Local Trash Goblin

Welcome! not a rt/ah/smg blog • kathryn/katchy • 27 • they/them (i’m genderfluid so this can change)

[queerautism]

Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?

This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.

[zorin-os-official]

THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS

GAMBLING IS NEVER PROFITABLE

RESIST THE URGE

[rudeboimonster]

#i cannot overstate they will make the horse girls gayer to get your money#im sorry thats just literally what it is#japan knows about yuri money

[prismatic-bell]

Listen, okay. I used to work in a gas station and as part of my job I sold lottery tickets. I'm about to tell you The One Big Secret State Lotteries Don't Want You To Know:

Scratchers have more prizes when the game is new, but those prizes are pretty much enough for you to break even and get addicted to the game.

They are the "first time it's free" wins. Because your brain doesn't remember that you won $10 on a $10 scratcher, it only remembers that you won. So you go back. And you go back. And in a few weeks you spend $100 to win $10 but it's fine, it's just a streak of bad luck, this game pays out all the time.

I once watched a woman pour almost $500 into scratchers, using her "winnings" to buy more and going back to her car and coming back in, jittery and shaky like every depiction you've ever seen of a speed addict in withdrawal. The symptoms didn't end until she lost her last dime. And then she tried to use our ATM. I'd actually called my manager in between buying bouts to beg her to let me do something, because I wasn't allowed to refuse the sale and if I did and it got back to corporate I'd be fired but I felt like I was handing lit matches to someone covered in gasoline, and she'd told me I could say the ATM was borked. So I taped a huge sign over the screen that said OUT OF ORDER STUCK CARD.

She was the most dramatic case, but far from the only one. I had people who came in every day after work and dropped $100 on scratchers. Daily. And that's not even the scariest part.

I had a customer I became friends with. We'll call him Jim. Jim invited me out for his birthday with his husband and a couple of other friends. We went to a casino, and because it was my first time I got a $10 free credit. And I was like "cool! I can play nickel slots all night long and never spend a dime of my own money!" And that is indeed what I intended to do. Early in the night, I won a $56 jackpot. I decided that was super-cool--I could fill my gas tank, grab a snack, and still have a little left over to throw in my savings account. Only five or six bucks, but hey! That adds up.

So I spent out the end of the original $10 and ended up with $63 total in winnings. At this point we'd been there like three hours, I was out of the money I'd been willing to spend/lose, and the noise and cigarette smoke was getting to me (the casino had gone nonsmoking but the carpets and stuff were still totally saturated, it was awful). So I said I was going to cash out and call it a night.

Jim physically took my playcard from my hand and forced it into a machine and said "no, no, you have to spend it ALL." He literally wouldn't let me leave the casino until I'd lost my winnings. And again, these were not huge winnings. These were "oh, that's nice." But he couldn't stand the idea of not gambling to the last penny--not just his last penny, but anyone's last penny. I hadn't realized until that moment that he had a problem--because he spread his lotto buys between multiple gas stations and never shared how much he spent at the casino.

Now Jim was a very nice guy with a very big problem (a few months after this he ended up in therapy for gambling addiction). I don't say this to slag off on him. We're actually still friends on Facebook. But he lost tens of thousands of dollars, several friends, and almost lost his husband, and he was taking other people with him. He was so deep in his addiction that he was putting the financial stability of other people at risk. I drew the line at spending my own cash--I'd actually left my bank card at home on purpose--but what if I hadn't? What if I wasn't autistic enough to basically have a built-in timer for flashing lights and ringing bells instead of finding them attractive? What if I hadn't grown up hearing my mother say "never take more money into a casino than you're willing to lose"?

Gambling addiction isn't just life-destroying, it can (in a way) be contagious. Your boss buys you a scratcher to put in your holiday card as a nice little token. What can it hurt? Your church holds a weekly bingo game for cash. It's just a chance to get out of the house, right? Your friend has a little casino outing for his birthday. You're just going to have a couple of drinks, play slots or blackjack for a couple of hours, meet some interesting people and go home--

--until you do more than that.

Be wary, kiddos. Don't take more than you're willing to lose. And the minute you think "this time I'm gonna--" you get your ass up and get out. Because that way lies debt and destruction, and the people raking in the billions don't care.

[rat2rrj]

Everything is rigged against you on purpose.

[sugar-petals]

down with ai and data centers, astronaut don pettit just dropped a new giant milky way photo taken from the ISS

[image description: a dark planet earth shot with a nikon from far away, lit up with cities and glowing in a green-blue sphere of light as the cloud-like milky way stretches all across the horizon. parts of the international space station intersect the image. it is truly awe-inspiring and epic in its broad scale.]

[kirakiraclub]

This piece of art made by Peter Gabel “Miniature Mermaid House” it’s the most beutiful thing I’ve seen in a while. 

