[ivyinacup]

The OC is a four-year-old Togruta youngling named Rabra Ti. Her coloration is white with purple markings, and she is a vicious and mighty huntress. Her favorite plushie is a rathtar. She lives in a crossover universe where Obi-Wan saved a handful of younglings from the Temple massacre and fled, ending up in a (better, less dark) version of the Witcher world. Some of her highlights include: stalking and hunting people’s ankles (especially those of Ivar Evil-Eye, who is delighted by her ferocity), being taught to cat by a big orange tom named Thump, wrapping her whole self around an obstacle course sandbag and chomping it fiercely, learning the word “Fuck” and being absolutely delighted by it, occasionally trying to eat the other younglings when she’s mad at them, and being nicknamed “Little Rabbit” by Ivar Evil-Eye and then being highly offended when she finds out what a rabbit actually is.

She felt like an axe kid

[hearthburn]

This is AMAZING!

[only-tiktoks]

[raevenlywrites]

OH MY GOD THAT WAS AMAZING

[girlgerard]

i’m so sick of people saying hannibal is bad queer representation because he’s a villain.

[girlgerard]

queer coding villians is a problem because their queerness is written to be the reason they’re evil. it’s an adjective used to make them more lecherous, more sinful. this is a huge problem, but if you conclude that problem by saying ‘villians can never be written as queer and the only good lgbt rep we can have are pure, morally perfect characters’, you’re completely missing the point.

hannibal is a fantastically written queer villian because his queerness has no influence over his sadism. him being evil has absolutely nothing to do with him being queer. he’s evil because he murders, manipulates, and cannibalizes people. he’s queer because he’s in love with a man.

as opposed to classic queer coded villians, hannibal being in love with will is seen as the only truly good part about him - that he’s capable of love, rather than simply violence.

let us have queer villians. queer antiheros. queer morally-gray characters. queerness in fiction being accepted only when it’s in relation to absolutely perfect gold-hearted characters is ridiculous. ‘good queer representation’ isn’t isolated to morally good characters. good queer representation is when a character’s queerness has no hold over their moral compass at all.

[bubblegum-bee-otch]

Tl:dr

A character being a villain because they're queer: Bad

A character being a villain who also happens to be queer: Good

[aqueerkettleofish]

As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

That’s ridiculous.  In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters.  Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level. 

[covington-shenanigans]

Proposal for a Watsonian explanation:

In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:

1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”

2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.

3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.

4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)

The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.

[aqueerkettleofish]

Hmm.  This is a fair point.  It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter.  Wasn’t made in Texas.”

I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well.  I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients. 

[math-is-magic]

1. It is not just hipsters that act like this about food. All the grandmothers I know feel this way too, and I don’t see that ever changing.

[mermaidelephant]

The missing ingredient is love, obviously. You can’t get that from a replicator.

[aqueerkettleofish]

Right, for that you need the holodeck.

[lemonsharks]

Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here: 

The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better. 

Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us. 

First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat. 

You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales. 

You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship. 

You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow  your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass. 

The tamale tastes like home. 

You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it. 

Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and 

Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods. 

The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma. 

Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste. 

Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better? 

Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it. 

And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.

I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.

Fourth:

You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement. 

The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea. 

It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge. 

If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does. 

[taraljc]

holy shit boo this is fucking AMAZEBALLS and I miss the tamale ladies at Stone on the way to the Target so much right now but also you *hugs you tight*

[subbyp]

Also, regional recipes are calibrated to work with the local tap water. That’s why pizza from New York and sourdough from San Francisco taste better–the micro-organisms in the water enhance the flavor. The chili that wasn’t made in Texas probably did taste subtly different than it would’ve back home.

[united-federation-of-trek]

There are lots of things that would change with replicators because they take out the human factor.

Maybe you really wanted that one meal from that one restaurant except the restaurant doesn’t release their recipe so it’s slightly off and always will be.

