fractiousrvt]

This is an Easter Lily. It is an actual lily and therefore deadly to cats.

[blood-trip-god2]

They’re marigolds and I know a bitch when I see one!

[delphinidin4]

This is a marigold:

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

….we need to start taking the phrase “go touch grass” more literally. go outside and examine a flower i beg u

[jmtorres]

“buttercups” is a name applied to MANY flowers. in my part of the south it was this one:

imo there’s correct identifications of dandelions, daffodils, easter lilies and marigolds in this thread, but buttercups are simply impossible to agree on and the only solution is for everyone to post pictures of their local buttercups

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

*squints* is that a motherfucking EVENING PRIMROSE?!??

[demon-and-human]

Hello I would like to add to the confusion:

That purple fella is a Morning Glory as told by my mothers (texan)

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

⬆️ morning glory

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

#amazing work everyone hit the flowers

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

[ignorethisatyourperil]

[astriiformes]

Inspired by my walking past a home built in 1754 in my new neighborhood, which isn't even the oldest building in the city. As someone born and raised in the Western US (where we do have some very old buildings, contrary to popular belief, just not in the middle of most cities), it made me curious!

When was the oldest extant building you can reasonably walk to from your home built?

20th century

19th century

18th century

17th century

16th century

15th century

14th century

13th century

12th century

11th century

10th century or before

Voting ended onAug 7

(Use your judgement for definitions of "extant," it doesn't have to be used for its original purpose but my intention is a building that could theoretically still be used, not just the remnants of one.)

[kedreeva]

I think that part of what irks me about AI being used even for "small" stuff like meme graphics (aside from all the larger problems obviously) is like.... the time spent on it was part of the humor. "this is a silly inconsequential joke but I had to stop everything and spend 5 minutes making it" was, at least for me, part of the joke. Someone really took time out of their day to make me look at something silly they took time out of their day to make. Now it's like someone took time out of my day to make me look at something no one even made. Stop wasting my time if you aren't wasting yours too.

[teaboot]

The Victorian Era was shite compared to now obsiously but also titty piercings were popular everyone was on heroin and they thought bad sex made your kids ugly so the zeitgeist must have been wild

[deafmangoes]

I wish I could remember the source, but I once read a sociologist's take that the Victorian era was a complete abberation of human development. It was uniquely weird, never existed before, will likely never exist again.

I wonder how much of that was on the back of the industrial revolution. Maybe humanity had a similar "weird" moment in the Fertile Crescent when we figured out farming.

But yeah. Victorians were an odd bunch. Delightfully contradictory.

[teaboot]

I feel like the wild combination of Suddenly Having So Much New Technology We Barely Understand and Suddenly Using So Much New Technology We Barely Understand *May* have resulted in such new and novel situations as:

The baby will stop crying if I give it cocaine

My entire face is covered in arsenic

How Wonderful That I Can Buy Guns And Heroin At The Same Store! I Certainly Hope My Lead Poisoning Does Not Lead To Bouts Of Distemper And Irrational Thinking

There Are Bare Electrified Wires Running Through My House And My Technicolor Dress Is Highly Combustible, Which I Do Not Know Yet

My son, Lead Poisoning Georg,, shall someday inherit my gun powder and lead paint empire,,

NEW! Magical Miracle Substance! Asbestos! WILL NOT catch fire! CANNOT catch fire! YOU WILL NOT die! (From fire)

Impress Your Guests And In-Laws With The Tastiest Bright White Bread Chalk And Wood Shavings Can Produce

NEW! Baby feeding bottles! NEW! Glass baby feeding bottles! How do you clean them??? That isn't important stop asking questions. NEW!

If Heroin And Lead And Cocaine And Arsenic And Typhoid And Tuberculosis And Radiation And Ungrounded Wires And Lead And Chalk And Arsenic And Working In The Coal Mine Are Bad For Me, Then How Am I Moving So Fuckingn Fast

[riverlinden]

"kung pow penis," a phrase commonly used in reblogs to indicate utter disdain for OP, has twelve letters, each of which (traditionally) must be supplied by a different user. the unanimity of disdain indicated by these twelve unrelated users has strong parallels to the requirement of unanimity for a jury—also traditionally of twelve—to arrive at a verdict. in this essay i will

[quendergeer]

"I'm not posting S and you can't make me!"

[lola-legendary]

K

[hardyparti-deactivated20250411]

U

[osvaldvvanstein]

N

[tiredmisophonicwerewolf]

G

[ecto-stone]

P

[a-selkie-abroad]

O

[kotdish]

W

[aviandaleks]

P

[dragonwysper]

E

[ultimatenutshackfangirl]

N

[ohhmichelettoohh]

I

[beetle-goth]

[throwupgirl-deactivated20240906]

[medievaljournalist]

it's easy for me to tell who is possessed by dark spirits and who isnt

[thecactifindahome]