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@counterturn
in absolute tears about the pride module at my work
HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY
Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...
Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).
happy first day of pride everyone
Reblog this ice pick for no particular reason
Jia Li (Chinese, b.1964), Summer Light, 2015, Watercolor on paper
The 1969 Easter Mass Incident
Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“We’re getting to that.” He waved.
Keep reading
Bleeding Fairy Helmets on Mount Cordeaux, 2024
somebody posted this Calvin and Hobbes strip and i cannot overstate just how topical this fuckin thing is
sometimes i see an opinion i disagree with, and from a combination of wanting to keep up appearances, avoid flak, and cut to the heart of the issue, i draft a series of increasingly abstract responses, eventually culminating in typing out "falsehoods aren't true", which, in a perfect act of autofellatio, deletes itself
anyway remember when the US government commissioned a study on dangers of pornography and when the commission returned with a report saying it doesn’t pose a danger and recommending removing restrictions the US government denounced its own study
[Image IDs: Wikipedia text reading: The Commission's report, called Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, and published in 1970, recommended sex education, funding of research into the effects of pornography and restriction of children's access to pornography, and recommended against any restrictions for adults. On balance the report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.
The report was widely criticized and rejected by Congress. The Senate rejected the Commission's findings and recommendations by a 60-5 vote, with 34 abstentions. The Senate rejected the following findings and recommendations in particular.
That there was "no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults."
That "a majority of American adults believe that adults should be allowed to read or see any sexual materials they wish."
That "there is no reason to suppose that elimination of governmental prohibitions upon the sexual materials which may be made available to adults would adversely affect the availability to the public of other books, magazines, or films."
That there was no "evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials adversely affects character or moral attitudes regarding sex and sexual conduct."
That "Federal, State, and Local legislation prohibiting the sale, exhibition, or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults should be repealed."
President Nixon, who had succeeded Johnson in 1969, also emphatically rejected the report. /End IDs]
Not to be rhe ten millionth person to say “USAmerican President Donald Trump Is An Incoherent Public Speaker Whose Train Of Thought Can Be Best Described As Scat Jazz” but I just remembered that when he talks at international events it is several dozen people’s job to translate what he’s saying and what he intends to say to world leaders in real time
And I desperately wish to hear how they do it
If anyone reading this isn’t fluent enough in English to understand the sentences that man says, please know that he has essentially mixed a number of adjectives and topics together in a hat and is pulling them out at random like a horrible children’s game
Like that waxy jaundiced bitch will straight up be like “J'étais sur internet l'autre jour – internet, la plus grande invention américaine. Et la Chine a “internet aussi. Pas un bon internet, pas comme le mien, j'ai un internet formidable. Les gens me disent : « Donald, ton internet est génial ! » On adore l'internet de Donald. Mais la Chine… Chine, Chine, Chine… Vous savez qu'ils mangent des oiseaux ? C'est terrible. J'adore les oiseaux. La Chine mange des oiseaux. Pas comme nous. Pas comme mes oiseaux. Mais vous savez, c'est comme ça, et c'est terrible. Mais voilà ce que je vais faire : je vais sauver les oiseaux. Je vais sauver internet et sauver les oiseaux. Tous ces magnifiques oiseaux. Pour l'Amérique. Et la Chine va nous détester pour ça. Ils vont nous détester parce qu'on est les meilleurs sur oiseaux”. And people will lose their minds
So this is actually kind of a problem in non-english speaking countries. It's very difficult to get people who don't know enough english to listen to Trump themselves to understand the type of person he is. This is largely because translators are kind of forced to sane-wash him when they do their job: if you translate him literally your audience will just assume you are a shitty translator. The shit this guy is saying doesn't make sense; can we get a translator who actually knows English?? If you say to them 'no, that's actually what he's saying and how he talks', they will just assume YOU don't speak very good English. So you run into a communication issue. When I tell people in casual conversation that Trump is a moron, they think I mean something like 'I disagree with this man's strategic moves and I don't think he's leading the US in a positive direction'. Not that he is actually stupid. If I say he's dumber than [local idiot for comparison], they will assume I'm making a joke or being hyperbolic. It's very difficult to get people to understand that no, he actually is for real not a smart person and has no idea what he's doing. It's kind of just culturally assumed that a machine as big and powerful as the US simply can't be under the control of someone like that. Especially since outside of the US you would basically never ever watch a full translated speech. Most people's exposure to Trump is on the radio or news, where a small clip from a long tirade will be taken and translated. So, instead of getting a long, meandering, contradictory word salad, they just hear 'If Iran doesn't give in to our demands we are willing to use maximum force'. This sounds like a powerful imperialist maniac, but on its own it doesn't sound dumb. Maybe after the clip the news anchor will add something like 'this comes just hours after Trump tweeted that he was considering victory in the conflict'. Which sounds a lot more reasonable that the impression you get reading an insane all-caps tweet. From a distance, it just sounds like politics. When people here say Trump is crazy, they mean the moves he's making on the world stage are scary and disastrous, similarly to how George Bush was talked about. It's hard to explain to them how it's different.