You programmed the replicator with your mum’s favourite mac and cheese recipe, but you didn’t know that your mum always added a little more salt and a little less mustard than the recipe called for, so it’s just not the same and it’s not as good.

[alarajrogers]

Pretty much this. Also I think we cannot overstate the degree to which “the food always comes out exactly the same” would end up bothering people over time.

[jagatcurious]

Important point is that these are “military grade” food replicators and military food is never really great. Hence the difficulty with the tea. Food replicators in private homes and restaurants are more controllable and may have programming for varieties of chilies or tomatoes or even carrots. There are 4 basic kinds of carrots but only one is available commercially, the others need to be grown at home. With a programmable home replicator one can have chantenay carrots… all the infinite varieties of foodstuff ingredients will be available with the right programming and therefore civilians in the 24th century in star trek will have perfectly customisable food. My mind is boggled now…

[kraznyoktyabr]

For a real-world example, but in the other direction:

When I was a child, my mother used to make chili using “Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix.” It made… okay chili.

When I was in college I found a book called “Chili Madness” at a local used bookstore, that had the winning recipes from the National Chili Cookoff for the last 30 years. It included Carroll Shelby’s actual recipe. So I made it. (Had to get one of my apartment mates to source beer for me, as I was not of age to purchase it yet.)

Wow. What a difference. Adding the spices at different times rather than as a blob of “spice mix”. Beer instead of water. No masa. So good!

So the bagged mix would be the replicator mix in this scenario.

[kaldurcalm-deactivated20240513]

@subbyp you said what about the tap water?

[subbyp]

It has microscopic crustaceans in it.

[kyraneko]

The microorganisms are different, if not missing.

The process of creating it is removed, along with all that entails: this spice left to simmer for the entire cooking time, that fresh leafy thing added in just at the end, a tiny bit heat-wilted.

The quality, not in terms of “is it good” but “what characteristics does it have,” the difference between grass-fed beef and corn-fed, mast-raised pork and commercial feed, how much sunshine did the animal get, what breed is it, how much exercise did it get.

What soil microbes mingled with the roots of that plant and what was planted next to it and how many rainy days did it get and how much sun? You have wine connoisseurs talking about how this or that year was “a good year” because of how the patterns of temperature and sun and rain hit the vines, and everybody has a memory of getting a really good batch of blueberries from the store ONCE and wishing they could all be like that.

When I was a kid we picked strawberries at you-pick fields that don’t seem to be around anymore, and they tasted so much better than anything I’ve ever gotten from a store.

One of the things that screws up my suspension of disbelief in Star Trek is how weirdly specific and intuitive the computers both are and aren’t, at the same time. Picard always has to say “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” at the replicator so there’s obviously no means of personalization where the replicator knows if it’s Picard asking for tea, he wants it Earl Grey and you can just jump to that unless he specifies otherwise, but also that one time he was able to pull up the musical recording of HMS Pinafore on the working screen of a shuttle by pressing just two buttons, and there weren’t a whole lot of buttons on either screens, so what the fuck?

Anyway there’s probably a shitload of data storage in a Federation starship, but are they really going to fill it up with enough molecular data to store

every extant cultivar

of every food plant

at every stage of edible ripeness

prepared every way it’s commonly prepared

in combination with every other ingredient whose presence or absence affects its taste?

Plus every cut of every food animal

with all the variables of how it might have been raised, and then

with every variable of preparation?

If you bake bread it will taste differently based on how you let it rise, at what temperature, if you put it in the fridge overnight and then let it rise, if you use a starter or a pre-ferment, as well as what yeast you use and how you knead it and what flour and what water and the temperature and shape of the oven and the atmospheric pressure and humidity of the day and the altitude you’re doing your baking at and

that’s

ONE

type

of

food

and you can’t just reduce all that into “bread, artisan, sliced” or whatever

don’t get me started on the butter

or the absolute multitude of things that you could mean when you say you want “chili”

and even if you go into the Settings menu the first time you take a Starfleet posting and spend hours on end going into detail about what varieties of peppers should go into each of your favorite Mexican dishes and how much crispiness is The Correct Amount Of Crispiness in your bacon (and how thick it should be and how it should be smoked and seasoned) and how big and numerous you want the holes in your sandwich bread to be

you’re still gonna find yourself missing the taco truck and the tamale lady and that one bakery and the sort of fried rice you get when you throw six days’ worth of leftovers in plus whatever spices feel right at the time.

