[nohoperadio]

Scooby-Doo is a dog who can talk, which is amazing, and he largely uses his powers of speech to communicate how scared he is of ghosts and monsters, and basically the only thing his owners do is drive him around the country putting him inside various haunted houses and such. I wish I could take Scooby-Doo aside, I want to say to him, these people are not your friends.

[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

[evidenceof]

costume + color + scene

CHER HOROWITZ and EMMA WOODHOUSE 2/2 Clueless (1995) and Emma. (2020) adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma | Costuming by Mona May and Alexandra Byrne respectively

[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

[freewingthefree]

@teaboot this maybe applies to modern times as well

Surely 500mg of caffeine will be good for me and help me function

The torment nexus glowing rectangle must be engaged with at all times

Look at all the profit to be made! This will surely grow forever.

Ignore the crowd begging for rational behavior, you dont want FOMO do you?

Money Georg, who has all the money in the world, is surely going to fix things

Wildly increased access to knowledge of things will not result in any cultural changes or upending of power structures

What do you mean there is a revolution in XYZ

Buy vapes! Use Ozempic! These novel things will have no negative health effects and will not be wildly popularized to the point of causing health crises

What do you mean the climate change we've been warned about for 60 years is real. I thought that was a torment nexus delusion

[teaboot]

^^^^^^^^

(I am aware I had a few historical points wrong there) but YES

I feel like that's *exactly* why new technology and ideas in younger generations always seems so scary while our present, boring technology seems so safe

we don't know the long term effects of ANY of it yet, but whatever bad things our parents raised US with, at the very least we aren't dead! Who KNOWS how this newfangled whatchamacallit might kill us.

NOW! To consume this bag of plastic particulate my parents gave me and assured me was fine and has not yet killed me

[asteroidtroglodyte]

I do enjoy a good visual gag, and an old favorite of mine is “there is Math on a Board in the background that contextually makes no sense.” This broadly comes in 3 flavors I enjoy:

• the board is in front of a classroom, and the Math is waaay too advanced for whatever level of pupil these kids are supposed to be; like having the calculus integral in front of kindergartners, or relativistic physics in front of high schoolers.

• the board is in front of Criminals, who are Planning Something, and by all rights there ought to be no Math there to begin with. Like. You’re planning a Heist why do you have the Full Lagrangian on there. Are we taking a rocket to the bank.

• the characters are super-genius science fiction people. The Math is “Pi≈3.24” with an unlabeled pie chart.

[cock-holliday]

so so crazy to hear the conversation in the US about "if employees get 1 or god forbid two whole weeks of vacation they will all drop their jobs and leave forever" when all my european friends have jobs with like 3+ week minimum vacation time. Some as many as 6. I know of people with 8 weeks of vacation because they're past a certain age.

"is 10 days of vacation time too much" jump off a fuckin bridge you hack journalist

[lokaror]

GOUGAR CLAIMS COOL ROCK

[ubersaur]

God forbid women do anything

[justpastsaturn]

She had a good time, too

[srsfunny]

Finally, a win

[saintofpride201]

This dumbass stigma that "hick" states are somehow dumber than the more urban ones because they're from poorer areas has to cease...

[animenutcase]

Hicks are the ones who put us in space.

[delicatefury]

You know what they changed? What Alabama is doing so different from California and New York?

They’re teaching the kids phonics.

It is legally required.

Turns out, actually learning to read improves students’ skills across the board. Who woulda guessed?

[thoodleoo]

one thing i do find fun about having a new adaptation of homer very present in the public eye with a lot of very vocal critics is that it truly is a continuation of an age old tradition of getting mad at homeric reception. there were people in the 1st century complaining at vergil for Doing Homer Wrong. a critic named herennius pointed out everything he thought sucked in vergil's poetry. agrippa thought maecenas hired vergil to create a new poetic style and that style was Lame. quintus octavius avitus supposedly wrote an 8 volume series of every line he thought vergil plagiarized. i hope we get this every 2000 years from now on.

