Bog-Standard Human, Definitely

During yesterday’s game I made an off the cuff remark that Infernal music uses a system of nine modes named after the layers of Hell as opposed to the traditional seven in Western classical music so of course I’ve been coming up with a system of nine tones per octave for no gain whatsoever, I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on something with absolutely zero game effect

I mean one obvious benefit is that I can now say that my character plays her lute in the Stygian mode which rules

disgruntledseagull

Now I’m desperately curious as to what that would sound like…

I haven’t had the time to play around with it so it probably sounds horrible, but okay it’s a system of alternating half-steps and full steps but with two sequential half-steps. The basic Avernal mode in C would be C, Db, Eb, E, F, Gb, Ab, A, and B (and with a final half-step to bring it back to C).

As I said, it probably sounds horrible

I mean it wouldn’t be hard for me to write a piece like that. It won’t sound “correct” to western ears because the root note, C, in that scale will sound like it wants to resolve up to the Db, but if your goal is for music to sound like it’s from Hell, then it’s doable.

Here’s the parameters for this piece:

I’m going to use this scale for expediency’s sake, rather than the two octave scale.

I’m also going to write this piece in 9/8, following the theme of 9′s.

I’m 2 measures in and

It’s uploading to soundcloud now!

https://soundcloud.com/critical-hit-compositions/in-the-court-of-mammon

Omg holy shit

whosname

[id. A twitter post by @/Bennieeexyz Jury duty letter came addressed to my cat. Not a mistake. "Felix Martinez" - that's his full name according to his vet records. My last name. His first name. Somehow he's a registered voter now. Called the county clerk. Me: My cat got summoned for jury duty. Clerk: Is the name correct on the summons? Me: Yes, but he's a cat. Clerk: Is Felix Martinez a legal resident of this county? Me: He's a legal cat. Clerk: Sir, if the name matches our records, he needs to appear or file an exemption. Me: He can't file anything. He has paws. Clerk: You can file on his behalf. Me: Under what exemption? There's no box for "is a cat." Clerk: (pause) Check "unable to serve due to medical reasons." Me: What's the medical reason? Clerk: He's a cat. Me: That's not a medical condition. Clerk: It is if it prevents him from serving. Sent in the form. Got rejected two weeks later. "Insufficient documentation. Please provide medical professional's statement." Took the letter to my vet. Me: I need you to write that my cat can't do jury duty. Vet: Why is your cat summoned for jury duty? Me: Excellent question. No good answer. Vet: This is the weirdest request I've gotten. Me: Can you just write that he's medically unfit to serve? Vet: On what grounds? Me: He's a cat. Vet: (started typing) "Patient is unable to serve due to species-related limitations including inability to speak, read, or comprehend legal proceedings." Me: Perfect. Sent it in. Got another rejection. "Summons is mandatory. Failure to appear will result in contempt of court." My roommate thought this was hilarious. Roommate: Felix is going to jail. Me: This is serious. Roommate: Bring him to court. See what happens. Decided that was actually the only option left. Day of jury duty, put Felix in his carrier. Brought the entire paper trail of rejection letters. Checked in at the courthouse. Clerk: Name? Me: Felix Martinez. Clerk: (looked at the cat carrier) Is that Felix? Me: Yes. Clerk: (long stare) He's a cat. Me: I've been saying that for six weeks. Clerk: Why didn't you file an exemption? Me: I filed three. All rejected. Showed her the letters. She read through them, expression shifting from confusion to disbelief. Clerk: Someone rejected the veterinary documentation? Me: Twice. Clerk: (called her supervisor over) You need to see this. Supervisor read everything. Looked at Felix. Looked at me. Supervisor: How did a cat get registered to vote? Me: You tell me. Supervisor: This is a data error. Me: Took you six weeks to figure that out. They dismissed Felix immediately. Apologized for the inconvenience. Supervisor: We'll remove him from the voter registry. Me: Appreciate it. Supervisor: (pause) Out of curiosity, how would he have voted? Me: Probably whatever party supports universal treats. Got a formal apology letter a week later and a voter registration card. For me this time. Apparently I wasn't registered, but my cat was. Roommate: Felix committed voter fraud. Me: Felix committed nothing. He's innocent. Roommate: That's what they all say. Felix is sleeping on the jury summons now. Fitting end to his legal career. end id]

teaboot-oceeboot

Not exactly

alias-fern-mason

I love teaboot going "oh I don't want to spam everyone with my OC stuff, I'll make a sideblog for it" and then reblogging all of it on his main blog

10/10 no notes

I love them your honour

elderspawnling

Ok but a skeleton feeding birds with peanut butter seed on their forehead is peak character

drtief

In response to a popular comic that's been floating around.

Headcanons are not activism. Ships are not activism. Fandom engagement at large is not activism. Punching down on someone for relating to a character in their own way, especially by claiming the way they are relating to the character is inherently not progressive, is reductive and damaging. Believing those who disagree with you are bigots and what they bring to the conversation is wrong or irrelevant is reductive and damaging. Telling any group that their headcanons 'overpower' fandom and are 'an epidemic' is reductive and damaging.