[bisexualbaker]

As a professional baker and someone who absolutely believes in the power of food and its impact on people, I will say this:

I have every reason to believe that a lot of disabled people love replicator food, sometimes for the very reasons outlined above.

Are there disabled people who will mourn than specific foods will never taste quite right? Absolutely!

But there are also disabled people who have their preferences memorized down to the last chemical detail and know how to make the replicators dance. There are disabled people who, upon the popularization of food replicators, basically cried, because it meant that there was all but a guarantee that, wherever they went, there would be something they could actually eat.

Sensory issues? I’ll bet there’s a list of standardized replicator recipes that are made 100% the same everywhere, so if you like it one place, you can guarantee you can eat it elsewhere. If even one recipe on that list appeals to you, you’re safe. Sure, you’ll be a little bored, but you’ll be able to eat, and that includes at functions with family and friends.

Allergies and intolerances? Even if replicators have removed all common allergens from their production code, even if the Big Eight (fish, dairy, shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, and eggs) are somehow accounted for, you’d be astonished at what some people can be allergic to. I knew someone who had allergic reactions to vanilla beans; not artificial vanilla flavor, but actual vanilla beans. I’ll bet it’s pretty easy to program a replicator to leave out one specific ingredient. On top of that, with how replicator technology works, I’ll bet it’s damn near impossible to cross-contaminate.

Specific vitamin deficiencies? Program the replicator to sneak some more of those vitamins into a meal, within species-safe limits. Going the opposite direction, like ADHD meds that you can’t have a lot of vitamin C with? No problem, you can turn the knob the other way!

Chemicals that interfere with your medications? No longer a problem with the push of a few buttons! Try our new doesn’t-nullify-things grapefruit!

I’ll bet ship medics have some sort of override code they can give patients, as well, if replicators still don’t cooperate for whatever reason. There might be some specific restrictions, so people don’t accidentally (or intentionally) poison themselves or others, but if it’s for something like adding a pickled green olive with a pit to a tamale, I know I’d look the other way.

[veryfunnymemes]

[blackberryshawty]

Like how bout you mind your business okay

[geekandmisandry]

I can only hope that you hit a tree instead of a person.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

as long as you’re on the road with me, putting my life in danger, it sure as hell IS my business. don’t look at your fucking phone while your car is moving. you’re going to kill someone.

[thecuckoohaslanded]

I did a report on actual studies of this for college.  It is part of a category of behaviors referred to as “distracted driving,” a category which includes driving while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.

The reason drunk driving is bad is you have inhibited judgment and a depressed nerve response.  If you are drunk driving, and there’s something you need to avoid or react to, you are more likely to make bad reactive decisions, and make them much slower than a sober person would.  (I do not recall offhand the name for the type of distraction this represents neurologically.)

Looking at your phone is something called a COGNITIVE distraction, which means your focus, in that moment, is entirely on a separate task, because contrary to popular belief, “multitasking” is not a thing that actually exists neurologically.  It is possible to switch between multiple tasks in such a way that you make progress towards both at nearly the same time, but within the same INSTANT, your brain CANNOT, by design, perform two cognitive tasks at the same time without greatly impairing your performance at both of them.  Even talking on the phone while driving, keeping your eyes fully on the road at all times, is a cognitive distraction that makes it much harder for you to pay attention to your driving and to the people around you, and even people who claimed to be proficient multitaskers, when tested, proved to be highly prone to accidents while talking on the phone AND far less effective at responding to the conversations they were having, because it is not possible for the human brain to do both things at the same time.  Talking on the phone while driving was found to be approximately as bad as drunk driving.