i see your "i dislike characters who talk like theyve been in therapy its more fun when they dont know whats going on" but i raise you "theyve been in therapy for a decade and theyve read all the scholarly articles on the topic they know exactly whats wrong with them and yet they cant logic and reason and rationalise their way out of their mental illness and its driving them insane because they shouldve gotten better years ago and they feel like theyre on square one"
Kinoko Shibari
POLL_QUESTION
SERIOUS_ANSWER_1
SERIOUS_ANSWER_2
SERIOUS_ANSWER_3
JOKE_ANSWER
RESULTS
turning claude cybermaoist
The Joe Mama punchline at the end is going to shut claude down globally.
The Steven Universe fandom might be “cringe” and “bad” but imagine a fandom so bad that a bunch of fandom members had ran a scheme to say “if you pay us money, your blorbo will know you’re valid” and the fandom permanently split over a 95 paragraph callout post of these people.
I cant do the story justice myself. Google “The Protestant Reformation” for more details, I hear a few people have done deep dives
Me after reading the setup: Oh man this is setup just perfect I'm going to make a killer Martin Luther joke and then everyone will love me a few people will perhaps reblog. Me after punchline: It wasn't that good a joke anyways. They wouldn't have loved me anyways. I was going to kick this rock down the road either way
Do you ever see people you know being friends/socializing with each other and think Damn. They're probably having so much fun and interesting conversations. Sadly I can't join them due to not being ensouled
ok seeing all the recent temperature polls i have another one for you
which would be less horrible to exist in?
-40° F
-40° C
F. Because now not only is it -40 degrees but you're also in the US.
So, after much time on tumblr seeing endless references and many consideration with the internal council of my mind, I have started reading Homestuck for the first time. And I figured since it's such a cultural touchstone on this website where I spend time, some of you would enjoy hearing the thoughts of a first-timer, especially since I'm going into this completely blind. This thread is where I'll keep my thoughts (with the tag '#homestuck readthrough'), of which I already have several. So yeah. Enjoy watching me enjoy this, assuming I do. Oh, and I'll be spoiling everything as I go along (although from what I've seen referenced basically every possible scenario unfolds in this comic at some point or another), so if you wanted to read through yourself then you have been warned.