[simplysnaps]

Sapphic Dynamic where the popular queen bee type is hopelessly in love with the weirdo girl that runs Anime Club. She's so down on herself, writing in her diary "Erin is so cool. She can beat Super Mario Brothers in under five minutes, she learned Japanese to read imported manga, and she runs an Anime Club even though nobody shows up. She's committed to that club longer than I've committed to a hair style. I just know about clothes and makeup, she'd be so bored by me. Oh what would I do for her attention?"

Her cheerleader friends are supportive, like "Are you kidding, girl? You played Sonic on your iPhone once! She's not out of your league!" but she still doubts if she'd be enough to keep up with Erin's zest for life.

"I went to Paris over Summer break, like some normie loser. Erin spent the entire Summer decompiling an abandonware point-and-click Nancy Drew game so she could port it to her Android phone. It's hopeless, she'd get bored of me in a week!"

[lesbianroselandry]

shane and jj rating the racist shit they hear on the ice. 6/10 okay that genuinely pissed me off. 1/10 yelling a slur takes no creativity no effort no pizzazz. booooo boring!!! 8/10 i broke a finger on your face for that one so i guess i have to give you points but also points off for being fucking evil. 4/10 okay i had to go to wikipedia for this one man, i actually didnt know that was a slur that existed??? damn

[lesbianroselandry]

comeau says something really stupid and really White™ at post-game drinks or whatever and jj makes direct eye contact with shane, then pulls out his phone and sends him this image (he edited it himself. he's been waiting for this moment)

and shane has to hold in laughter so hard that he actually has to excuse himself and leave the room for a minute. jj is SO proud of himself.

[theartofangirling]

*flint voice* our golden age of piracy is collapsing

[theartofangirling]

black sails if it was bad and there was no all this will be for nothing we will have been for nothing defined by their histories distorted to fit into their narrative until all that is left of us are the monsters in the stories they tell their children

[bruzum]

[wenlokholmes]

sorry, prev, your tags are too true to be silenced

[callioope]

In an ideal world, everyone has read Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, and I’m just preaching to the choir.

But if by any chance this post reaches anyone who hasn’t read this marvelous, delightful book, let me tell you what you’re sleeping on:

A perfect example of how to write the most oblivious protagonist while still making things clear to the reader what’s going on

A competent protagonist who still has relatable self-esteem issues

Oblivious p I n I n g she wants Howl so bad and is in SUCH jealous denial

Misunderstandings related to that obliviousness

The most ridiculous Drama King to ever slime his own house

But who also is head over heels for that adorably oblivious protagonist

Like he dotes on her and she just thinks the whole time he doesn’t like her

Okay it’s not exactly enemies to lovers, but like, Sophie has such an impression of Howl’s reputation due to his own efforts to blacken his own name that Howl has a lot of work to do to correct her impression of him

and besides which, he really is a slitherer-outer so you can hardly blame Sophie’s frustration with him

and besides which Sophie does meddle an awful lot so you can hardly blame his own frustrations with her

I mean she basically just barges into his home and insists on staying an indeterminate time, like just tonight or you know, forever?

On that note, it’s not fake dating but these two are essentially living in a domestic relationship before they even kiss

File under: how to write a romance without needing the protagonists to kiss!

When Sophie insists on cleaning all the time Howl is just like “??? why??? do you want to clean when you are so awesome and powerful and could do so much better??? i keep telling you there’s a spell for that and you do not have to clean???? but if it’s what you want to do I guess?????”

like for real he’s just disappointed that she seems to only think she’s good for serving and doing chores and wants her to want more for herself

you can reread the book and try to pinpoint when Howl starts loving Sophie but then you cannot and for sure it just must be a case of ‘he was already in the middle before he knew he begun’

like he cures her aches and pains and he buys her nice clothes clearly trying to cater to her taste and

when he has to redo his whole HOME he asks her what kind of shop she wants to run and he buys her old home like as if they’re already married and they’re building a new home together

and Howl tries multiple times to break her curse, but in the end only SHE can really break it bc like I said this story is brilliant

and the WHOLE TIME, the whole time ALL OF THIS doting and pining is going on, Sophie looks like a 90-year-old woman and Howl is just head over heels for her 

I mean with tropes like these???? what are you waiting for?