You are ostensibly telling someone they're playing with their dolls wrong. We are well past the age to be fighting over who gets the swings at the playground or whether you should go through the monkey bars forwards or backwards. Turning exceedingly minor fandom disagreements into a moral crusade, using the opportunity to feed into existing discourse about vulnerable groups, and refusing to listen to the voices of the group you are harming by mislabeling them all under a pejorative reactionary term to de-legitimize them makes you a bad person. Be better.

peace and love on planet earth or whatever

Sorry to get preachy outta nowhere but if you are a person who's never had a phobia PLEASE don't say shit like "it's not dangerous" or whatever because phobias, especially IRRATIONAL phobias, don't fucking work like that.

I personally have a specific phobia that, when triggered, used to make me spasm and hyperventilate and cry, and it was super embarrassing because I was fully aware that there was nothing really wrong. You can experience the effects of a phobia while objectively knowing you're safe! And STILL I would get people telling me to chill out cause I was fine.

I've gotten better at managing it. I can thing straight and control my breathing and not feel *emotional* fear, but my body still locks up and my heart still goes crazy and I still have to focus on breathing.

I am aware that it doesn't make sense. I am aware that I am not in danger. I'm practiced enough that I can sit still and have a conversation through the experience now. But it's still a phobia and no amount of reminding me how irrational my body is being is going to fix that- it's just gonna piss me off on top of it.

and you know what, I'm gonna add on the same thing I tell everyone who DOES tell me I overreact to my phobias: what are YOU scared of? Spiders? Snakes? Dirty needles? What makes YOUR body heave? Is it cold vomit? Spoiled meat? Dead skin?

When IM experiencing the effects of an irrational fear, imagine putting whatever awful or dangerous or nasty thing disgusts you in your mouth. Imagine experiencing a RATIONAL fear. Because it doesn't matter what I know is true, the effects of rational fear and irrational fear make your body do the same things.

Nausea, locking up, inability to make yourself move, panic, denial, refusal, shaking, disgust, revulsion, anger, fear, outrage, humiliation, vulnerability.

If my phobia is, say, walking past a 2002 Toyota Prius, then making myself do that FEELS just as difficult and horrific to me as licking broken glass off a gas station bathroom floor does to YOU. The only difference is *I* might have to do the thing ANYWAYS, while people make fun of me an I know that I look ridiculous, whereas YOU would at least know that your feelings are normal and your experience will be taken seriously.

WE KNOW OUR PHOBIAS DON'T ALWAYS MAKE SENSE. IT DOESN'T MAKE THEM STOP. Its why they're called "irrational phobias"

i-fear-neither-death-nor-pain

Hot damn this is an old post

But anyhow, today I encountered one of my phobias and was able to react to it calmly and rationally while my brain screamed instead of physically locking up and doing the screaming out loud, so here's to gradual progress

Also, figured out a better analogy over the years:

If Fear is like disgust, think of a Phobia as an allergy

I'm not DISGUSTED by the thing. Telling me you have a better recipe is not helpful. My throat is closing up and I need an epipen

lenbryant

Women in Shakespeare

orangebitters

Also like to point out that when her mother says “I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid,” (translation: I had you when I was your age) you have to remember her father’s words: “earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she,” (translation: all the other children died.) The whole plot point of Juliet being an only child is explained by her mother being a Margaret Beaufort type who had her first child too young and it damaged her past the point of being able to bear more children.

beatrice-otter

Margaret Beaufort died in 1509. She was a major player in the Wars of the Roses, the swirling on-again-off-again civil wars that consumed England from 1455-1487. Romeo and Juliet was written and first performed in the early 1590s. Your average English person of Shakespeare’s day would probably have had at least a vague understanding of who she was and what happened to her, because she was a key figure in recent history and was still getting passed around as a cautionary tale.

There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.

The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.

You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.

Shakespeare is telling us “yeah, this is fucked up. but even if you’re the kind of awful person who doesn’t think girls marrying too young is morally wrong, it’s also a problem for practical and dynastic reasons, don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

stalker-among-the-stars

Interesting

It bears repeating:

don’t forget that by doing this wrong thing you are very likely to destroy what you most want out of it.”

sarahthecoat

yes, excellent discussion!

another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)

i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?

art history matters.

rowanhorserider

I've been thinking about this play a lot lately. I really wanna highlight that Lord Capulet asks Paris to wait and get to know her, and to woo her, while Tybalt lives. While Tybalt is alive, Juliet has something of a reprieve, and her wellbeing as his only child matters more to Capulet. But once Tybalt has died, the gloves come off. Lord Capulet was worried about his daughter's wellbeing when he felt he had the space to care, but as soon as his dynasty is at stake, as soon as this becomes larger than Juliet's happiness, his consideration for her health and mental wellbeing get thrown away. Which also is due in part to the fact that Capulet's family is implicated in a brawl that has left several dead after the Prince's family EXPLICITLY told the Capulets and Montagues to stop fighting or face dire consequences, AND Capulet is trying to align himself with the Prince's family by marrying Juliet off to County Paris, a relative of the Prince. So to Lord Capulet, it is now less important that Juliet is happy, and more important than he reminds the Prince of his loyalty via this marriage and aligns his family with the Prince's before it's too late. And he believes this must be done, at any cost...until Juliet kills herself. And that's when he realises the devastating cost of treating his family as chess pieces. He realises his wrongdoing far too late.

