Vox Datum

Given Voice

[freak-phone]

i cant breathe

[lolt64]

which means if i chunk this rock at him

[domicileensnared]

Reminder that this was so iconic that when Dragonball FighterZ released, one of Krillin’s moves is just “overhand chuck a rock” and it’s one of his best moves for hitting the opponent on their wakeup

[apatheticfluorescence]

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

[headspace-hotel]

Shakespeare is like this

[insufferablepirate]

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

Have you seen this shit my liege? smh unreal

[c3rvida3]

I think Joan of Arc's fursona would be a dog called Joan of Bark, but my partner thinks it would be a phoenix, which seems insensitive to me, but neither of us are furries, so I guess we don't really get a say either way.

[swiftrunnerfelidae]

I promise I’m not trying to be pretentious here. Jeanne d’Arc’s last name is d’Arc.  An overly-literal translator insisted it stood for “of Arc”, and that’s why we know her as Joan of Arc.  At the time, she was more commonly known as “Jeanne la Pucelle”, meaning “Joan the Maiden” or “Joan the Virgin”.

anyways since her main attack strategy was “hit them until they stop moving” I think she’d be a gorilla.

[c3rvida3]

*taking notes* What else do you know about this beautiful world?

[kyoshi-lesbians]

my controversial opinion is I don’t think Zuko was confused by “my first girlfriend turned into the moon”

[kyoshi-lesbians]

he was there during siege of the North. he infiltrated the spirit oasis. he has an uncle who studies spirits and the spirit world. he watched the sky go dark then the moon suddenly reappear like everyone else in the entire world did. and most importantly he watched zhao get eaten by a giant godzilla fish spirit.

[kyoshi-lesbians]

his entire life since he saw that beam of blue-white light in the south pole has been ‘this day has already been so goddamn weird’

[edgar-allan-possum]

The only really new information was that that was Sokka’s girlfriend

[library-graffiti]

Important opinion in the tags that I need to have be part of the post:

[clearascountryair]

Also, Iroh was there? He literally watched Sokka make out with the moon spirit. And you want to tell me that a romantic sap like him would not have immediately told Zuko about this romantic tragedy? Please, Zuko has known about this for ages, he just knows that this is not an acceptable situation in which to say “yeah, I know.”

[terriwriting]

Sokka: “My girlfriend turned into the moon.”

Zuko: “I know.” “Yes.” “She sure did.” “Uh huh.” “Tell me something new.” “Are we still talking about that?” “That’s rough, buddy.”

[alexseanchai]

[image: tags by samwisethebold: #it’s not that he doesn’t get what sokka means #it’s that how on earth do you respond to that]

[uberguber89]

When you put it like that, this is actually a legendary display of tact on Zuko’s part

[knucklecurve]

filthy, filthy read

[stealingpotatoes]

I would give an arm and maybe a leg to see the PHM characters in your artstyle (no pressure)

PUT YOUR LIMBS BACK AND HOLD THIS INSTEAD

(links // tip jar!)

[northstareclipse]

A lot of criticism of delivery apps focuses on the fact that they offer convenience and variety, which I find much less compelling than criticizing the fact that the apps often send their contractors on fetch quests from Hell.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

I guess the opinions of delivery workers only count when they are politically convenient.

[hellenhighwater]

I've started the process of documentation on the last labyrinth, which is...an undertaking.

[hellenhighwater]

I forgot my favorite picture!

[hellenhighwater]

And here’s "Asterion."

[hellenhighwater]

And our middlest boy, "A Crack in the Labyrinth. "

[snoopyoftheday]

snoopy of the day

[headspace-hotel]

I’ve been reading about werewolves on Wikipedia and I just have to say. “Werewolves are warriors that descend into hell to fight demons” kicks unbelievable amounts of ass as a concept

[yorgen-sh]

The Chinese shoe manufacturer decided to demonstrate the indestructibility of their shoes

[scarlettohairdye]

And also the indestructibility of that woman's ankles

[animalwoonz]

Personal space? Nope - never heard of it.

[alaimo]

Is that…… them

[goatguy7399]

YALL THERES MORE TO THE SERIES

[amrv-5]

Does anyone know what to do about the temperature and also the prices

[nightonblogmountain]

[demilypyro]

it's funny how "press F to pay respects" was such a gigantic meme that it seems to have permanently affected the way we talk online. people use it completely genuinely and unironically. had a bad day? F. died in a videogame? F. I see it constantly in Discord, Twitch and ingame chats. like it's actually being used as common shorthand. when it only gained prominence because of how hilariously stupid this screenshot is

[northern-punk-lad]

Being prime minister of the uk has a higher regret rate than being trans

So the solution is to ban prime ministers

[northern-punk-lad]

[the-goddess-of-annoying]

Image ID: a screenshot of tags that say #uk politics #before being allowed to run for party leadership politicians should get two letters from psychologists or psychiatrists #diagnosing them with severe political ambitions that cannot be alleviated by any other means #also there should be long waiting times for those assessments because maybe they're just faking for attention #allowing politicians to become party leaders should be an absolute last resort #especially if there's a reasonable chance it could lead to becoming prime minister #we need to protect them from themselves they don't know what they're doing /end ID

[gallusrostromegalus]

I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

His process for unloading the fireworks is to 1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls. 2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things. 3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed 4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup. 5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her. 6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house. 7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too. 8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate 9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed 10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.

Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man? Answer: Absolutely Not.

There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else. (This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual) Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally. Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.

I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.

However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up. and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop" And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."

For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."

I move under the eaves. "Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled." "Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not." "Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."

Sometimes, the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.

The Gods were not merciful today.

It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this, But I got to see it today. Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before. Oh. I realized as it got closer. That's RAIN.

Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say, five to tent square miles, is instead concentrated into an area of say, my neighborhood exactly.

So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.

The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel. Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge. Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.

My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp. They do not have a tarp. They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.

Which is when the hail begins.

"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy. "HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!" "OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"

I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic. The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor. Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.

So. I was raised Agnostic -but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.

---

(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)

[sweaterkittensahoy]

shout out to everyone who has any sort of maintenance job whether it's a custodian or a mechanic or a furnace repair person or a pool cleaner or a housekeeper or anything where someone shows up or I go to you, and my shit is taken care of.

big appreciation for the maintenance people

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Huge fan of when I have a problem that I have no idea how to handle (or no time/tools/physical strength to handle) and I call A Guy who knows how to handle it and they come and handle it for me.