PS WAIT TRAVESTY I FORGOT – awesome sisters caring for each other!!

[snowsmoked]

It was common knowledge between Timbit league coaches, premium menswear brands, and the MHL, that there was not much that could deter Yuna Hollander from a task. 

She loved having a task, she excelled at having a task. 

Her current task, while with a bit more moving parts than others, was her most interesting task since Shane was 4 and Get Him into the MHL slotted into her mind. This task was a curly haired Russian, that she spent the better part of the decade indignantly annoyed at, sitting in her living room looking through a baby photo album with her husband while her red-faced son pointedly watched an uninteresting rerun game on the television. 

She leaned against the doorframe, allowing herself a moment to enjoy something she was starting to worry she would never have - Shane with a partner. Over the years, her vision of her son’s future shifted from him and hockey-loving, kind wife to him with a husband. But never could she have thought Rozanov would be that husband. Not that they were husbands - apparently they were only boyfriends as of a few days ago. 

Still, she always joked to her friends that Shane was married to hockey. His hockey rival and second best player in the league was probably as close as he could legally get to marrying hockey. 

She must have let out a small laugh that Shane misinterpreted as being directed at David showing Ilya photos of his fifth halloween - the first one where he was old enough to choose his own outfit. And, exactly two months after he started playing hockey. 

“Mom!” He whined. ‘Fully grown adult’ her ass. 

“Yes, honey?”

“A hockey player, Hollander?” Ilya teased, delight shining through his features. 

“Not just any player,” he grumbled. 

“You’ll never guess what he was next year.”

“Not the same one!” Shane protested. Ilya must not have realized that he stumbled into a decades long argument that no, Shane, dressing up as different hockey players is not a different costume. 

Eventually the conversation transitioned into dinner. After it was decided there wasn’t much at the house, and they couldn’t go out with Ilya with them, something that sent a little pang of hurt through Yuna’s chest, they all got on their various food delivery apps to look for a suitable place. 

Then eventually settled on a sushi-fusion restaurant that Ilya found and his phone was passed around for everyone to place their orders. 

When Ilya got his phone back, Shane leaned over and asked, “how much is mine and my parents?”

Ilya scoffed, a little insulted. Though he shouldn’t be, Yuna considered, Shane had always had a very rigid sense of fairness and would get upset if he thought something was unfair. A lot of people found it annoying. Yuna found it incredibly sweet. 

“I am worth 12 million dollars, Hollander, I think I can afford DoorDash.” 

“12 million?” Yuna’s eyebrows shot up. Because, what. That couldn't be his total net worth, could it?

“Yes, I am very rich.” 

“No, that’s…” she trailed off. “What are you spending so much money on?”

“Jesus mom, you can’t just ask that.”

“What? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. Between his MHL salary and sponsorships, that’s low.”

“That is low?” Ilya looked at Shane. “How much money do you have in bank?”

Shane groaned. “You’re as bad as her. And most of my assets are tied up in investments and stocks.” 

Ilya had a blank look. “Okay.” 

“Ilya, do you have a financial advisor?” Yuna asked. “Or a wealth manager?”

“I think so?” 

Yuna clicks her tongue. Task. 

“Shane’s net worth is public information - he’s worth about 120 million. He has about an eighth of that in liquid assets - money in the bank.” 

“You really have that much money?” 

“He’s the highest paid player in the league,” Yuna said with no small amount of pride. She did negotiate a ground breaking 8 year 50 million dollar contract after his rookie season. “He also has nine premium sponsors, not to mention his investment portfolio. You should be nearly at that too - you two have had very similar careers.” 