But it gets worse.  

If you are traveling at highway speeds, and you look down at your phone for just six seconds, you will have traveled roughly the distance of an American football field while your eyes were completely away from the road.

This, obviously, is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

A person under the influence of alcohol will have a DELAYED reaction.  A person whose eyes are not on the road because they are texting will have NO reaction.  In the event of an accident, this means full speed collision head on with no actions taken to mitigate the damage.

What every study ever done on the subject showed, unambiguously and by a CLEAR margin, was that TEXTING WHILE DRIVING IS SIGNIFICANTLY MORE DANGEROUS TO YOURSELF AND OTHER MOTORISTS THAN DRUNK DRIVING. You are both more likely to be INVOLVED in an accident and less likely to REACT to it in time to save your life and the lives of other people on the road.

Drunk driving is punished HEAVILY by law, and rightly so, because it is a reckless endangerment of public safety.

If you text while driving or check facebook while driving or do anything else on your phone instead of keeping your eyes on the road, YOU ARE MORE DANGEROUS TO YOURSELF AND OTHER DRIVERS THAN A PERSON WHO IS SEVERELY DRUNK, YOU ARE A THREAT TO PUBLIC SAFETY AND YOU SHOULD BE STOPPED.  Other people on the road have every right to hate you for it and to hope someday the law catches up on this issue.

If you’re driving on the same road as me, YOU TEXTING IS MY FUCKING BUSINESS, because you are putting MY LIFE in danger.

If you want to text while in transit, you shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat.

[nonbinaryartistsarah]

Friendly reminder:

DON’T BE DOING ANYTHING ELSE BESIDES DRIVING WHEN YOU ARE DRIVING.

NO “IF” OR “BUT” ABOUT IT.

[melodyofthevoid]

Hi, just a friendly psa: A CAR IS 2 TONS OF METAL AND SPEED YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST PAY ATTENTION TO SHIT! 

[aleatoryw]

my theory on why “agender clothing lines” are always so dull and shapeless is that it’s the same logic that makes people very judgey towards nonbinary people with prominent secondary sex characteristics, like breasts or facial hair. those things are gendered by society, so for a true ~neutral~ look, they must be hidden away. similarly, anything that can be considered masculine or feminine style - too much jewelry or makeup, anything with a fitted waistline, anything too tailored or boxy, skirts/dresses, buttoned shirts, even colors themselves - must be stripped away, leaving only neutral colors and items that are already considered unisex, like a hoodie.

this is nonsense. obviously. but clothing manufacturers still seem to think that what people want when they talk about “agender” clothing is something so bland it cannot be gendered. fully androgynous, just like the hypothetical nonbinary person with no secondary sex characteristics or defining features at all. what i want, personally, is more ‘masculine’ items that will fit over my boobs. i would like one (1) button up shirt that fits. i know plenty of amab trans or nonbinary people have mentioned that they want ‘feminine’ items that aren’t so short. and a lot of nb people love loud stupid patterns! we gotta impress upon the cis that nonbinary isn’t a third gender category defined by shapelessness and neutral colors, it’s an umbrella of different genders, and cannot be defined at all. and also that we love an outfit made entirely of statement pieces so the above stops happening.

[elidyce]

Just going by what I’ve heard nonbinary people say online and in person, there’s a lot of money to be made in a ‘agender’ or ‘nonbinary’ clothing line that consists entirely of loud hawaiian shirts in a variety of cuts, colourful obscurely-nerdy (I’m not talking Star Wars, I’m talking crayfish fandom or Ea-Nasir references) prints, comfortable pants for all groin shapes and dresses with deep pockets. 

