The Arsenal

Puns, dark humor, and miscellany. 

[the-lincyclopedia]

Is it just me or does having a positive interaction with a stranger scratch a very particular itch? I think it's the reassurance that the world is not split solely into people who already love you and people who never will.

[45percenterthen]

caving as an extreme sport is sooo unfathomable to me why are u as a creature of the daylight doing that. were u born without the dread in ur bones or something

[45percenterthen]

come 9 year olds let us sleep in the hell fissures where time goes to suffocate

[sorairoknife]

kind of obsessed with my dad's friend who apparently goes back to being a Buddhist whenever he gets a divorce

[aokozaki]

[gets divorced] Alright, that's it! No more worldly desire! [sees another beautiful woman] Well... unless?

[theballmighty]

I love that it’s apparently happened enough times that it’s a cycle. Almost like…

[stellaluna33]

Historical context is of course very useful for important things like Politics and Science and everything, but will also open your eyes to things like, uh... the way the clothing/textile/crafting industries try to use the word "natural" as an excuse to sell shoddy and bad quality goods and make you think that's normal.

God knows there are worse things going on in the world, but it really pisses me off when I see companies advertising "Real Shell/Pearl buttons!" like that's supposed to be some upscale selling point, and the buttons in question are the thinnest, roughest, most crudely-made buttons in existence... 🙄😒 "But they're made from Natural Materials! You can't expect Natural Materials to look refined and consistent like synthetic ones!" They are lying to you. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU! And I know this because I've seen "real shell buttons" from 100 or even 50 years ago. And most of them are sturdy and smoothly polished, of a consistent thickness, and sometimes even finely carved. The buttons on nice men's dress shirts? Those are the cheap, plastic IMITATIONS of what people expected actual mother-of-pearl buttons to look like! "Natural" isn't an excuse! Your product is cheap and badly and lazily made! And I'm so sick of this, because I see it EVERYWHERE. "Linen-look" has become shorthand for "coarsely woven fabric with visible slubs" and that drives me CRAZY because do you KNOW what kinds of linen I have seen??? Antique linen so light and fine and smooth you can't even SEE the weave unless you magnify it!!! A fragment of a linen damask tablecloth so smooth and glossy, it looks like SILK? 😭 (On that note, "dupioni silk" is so roughly woven that it would have been considered hardly fit to sell a century ago) "This fabric is woven of Natural Materials, so imperfections will be inevitable!" 🙃 No! 😀 You just made it cheaply and sloppily, and that was your choice! 😊

[datasoong47]

[lollytea]

i like how writing realistic worlds and characters is so important for so many writers to the point where they agonize over it. meanwhile lemony snicket was just like “death to reality. im gonna write this whole ass series and with god as my witness, absolutely fucking NOBODY is gonna act like a person.”

[overthestars-and-offtoneverland]

Daniel Handler, after downing whatever the hell he was on: The baby has piranha teeth and can take a trained swordswoman in a fight. 

All of us: Fucking genius. 

[thesixthstar]

readers: what time and place is this set in? Daniel Handler: Yes.

[bogleech]

The thing society as a whole doesn’t understand about nature is that absolutely nothing is just a worm or just a bug or just a plain little fish that does nothing but swim around and eat until it dies. Every single animal has a complicated life and habits. Minnows make nests out of pebbles. Slugs have courtship rituals. Fruit flies have territorial battles and when they can’t get laid they become alcoholics all in those few days that they even exist on earth. Just the functions of the different body parts of a dust mite can fill a lecture and we still don’t completely understand everything about its life habits or its biochemistry.

[smute]

i think the most upsetting thing about american-flavor puritanism is how fucking patronizing it is. it's 2026 but the whole world still has to deal with a cultural hegemony grown from the gnarled vestiges of victorian-era paternalism. tax-paying adults with passports and the right to vote are treated like wayward children because of the antiquated idea that authorities must protect the weak minds of the unwashed masses from depravity and corruption. the average american can send a fellow citizen to the chair, but they can't piss in a ditch without being declared an outlaw. american entertainment media is saturated with sex, but you can't talk about it online without getting your account suspended. it's such blatant censorship at a universal scale, but because sexual content is framed as inherently dangerous, this restriction on basic adult autonomy, this blanket denial of moral and intellectual adulthood, can be reframed as protection, an expression of care, a moral duty. "won't someone think of the children!" I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN!

[smute]

thank god that the video game that features slow motion animations of graphic gunshot wounds and is rated 18+ has a profanity filter in single player offline mode. thank you for protecting this 33 year old mind from the corrupting influence that is a horse named apple slut

[thestuffedalligator]

“Incurious” is an incredible thing to call someone. It conveys so much with so little. To be so uninterested with learning or developing an understanding that it’s damning. To fail to feel what a toddler does by instinct.

I sometimes go back to the Dan Olson video about Doug Walker and there’s a bit where he says “Doug wants to be a filmmaker, he wants to make art, but he can't, because he's a fundamentally incurious person who isn't much interested in what other people think or feel and all his ideas boil down to ‘what if Batman met Mario?’” and I know that if this was said about most artists I have met they would wither up on the spot like a dying spider

[bathroomcube]

lol! so true bestie *leans over to my body guard* you have to kill this clown right fucking now

[docholligay]

Possibly my spiciest take is that it's actually good to have people you respect and like that have some dogshit takes.

I think part of what is making young people lonelier, in discussing why they're increasingly isolated, is that they're so afraid of meeting someone who doesn't hold their same beliefs, and instead of being just core beliefs it is kinda ancillary shit.