First off I want to talk about the format. It's surprising to me, given how insanely much I've seen this webcomic talked about on this site, that I really knew nothing about its particulars. The comic sets up a curious pretense of presenting itself as a game. As if you, the reader, were playing a video game (in this case like a point-and-click-adventure sort of thing) and interacting with the characters and their environment. I say curious because this is of course not true. The narrative is completely linear (as far as I've made it), and 'you' cannot do anything but progress from one comic to the next, the way any comic works. Except instead of a 'next entry' button, the link to the next comic is phrased in a way that implies you maybe entered some kind of text-based-adventure-style command like 'EXAMINE ROOM' or 'PICK UP [ITEM]' or what-have-you. The comic buys fully into its own conceit, with our protagonist John Egbert (a name I'd heard before) interacting with the ostensibly real world in a game-mechanic-y way, storing items in his limited inventory* and recognizing the game mechanics explicitly, to make it clear it isn't meant to be a metaphor or somehow just for the benefit of the reader. The narration is all in second person, and also follows the now-familiar style of video game text, whereby certain IMPORTANT TERMS are highlighted, such as names of ITEMS, and bespoke game terminology is used for actions. You don't put an item into your inventory, you captchalogue it into your sylladex, and if you don't have the right modus, then you won't be able to get to your items properly and you'll have to mess around to get it to work right. Except of course, 'you' aren't actually doing anything. It isn't a game, it's a comic. In practice, the experience of reading Homestuck feels a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure game in which there is only one available choice at any junction. It's a weird sort of mix of the material inviting you to get involved, but always keeping you at arm's length to remind you that you can't. It's a keyfabe aimed at your suspension of disbelief in a very self-aware fashion, which is something I'll talk more about in my next post on this.
Next up I want to talk about the tone. From the very, very beginning, Homestuck is very meta. It is aware of itself and of its format, aware of how it comes off, aware of you reading. Rather than breaking the fourth wall, Homestuck is written as if there simply never was one. One of the first jokes in the series is that upon being introduced to our friend John, who looks like this:
'you' immediately input a prompt that's something like 'look for your arms', to which the next comic's narration has John looking around the room for something to correct his 'perceived lack of arms'. Right away Andrew Hussie pokes fun at his own art style, assumes that you the reader will notice, and then clarifies that no, that's just how it's going to be. He's not missing arms, it just looks to you like he is. Not necessary to look into the camera: the camera is in the room from the start. Everything is like this. I mentioned in my previous post that the comic's conceit is that you're playing a game. But what is the game about? Well it's about a kid who is looking forward to playing a new video game. It's all meta, and it's all hijinks. Reading through this first section of the comic, I couldn't help but be struck by how powerfully I could feel that this was where so much of Undertale's DNA originated. The constant pointing at the game-y ness, the way a throwaway gag is taken seriously to move the action forward, the tension between the (again, not real) player and the character they are (not) controlling; this is unmistakably the ancestor of Undertale and Deltarune. And it's all tied together with an utter creative shamelessness that I think any creator should envy. Andrew Hussie writes this in a way that feels like it couldn't possibly come out the same if it were made by someone else. Everything is idiosyncratic. There is no buffing out the rough edges; they were put there for texture. Sometimes you read a story that makes you think 'I could have done this'. Reading Homestuck makes me feel like I definitely could not have, and if I did have this strange idea for a narrative, it would have turned out MUCH differently under my pen. Any place there could be something generic, it is replaced with something particular and often strange, and the result is a piece of art that feels extremely like itself. I think this is probably one of the things that draws people to it and keeps them hooked. Homestuck feels like something that was built to be exactly what it is. Anyway, this is the extent of the pre-thoughts that I have. I've just started up the section where the POV changes to Rose Lalonde (a name I had NOT heard before), and it was the insistence on the narrative continuing to use second person here, as well as Rose's far-less-cooperative-with-your-commands attitude that inspired me to start talking about all of this in the first place. I am curious to see where this goes. Everywhere, if the stories are to be believed.
Some thoughts now at the end of Act 2 This is... fun! Over all of the weirdness and interestingness, I'm just really enjoying this. I can definitely see why this captured so many people. Definitely feels like the author knows where it's going. Very liberal use of the word retarded, which is a bit uncomfortable in this day and age, but was very much how we used to talk back then. And it seems to be getting worse as it goes on. Even the narrator says it! I wonder what we say today that people will one day balk at.