You know, the stuff we ALL want. 🙄

[bourtange]

ever since sites like the new york times caught on to the private browsing trick to get around their bullshit paywall, i’ve been using the google translate trick instead. google translate isn’t restricted to text you paste; you can also paste in a url and it will generate a link to a translated version of the webpage you wanted. it’s this service you’ll be using

go to google translate and paste the url of the paywalled article you’re trying to read on the lefthand side (where you’d normally paste foreign text). set the “from” language (the one on the left side) to russian, arabic, japanese, etc. – any language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet. set the “to” language (the one on the right side) to english. it will generate a url on the right, and you can click it and enjoy

(the reason you want to pick a language that doesn’t use the latin alphabet is that false cognates are inevitable. if you don’t want to read an article that’s mostly intelligible but every instance of the word “after” is changed to “anus”, for example, you don’t want to go with german)

this DOES NOT work with every paywall! i just tested it on a number of sites, and it doesn’t work on wall street journal. but it does work on the new york times, the la times, the washington post, and the san diego union-tribune. i make no guarantees!

hope people find this helpful!

[3liza]

many/most paywalls can be foiled by putting the url into Archive.is as well. this has the secondary benefit of creating an archived snapshot of that particular article on that day, which is invaluable to historians and researchers

[nicolegendary]

that post thats like “how do i know dean’s performing masculinity? because sam isn’t” except “how do i know dean’s in love with castiel? because sam isn’t”

[nicolegendary]

#there’s no fucking WORLD where sam would be on his knees in front of castiel and tearfully confess ‘’i need you’’ #that scene just wouldn’t WORK if it was between sam and cas #why? why wouldn’t it work? SAY IT. OUT LOUD.

[stele3]

I only watched the first two seasons but I can tell you the exact moment that they made Dean Winchester queer, textually. This post isn’t actually about Destiel, I respect y’all but I want to talk about just Dean for a second here.

I don’t remember the episode number, but Sam and Dean went to (I think) a haunted hotel where there was a lady clerk. She mistook them for a gay couple and tried to give them a queen room; they corrected her awkwardly–which wasn’t noticeable, they’re brothers, I’d be awkward if someone mistook my brother for my boyfriend–and then Dean even more awkwardly asks why she thought they were gay. Which…still not quite tipping over the edge, he could just feel weird about, y’know, someone assuming that his kid brother is his boyfriend. Admittedly a big assumption to make, lady.

But then they come back to it. They talk about the case a bit and I have absolutely no memory of the details nor care enough to look it up. All I remember is Dean saying something to the effect of, “More importantly, why did that lady think we were gay?” He’s stuck on it. Sam breezily points out that Dean is pretty butch and maybe the clerk thought he was overcompensating for something.

AT WHICH POINT. The camera focuses on Dean’s face as he nervously laughs and looks uncomfortable.

It was played for laughs, but the joke only lands if he’s actually queer. If he wasn’t, why would he look that nervous? Sam isn’t. Sam was awkward when the lady assumed that his brother was his boyfriend, but once that was corrected he didn’t give a shit. People involved in the show will tell you that you’re delusional but they’re the ones who made Dean Winchester queer in season 1 (I think that episode was season 1? Coulda been season 2) as a joke. The comedy of that moment only works if Dean is actually queer in some way.

In the words of Billy Porter: “If it’s comic, people can stomach it.” They made Dean Winchester queer as a joke and then kept joking about it for 15 years, then the second that they treated it with any kind of respect they killed him off.

[blackpyrefly]

after nearly 2 years of near continuous isolation from the global pandemic i can say that the guy from the shining was a bitch i could do his job and not try to kill my wife and son. i havent tried to kill my wife once and ive spent way longer going insane

[hellomrmarionette]

Do you have ghosts and demons tho?

[blackpyrefly]

being online is the same thing as being psychically attacked by ghosts and demons

[penny-anna]

“It’s just a bit Harry Potter,” he said.

“A bit who now?” she said, earnestly.

“Harry Potter,” he said again.