Seriously Romeo and Juliet is HEAVY on the dynastic politics, and I think you can't fully understand the play without understanding how that all works, especially because the impact of dynastic marriages on women and girls is like. THE POINT of the play

smallpotatoes-dandelions

I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".

sulkybender-retired04042026

*fishes this absolute treasure from the tags*

feminist-space

gothiccharmschool

Today’s advice from your Goth Auntie

-Stop slouching, drink some water, take your meds.

-Your value and worth isn’t tied to you being useful.

-The Lurking Horror and the Cursed Object have been practicing making soothing tea.

❤️Auntie Jilli

flowerinaflame

hallogallo

Smug face of a free man

So I just simultaneously did, and possibly didn't lose my job today :)

Very much did in the sense that I literally do not know where my job is at the moment. But, for the time being I haven't been let go because nobody else including the store owner knows where it is either.

So, I don't wanna risk doxxing myself by posting pictures but goddamn am I tempted because this is not a believable event. This is a cartoon problem. For looneytoons.

But yeah, so, I work(ed?) at a kiosk selling boba tea, right? Freestanding kiosk in the mall with full water and electrical hookups and multiple fridges and sinks and a mini kitchen and the works. Fully functional tea shop. Very important to note that it was there last night, The work chat was discussing another issue last night at closing time. I'll get back to this.

It's been showing signs of being on the way out with how business is being handled lately and I've been considering other options, which is probably why I'm not as torn up about this as I should be, but maybe it just hasn't set in yet, but that's not the point. The point is there's been a lot of shit breaking and not being replaced and nobody mentioning anything about it until I walk into work in the morning and have to figure out why shit like the fucking cash register isn't there today. So I'm kinda used to having to ask questions about big things that nobody bothered to update me on. I was out for two weeks recovering from a surgery, so I came to work this morning assuming there'd be some kind of bullshit, yeah?

So, the question I had to ask the chat this morning was:

Not a text I ever thought I'd have to send in sincerity, but there it is. Because what I found instead was a fenced off patch of discolored tiles and a few holes in the floor where my entire place of employment used to be.

And the answer? Nobody knows! It was there last night when the mall closed, and every single trace of the structure and all its contents including drink making supplies and our safe and cashbox was gone when it opened again. And when I say nobody knows, I mean everyone from last night's closers to the actual (former?) owner of the store jad no fucking clue about this until getting that text from me this morning. For once I am actually the first to know. 🎉.

So. I guess I didn't so much lose my job as had it stolen. Not by AI, but good old fashioned hands-on human beings picking it up and carrying it away somehow. All mall security would tell me was that they were instructed not to tell me anything and have us contact our management. Who also don't know anything. And later on I came across some construction workers around the gravesite of the kiosk discussing filling in the holes, asked them about it, and was told that they "weren't at liberty to say".

So, not only is my job gone in the most literal physical sense of the word, but it was taken in some kind of super secret kiosk extraction in the dead of night without any warning or witnesses and nobody is allowed to speak of it. The store owner said she was gonna figure it out 10 hours ago and still no word back.

I don't know what else to say aside from I've been laughing all day and I'm gonna have a hell of a time explaining Schrodinger's Unemployment to the benefits office.

Update that is not an update because I'm basically certain this isn't what actually happened:

My mother in law thinks the FBI took it.

Not any of the other stores around the state. Just the one little kiosk.

Why? Because she loves a conspiracy and is just a little bit extra.

Also because she was around for the massive crackdown on Yakuza-owned businesses in Waikiki (in her homestate) that did actually involve the FBI seizing stores (no confirmation of making kiosks cleanly disappear in the middle of the night though).

Still no word from my job on what's actually going on, but the most likely theory so far is that maybe the kiosk was on lease and got repossessed? The mystery continues

(also shout out to the person who proposed Carmen Sandiego)

ACTUAL (partial) UPDATE:

According to the owner, based on what she's been able to find out, the kiosk was not removed legally and they're starting a potentially long process of legal action. I hope she gets to sue the shit out of whoever did it but for now at least I know for sure I'm unemployed.

Really hoping for more details in terms of who/why/how, so I'll keep updating if I learn anything.

For now the summary is: An unnamed entity that is most likely mall management (on account of mall security cooperating with them) stole an entire kiosk and all the contents including money and machinery with barely a trace in the middle of the night grinch-style, with zero warning or explanation, and ensured the silence of both security and the construction crew, in an action that was definitely preplanned and illegal, and as far as I know nobody knows its whereabouts.

So now I'm officially out of a job. Because my workplace was literally stolen in the night.

Actually fuck it let's share some photos cause I wouldn't be inclined to believe this myself. It's not like anyone can stalk me at my job now and I'm not gonna have to see any coworkers that might find my tumblr.

Enjoy the unintentionally funniest text I've ever sent in my life

Aaand a close-up:

The last remains of a once Very Much Solid And Immobile Workplace