[tatters-the-bat]

Are they like..... Yknow.... [Goes to do a hand gesture but forgets I'm a wizard and I accidentally cast Lv50 lightning bolt]

[calware]

spiritual successor to my email post

[calware]

ok this too

[making-friendos]

[arr-jim-lad]

i keep seeing that post about how frustrating the buff guy -> petite girl type genderbending is, and i wanted to add my two cents regarding the addition of ‘just swap pronouns and don’t change the design’ approach because i think these are two sides of the same coin, as they both fail to really delve into what i think is the most interesting aspect of this design exercise.

the reason i find genderbending to be such a fun and interesting challenge is because, if you actually want to be good at it and put thought into it, you have to really consider the character’s canon gender expression and think about what it means to them and how it reflects in their outward appearance and presentation.

is this male character buff because he likes to work out / be strong, or does he aspire to achieve conventional heteronormative male beauty?

is this female character a tomboy because she likes to express herself in a more masculine way, or is she doing it to fight gender norms?

the answers to those questions should produce very different designs!

this website loves to say that gender is a spectrum, but sometimes i genuinely wonder if people actually understand what that means. 

gender expression, much like gender, is also a spectrum, which is why keeping the character exactly the same won’t always work, in the same way that just making the character conventionally attractive won’t always work. but sometimes, a buff dude would actually just be a hot girl. lady bane, however, would 100% look exactly the same.

[steelycunt]

is there anything more humiliating than filling in the 'preferred salary' bit of a job application. grubby victorian workhouse child cap in hand oh guvnah ill work for anyfink! oh if youd be so kind, just a tuppence for me troubles sir, honest only a tuppence!

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

Reading hitchikers guide for the first time was really funny because it was like ohhhh THIS the writing that every unfunny nerd has been trying to emulate from like ‘00-‘12 . But good.

[milkchuggs]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#tbh my opinion on hichhiker's guide is that while i really enjoy it i feel like Terry Pratchett just kinda did everything Adams tried to do#but better and with more subtlety and greater depth of execution#So while i enjoy and appreciate it every time i pick it up im just kinda like#“whoah i should be reading terry pratchett”#and then i pick up praychett#and im like woah this guy was a fucking genius and did everything adams tried to do but more and better and in such a way to where its#hard for people to be annoying about it bc it possesses a lot of subtlty that#while adams is good he definitely lacks to the extent pratchet has#Also while pratchett practices absurdity he maintains a coherence of theme and idea that while carried by some overarching themes#adams definitley leans into the zany galaxy roadtrip at the detrement of coherence where pratchett generally succeeds

I think the key difference here is that Pratchett was a dedicated writer who wrote with intentionality and focus, whereas Adams was hurriedly throwing up half-baked radio play scripts in between his actual paying job of editing Doctor Who and then later procrastinating severely on forcing those scripts into novel and tv show formats while his agent tried desperately to figure out what pub he was getting drunk at so they could force him to come home and do some actual work.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#imma be so fr#comparing hitchhikers to any of pratchett's work is frankly insane#and makes me think you fundamentally misunderstood what at least one of them was trying to do#like these do NOT occupy the same conceptual space#this isn't one guy doing a thing okay and another guy doing it great#this is one guy doing one thing and another guy doing a vaguely related thing#you wouldn't say spaghetti is mediocre because fettucine is flat#like you recognize that that sounds insane right?

[elodieunderglass]

Looking at how those posters might have come to this idea, I think a lot of people encountering either Pratchett or Adams without reading other/earlier works probably feel those two authors invented that type of humorous storytelling, aka “stories with jokes in”. They didn’t! They really didn’t!

Pratchett and Adams wrote humour in a long-standing recognisable tradition of humour heavily influenced by the magazine Punch. Both authors clearly had their brain chemistry fundamentally altered by works like 1066 and All That, published in 1931. This was a joke history of Britain, showing some features recognisable to people who can read:

The wordplay, footnotes, arch tone, inaccuracies, long-payoff jokes and running gags, silly names, silly lists, references to shared/pop culture, references to classical culture, social commentary, use of absurdity, etc are features. These weren’t invented by Adams or Pratchett, and people who use them today actually might not be referencing those two authors at all; it’s a style of humour with a very extensive back catalogue, over 100 years old. Fun to read if you enjoy those authors; and since the inventiveness and wit are based on having a moderately clever author who is very well-read, it’s hard to write well in the style without at least being educated in the genre.

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

[ID: Screenshot of tumblr tags reading “please op i am desperate for the context.” End ID.]

Sure, here ya go:

Lord George Gordon Byron was an English poet in the early 1800s.

He wrote several narrative poems that influenced the gothic genre and was a HUGE fucking slut. HUGE. This bisexual mess slept with so many fucking people it was insane, no gender was safe. Unfortunately that “no one was safe” mentality did not work out well for him bc there were a LOT of rumors that he impregnated his half-sister.

His only child from a legitimate marriage was from his wife, Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron, who straight-up left him after a year. You know how divorce was uncommon in the 1800s? His wife was just so fed up with him that she did not care and left when her daughter was five weeks old.

This daughter was named Ada and would become known as Ada Lovelace.

Byron signed the separation papers and then left the country to have sex elsewhere and would later die when Ada was eight.

During that time if a couple divorced, usually the Dad would get full custody, so just in case he tried anything Lady Byron made sure to play the devoted and overattentive mother.