“Who’s he?” said Emerald.

He stared down at her. To all appearances she was completely serious. “I can’t tell if you’re messing with me or if you really don’t have it here,” he said.

“It could be I just haven’t heard of him,” she said.

“No – no, if you had Harry Potter here I really think you’d know what it was,” he said. “You seriously haven’t heard of it?”

She shrugged, pulling a that’s all I know sort of face.

“Are you messing with me?”

“Okay, so like,” she said. “Just as a blanket rule, I’m not ever going to be messing with you about what we do and don’t have in this dimension. That’s just dickish. I don’t know who Harry Potter is. Who or what is Harry Potter?”

society in my NaNo

[heytatertot]

@nathanwpyle

I literally love this.

I couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes.

No joke.

[ask-a-vetblr]

I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?

gettingvetted here.

Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.

In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”

Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”

Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.

God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.

Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.

“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”

And that’s all you need to know about horses.

[lizziedoesvetpath]

Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia

[avoiding-claws]

Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.

[gallusrostromegalus]

My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:

Horses don’t got enough toes.

So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:

They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.

But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well.  Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides.  Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM.  So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:

The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.

When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of... stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync.  But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates.  It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.

When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that.  But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia.  Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.

ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier.  So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.

ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental.  Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”.  The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.

TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.

[prokopetz]

If you ever feel like you must be the most unobservant person in the world, remember: I once spent half a year failing to notice that my new favourite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the Ukrainian mafia.

(I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in retrospect, the fact that it was always dead no matter the time of day - I think the busiest I ever saw it was five people, myself included - well, that should have been a tipoff. Also, the waitstaff kept calling me “Mr. Prokopetz”, which I had assumed was just part of the restaurant’s gimmick, but given that “Prokopetz” is a Ukrainian surname, I’m now force to wonder whether they’d thought I was, you know, in the business. I just liked the pierogi!)

[moonbelowsea]

What I need to know is how on earth did OP finally realize his favorite restaurant was a money-laundering front for the mafia.

[prokopetz]

I’d like to say I put together the clues, but in reality, I just showed up one day to find that the place had been indefinitely shut down, and later learned it was because the managers had all been arrested.

[andersonsallpurpose]

What I really want to know is how good the food was?

[prokopetz]

Excellent, if your tastes run to the “heavy cream and too much garlic” end of the spectrum.

[toloveviceforitself]

Every crime front I’ve ever eaten at has had completely amazing food, honestly. I am pretty convinced that if you want to open a front, you don’t choose “restaurant” as your front-business unless you have a relative who loves to cook.

[prokopetz]

It tickles me that this is evidently a sufficiently common experience that people find it relatable. (Seriously, check the notes!) We should write reviews or something.

[onewit-torulethem-all]

did I just read the line “every crime front I’ve ever eaten at” with my own two eyes

[toloveviceforitself]

Look, I went to college and lived my early adulthood in a town whose entire thing was import/export, and we had a lot of restaurants that were suspiciously empty except when they were closed and filled with very serious men in nice clothes.

They were usually run by someone who was about the right age to be some adult’s parents or grandparents, and in the case of the two Korean restaurants matching this description, they didn’t speak English. Universally though, they were very pleased to see customers, very proud of their cooking, and very very interested in keeping us far away from the aforementioned serious men in nice clothes. And despite having huge dining rooms and never having more than a couple customers, they never went out of business.

Also, because I am very, very stupid and sometimes don’t think before I talk, I once said loudly, over the phone, while sitting in one of these places, “Hey! Yeah if you want to meet us, we’re eating at [place]. You know…[place]? You totally know it. The Front, on Warwick st!”

The looks I got from every single employee were amazing and then I left.

[cat--77]

We had a corner store/deli-place near our apartment in college. Everyone knew they were in on something and no one cared because they looked out for their customers and their neighborhood as a whole.