“Hmm,” Ilya shrugged and turned to her son. “Is okay, you can be my - what is the word, sugar daddy?”

“Never say that again.” 

“Anyway,” Yuna continued. “I can send you some recommendations for an advisor. I mean, it's your money of course, but it can go fast. Especially with how early hockey players generally retire. Or if you get injured, god forbid.”

“No, it’s,” Ilya shifted in his seat, eyes cutting to Shane. “That is good. You can send advisor details. Thank you.” 

“Of course,” Yuna dismissed. Ilya thanked them much too often. But it didn’t feel performative. It felt genuine. 

~*~*~*~

Eventually, Yuna got an opportunity to sit down with Ilya and his new financial advisor. He had asked her, somewhat shyly, if she would attend their meeting. Now that he and Shane were out, he had decided to take her up on the new advisor. But, as he told her, he was still not so good at English business terms. 

She had felt so warm that he asked her. 

She felt a little less warm that he asked her not to tell Shane what they were doing. As far as Shane knew, they were getting lunch. 

She understood when she started looking over the documents the new advisor laid out for them. 

Anger, hot and uncomfortable rose up in her chest. But she pushed it down because that was not what Ilya needed. Ilya, who was sitting with his arms crossed, not looking at either of them. A faint blush on his cheeks. 

Because his very limited investment assets were barely four years old. For the first five years of his career, he had sent nearly everything back home. There were payments to his father, his brother, his step-mother. Trusts for his niece and his step-mother’s children. There was a house bought in an uncle’s name. There was a private school for his niece. There were random wire transactions to his brother for odd amounts - 20k, 15k, 56k. There were even salaries paid to private chefs and house cleaners. There was a weird split of money between Russian and American banks.

What wasn’t sent back was spent on severely depreciating assets like sports cars. Rounds of alcohol at bars and clubs. Thousands of dollars spent on random Amazon purchases, designer clothes, etc. His Boston house with a criminally high interest rate. He hadn’t even bought it outright, even though he had plenty of money to do so. He had maxed out credit cards with debt he would wipe out today and not even feel it. 

His liquid assets, which were basically his only assets, weren’t even in a high yield account. At least, not as high yielding as it could be. 

He was almost living paycheck-to-paycheck in a very rich way. More like contract to contract. He would exhaust his 8 million dollar/2 year contract and then sign another one. His contracts, too. They were much lower and shorter than Yuna would ever allow her son to have with his stats and experience. 

His financial history read very much like an 18 year old boy who had been thrown into a foreign city, with a language he wasn’t totally familiar with, and no one with his best financial interests at heart. Only a family that wanted to exploit him and a new team he desperately wanted to impress. 

But Yuna pushed all that away, shook it off, and considered the plan. “This is a great starting place.”

Both Ilya and the advisor’s eyes shot to hers but she refused to back down, leveling the advisor with a hard look. 

“It is?” Ilya asked. 

“Of course,” Yuna gathered up a few documents. “You have 17 million dollars in liquid assets. You have a great contract with the Cens for three more years. That’s a much better starting point than the vast majority of people.”

“Not as good as Shane,” Ilya pointed out.

“No,” Yuna agreed with a little smile. “But if you go broke, I’m sure Shane will let you be his sugar baby.” 

[enki2]

[brittlepredatordemon]

Actually, no, I don't think that friendships dropping like flies in your late 20s and early 30s because no one has time for that between overwork and family obligations and marriage and kids and partners and the ritual of the time slayer is normal and ok. No I don't think deep conversations and spontaneous adventures being replaced with a tired coffee every six months is a normal part of growing up. I don't think that emotional intimacy and soul bonds disintegrating in the face of practical inconvenience is a fact of life. I think that means something is deeply deeply wrong with our society and I will never forgive it for the friends I've lost