It's actually okay to disagree even on social topics! Even on some political ones! But I mean, online you can start with "i love this mutual but they have a really bad/uninformed opinion about x media"

I know this is IMMEDIATELY going to be taken in bad faith, and yes babygirl, you are so right, I DO want you to go make best friends with both the KKK grand wizard AND your nearest nazi leader.

But seriously, as someone who has spent two decades doing community organization: finding ways to connect with different people is so so so important. There are people i follow here who ate 80% smart and their brain falls out of their head 20% of the time and that is GOOD FOR MY MENTAL ECOSYSTEM AND GOOD FOR LEARNING HOW TO BE A PERSON

LET'S ALL GO PISS ON THE POOR

[starbittie]

i’ve seen a lot of people talking about the pacing of iron lung, and i kinda think that people are overlooking that the pacing is the point.

movies right now are absolutely terrified of silence. every spare second is crammed with motion and noise and information. there’s always something new to look at, something new to process. look here. now here. don’t blink. don’t breathe. it’s constant stimulation. there’s no room left for a moment to land before the next one is already gone.

there’s good sci fi horror out there that do silence and restraint well. i can immediately think of under the skin, annihilation, and ex machina. sometimes the silence is the point. personally i think iron lung works in that lineage.

this isn’t a movie that will let you sit there and passively consume. this is a movie full of visual and audial clues waiting for you to unravel them. this is a movie that wants you to notice your breathing. to feel the silence press in until it’s oppressive.

isolation is the movie. it’s you alone with your thoughts, with time stretching and warping, with nothing to distract you from the constant dread creeping in. it’s not the monsters out there that you’re afraid of. not the constant drip, drip, drip of impending doom. but you, alone, in an endless sea of red.

can you count your breaths in the silence? can you hear your heart beating in your ears? can you live with yourself?

that’s iron lung to me.

[everthefractal]

I can't get over how human Simon was. He apologised for his outbursts, even when punching the sub at one point, he repeatedly apologised for the radiation in the exact same way like he was still reeling from the shock of that information. Whenever the oxygen ticked down you can see a new wave of horror washing over him that he needs to take a second to cope with. When Ava gives him the login details he stumbles on remembering control-shift-9 never mind the password she rattled out.

They managed to present a man with a dark past and anger issues who is also not a monster. He is a human being desperate to survive and nobody even knows his name anymore. The closest thing he had to a family he resents but still obviously misses terribly as he clings to that pendant and shakes.

And Ava. Ava too. She's in an impossible situation. She doesn't want more humans to die. She has no idea how much damage radiation has done to her. This man, who she thought was a heartless killer, is begging and pleading and apologising like a child and it's getting increasingly harder to lie to him that he's going to be ok. Her screaming and begging that this is bigger than him is so achingly desperate I can still feel it, humanity is almost entirely gone. I fully believe that she hates this as well, all of it, but if she doesn't follow orders and take calculated risks then what else is there to keep her tethered and sane? What else can she cling to? They're almost entirely alone in an empty universe. She needs this hope.

[crabussy]

small tips for Enjoying Being Alive from someone who went from wanting to die to genuinely loving life. these won't fix your life but they'll make it a lot easier to want to live day by day. I promise.

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

diet deficiencies can make you properly miserable. your physical health impacts your mental health more than you'd think. get some vitamins, some omega-3s and so on. whether from food or supplements. they can make quite a difference! your brain is responsible for a LOT of the way you feel, and giving it the fatty acids it needs to function at its best can go a long way.

[indexcard]

can the science side of tumblr explain why >_> is more aesthetically pleasing than <_<

[equalopportunityenby]

Westerners read everything visual, including signs with no words and art, from left to right and up to down. When the composition of an art piece pulls us against that, it makes us uncomfortable, and this also holds true for emoticons. Which is why (: is also weirder than :). It breaks the flow of the sentence.

[drunp-archive-deactivated201711]

oh there was an actual answer okay then

[firbolging]

the pride and prejudice musical we deserve:

darcy doesn’t sing a single note even during conversations where everyone else is singing at him that is until the argument following his first attempt at proposing to lizzy where you can see his restraint fall away

his first big solo is the letter he writes her

gelsey bell is mary and the unofficial narrator and she sits down at her piano to describe whats going on but before she can ever reveal her feelings on the matter, starting with that gelsey bell scream, mr bennet comes over and does the whole ‘that’s nice dear but give someone else a turn’

mr wickham has this huge ballad about how darcy ruined his life and its super melodramatic and touching

mr collins proposal to lizzy is an absolute bop that he gets so into he forgets for a moment what he’s doing he’s just owning the stage

wickham has a song where he’s trying to seduce lydia but she’s not even listening she’s just monologuing about how excited she is to get laid

during darcy’s second proposal he keeps hesitating waiting for lizzy to interrupt him like she has done every time before but she doesn’t say anything until he’s finished

at the end mary sits down at the piano and right where she’d usually be interrupted, kitty joins her and harmonises

 jane and bingley have the adorable upbeat romantic duet which is just them being super polite like ‘oh so nice to have you here’ ‘so nice to be here’ interspersed with their inner monologue which is just them being like fucking jesus I’m so in love

the bingley sisters probably have a really cool mean solo

lady catherine has this terrifying disney villain song in the garden

there’s for sure a song about ribbon shopping

[strawberry-crocodile]

my personal philosophy is that. we as a society like to pretend that the human brain is a machine for extracting truth, when in fact it is a machine for keeping a monkey alive and happy (in that order), and human behavior needs to be understood through that lens

[mikkeneko]

#a human brain is first and foremost made to use as little energy as possible while keeping you alive#so it will take all shortcuts necessary and looking for the truth is often too energy consuming - important addition from @maenara