Lady Byron was absolutely paranoid that her daughter would become an insane gothic mess like her dad so she decided the only thing to do would be to make sure she did not become a Poet™. So she heavily encouraged Ada’s interests in science and mathematics.

Around the 1830-40s, Ada met Charles Babbage through a mutual friend and he showed her his prototype for a mechanical calculator. She got absolutely obsessed with this machine and began helping him out with it to the point where her notes on it became more extensive than his.

She also added notes to a translation of a paper on this engine that is considered to be the first published algorithm.

These notes on the engine and translation became the basis for computer programming.

She’s considered The First Computer Programmer™

So, because Lord Byron was a little slut and his wife wanted their daughter to Not Be, we now have to deal with tumblr discourse. Thank you and goodnight.

[autisticexpression]

Vampire fiction and science fiction as we know it today also exist as a direct result of his friends being stuck in a cabin with him during a storm so there’s that as well. Hot vampires and sci-fi nerds are also his fault.

[airandangels]

She was one of the people stuck in the cabin (well I think it was more of a 19th century Airbnb that the group of friends rented for a holiday that was then ruined by the weather) with him. Since they couldn’t do any outdoor activities they decided to write spooky stories and read them together instead. She wrote Frankenstein, kicking off the science fiction genre, and Dr John Polidori wrote… I’ve forgotten the title and it might just be “The Vampire” or “Vampyre” or something like that but anyway he did that. Dracula is much more influential now but that was the first big vampire novel. Byron didn’t create either genre but arguably motivated their creation by being an annoying horndog so they wanted to stay in their rooms writing instead of hang out with him.

[rattleroze]

It’s also worth mentioning that the summer they were stuck in that cabin is referred to as the Year Without Summer and was directly caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before. It is also blamed for failed crops and mass famine on almost every continent, and the explosion could be heard something like 1600 miles away. The eruption of Tambora and the subsequent lack of summer worldwide is estimated to have killed anywhere from 100,000 to many millions of people. If all the deaths from diseases such as cholera and typhoid that found perfect conditions to spread rapidly during the famines are included, the total death toll could be estimated around 40 million people worldwide, which would put it on par with world war one.

TL;DR: Byron being a goth slut led directly to his daughter inventing computer programming, and being stuck in a cabin with him during crazy weather patterns caused by the largest volcanic eruption in modern history on the other side of the globe directly led to the invention of the genres of science fiction and gothic horror

[brightlotusmoon]

Tumblr dragging Lord Byron is similar to its dragging of Ea Nasir, but more verbose and maundering and blunt and intense, which also describes Lord Byron.

[kaijuno]

[evilwizard]

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i don’t get horror movies, why doesn’t the protagonist just act in a way which will prevent a story from being told or piece of entertaining media made

[fvckw4d]

Guy who doesnt like to think of himself as an irrational animal affected by fear and pain: haha why are these characters doing stupid things under stress, I sure wouldn't

[p0tasiu]

Idk about you but personally I wouldn't find myself blocked in some sketchy catacombs just because I wanted a stone and then enter a passage that has "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" written on it

[cheaphalloweencostume]

skill issue. im moving in the catacombs like a victorian sewer snake. pockets full of rocks. straight up clattering with illicit gains. hands full of skulls and gravel. velvet cloak. sunglasses; no sun. “abandon all hope” does not apply to me because the only thing i brought with me was 49 Trojans and astroglide. the only thing im leaving with is memories.

[nonebutyou]

feels amazing actually to love gdt’s frankenstein having studied the book at degree level and knowing that a good adaptation can include nuance and changes that support the original text while also knowing that i don’t need to pretentiously proclaim ‘um this wasn’t included so film bad actually’

[beemovieerotica]

[the-meme-monarch]

happy hallowing you can take TWO pieces

[mapleejay]

kitty cat purring gotta be in the top 1 sounds ever invented it's so awesome that there's a creature that can just be sitting and staring blankly at me but I know she's happy cause she's going brrrrrrrr

[frontmansdefender]

[gnar-slabdash]

Oh good, now I have a cheat sheet for Uncensored Nate

[teaboot]

I’ve narrowed it down to these three top reasons OP should be allowed to commit arson

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

Walking around with this sheet in hand and pointedly taking it out and methodically searching through it every time I want to say something

[recoiloperated]

This is killing me.

[blockiestone82]

Excuse me, sir, has to be my favorite of the list

[icecream-noodle]

Can we get these "New phrases" as Oblivion NPC dialog screen caps, please?

[wonderwomemes]

going to make this popular at the workplace so next time i go "excuse me, sir?" at the boss he will give me the look

[elodieunderglass]

I’m caught in the beautiful mental picture of an employee saying thoughtfully, “blow me. Blow yourself?”

And the natural response, “yeah, I do see - I mean, I blow myself as well. Hold on a second - hey, eat shit and die, motherfucker, that’s a push door, not a pull. Yeah, I know, the handle’s confusing. Yeah, i get it, I blow myself as well, it’s not ideal.”