Act 1 is setup where we get to see the game in action. SBURB, presumably for 'suburb' like the one John lives in, is a game in which one player can alter the reality of another, deploying items adding expansions to their house, all at the expense of 'grist' and other similar terms. The story seems pretty adamant about keeping track of this, and we only get a second of shenanigans before we are plunged into 'there is a meteor headed in your direction.' In Act 2 delves a bit further into the meta. We're introduced with a future timeline where a 'wayward vagabond' finds a computer terminal showing John, in his house. The game saved him from the meteor (but the meteor still landed?) and now his house is inside the matrix medium. This future character types commands into the terminal, issuing 'Commands' to John. Just like we don't! Because this is a comic! It's suggested that these commands get beamed into John's head as a 'voice' (just like ours do(not)?) (from the future?) that he can choose to obey or not, which is pretty in-line with how the dynamic between John and us has been so far. We will be loosely following this future timeline now, along with John's and Rose's (and now Dave Strider's, another name that I had definitely heard). It seems this is being set up to be a classic four-player party, and John is less the 'main' character and more the 'first' character. It's an interesting way to tell a story and I'm fully hooked. Definitely getting the feeling that this is the start of a whole big thing, and it seems like the first order of business is getting everyone into the game world.
Overall, I'd say that unlike a lot of webcomics, Homestuck does not feel slow. In fact, I would say that it's surprising how much it gets done given how much time it spends re-treading what it's already covered. We spend time on three different character perspectives (four if you include the mayor of can-town), and most of that time is spent filling in background for what those characters have been doing since the start, and even flashing back to before the story started
But it definitely feels like it's going somewhere. Through all of these moving parts you can feel something picking up steam, and some of the animated sequences give hints as to what kind of thing it is. A gate spawning meteors to impact earth? Are they all capsules? Playing the game sends a capsule back in time to impact at your location? Tell me your story.
Act 3 we meet Jade who seems to know a lot of things about what's going on that she shouldn't (as hinted by her screen name, GardenGnostic), and instantly some shenanigans are abound. She has visions of the future when she sleeps and wears many colored strings on her fingers to help her remember what's real/important/whatever. The importance of these visions means she has a dream robot (the robot is not a dream, 'dream' is its function) that copies what she does in the dream in real life, acting as her surrogate. Her friends (or at least Rose) know this and consult her for advice. Also her parental figure is not actually alive and she has some sort of demon dog that can alter reality and fetch bullets. Got all that? Because that's normal now. That's our normal friend Jade. There's also more characters appearing in the future timeline, all dressed in tattered rags. PM the Peregrine Mendicant wakes up next to a computer terminal similar to the one WV (mayor of can-town) used to interact with John in Act 2. She tries using it to talk to Jade, but her computer terminal explodes, revealing she's in a flying ship? Also she's a mailwoman I guess, which is helpful when WV finds a machine that can transport any object though time and space and uses it to accidentally get John's present to Jade from the past. It's ok though, because Jade had left a note on it to him telling him to give it to PM and also a note to PM telling her to send it to past-child-Jade so she would grow up to love gardening and become friends with John. Because she (in the present) left the present in the correct spot for it to get transported from, along with the notes. This is normal now, remember? And if you think reading this is confusing, I am at least telling it semi-linearly. And also have read it twice now. We zoom out to see the place where these future japes are taking place is in fact Jade's home, long after everything about it has changed except the frog ruins, which still stand. Rose makes it into the Medium in a very cool animated sequence, which now makes 2 out of 4 players. Which sort of points back at what I was saying. Although in-universe very little time has elapsed since the end of Act 2, and relatively little has happened 'since' then (basically JUST the animated sequence at the end), the going hasn't felt slow. The story has been sort of hiding its hand with the time travel up until now, but now we're starting to see a bit more what kind of story this is going to be. I've also seen the word 'troll' for the first time, though in reference to internet trolls and not the classic 'homestuck troll'. I expect this will now both slow down and speed up as we follow all FOUR of our human pov characters as well as the strange future timeline. First order of business is to get everyone into the game? The story is dense and can only be told one panel at a time, so we'll see how it goes.