They started stocking my favorites because I mentioned them within hearing range once, would tell their “vendors” to move out of the way if we stopped in. I walked a different route home and got harassed one night and they asked after me. When they found out what happened, they declared “Consider it taken care of, you should never be afraid around here.” Never happened again.

Everyone needs their friendly neighborhood crime lord.

[friendlyfrankenstein]

This is both my favorite and makes me fondly remember home. Less of the  eateries, more of the mysterious retail joints that never seem to close despite no one ever buying anything, though. Well. Aside from the juice bar. Didnt last, though. 

[jupiterjames]

I found these places everywhere I lived. My favorite was an omurice place near my home in Japan, and a mother/son officially ran it. The food was incredible, and one night I was there and there was a boisterous crowd of BLATANTLY yakuza men eating and drinking. They started talking to me, and were super nice. Said they wanted to “practice their English,” and paid for my food and drinks and then said they wanted to take me to karaoke. That was a little alarming, but the mother/son, who seriously looked after me as the only foreigner in the area, said I should go, and the son came along. So we piled into a white landboat Cadillac and partied until dawn.

One of the older men at the party took me to my neighborhood and dropped me off out front (the car was literally too big to fit down the small neighborhood streets) and said that I had his blessing.

Which was confusing, but I was drunk, so whatever. Then I went back to the restaurant about a week later and the mother said, “the family approves of you. You may marry our son if you wish and be welcomed.”

I did not marry him, but wow. There were no hard feelings, either. They still helped out if I got harassed by the cops (which happened a lot in these smaller towns with no foreigners) or anything like that.

And to this day, no omurice has ever compared.

[not-so-terrible]

@temari-i-i

[probably-voldemort]

Not a restaurant story, but when I was eight a hapkido studio opened in my town.  I live in the kind of small, Canadian town where you have to drive for the better part of an hour to buy anything more than basic groceries (or to go to high school for that matter), and the biggest things to happen are someone occasionally getting busted for growing and selling pot, or elementary school being cancelled because a cougar had decided to take a nap outside the front door.

So no one really questioned the motives of this large Korean family that moved to town and had a martial arts studio built.  I mean, maybe we should have, since no one ever moves there, but we didn’t. (Or maybe we did, but I was eight so idk)

Anyway, the kids’ class had about a dozen of us, which was a lot for any sort of organized extracurricular, ranging from my brother at five to me at eight.

It was great.  Hapkido was a lot of fun, and the older man who ran it made sure we had a class at least once a month or so where we learned self defense well enough that we’d actually be able to apply it if the need ever came up.  Occasionally his “friends from Korea” would come to “visit him” and they would guest teach a class.

By the time I was thirteen, I had made my way through quite a few belt levels, and he gave me a part time job helping teach the new under five class.  A few of them had joined the volunteer fire department, the moms helped with bake sales at the elementary school, my sister was really good friends with the daughter that was her age, and they were all a pretty big part of the community.

Until one day when we’re in class.  At this point, I was still in the kids’ class, despite an offer to be moved up to the adults’ one, because I’d finally managed to convince some of my friends to join and they were in the kids’ class.

So, picture this.  An older-boarding-on-elder Korean man teaching martial arts to a dozen or so kids.  Parents sitting in the adjoining room, watching through the one way glass and gossiping over tea.  The door slams open, and a half dozen police officers come in, guns out and yelling.

We all dropped to the floor, freaking out, because nothing like this happens ever.  One time, my neighbours got high and lit their car on fire and drove it into a ditch, and the fire fighters had to wait around for three hours before the police finally showed up, that’s how much they hate having to drive out to our town from one of the near-ish cities.

But here they were, interrupting our class.

And the teacher?  He booked it out the back door as soon as they entered.

Turns out the studio was a front to smuggle drugs from Korea.

I was only thirteen so nobody really wanted to give me all the details and it may have been 2010, but the elementary school was still the only place with internet, so I couldn’t even look it up.

From what I remember, though, the police caught the hapkido teacher pretty quickly.  I’m not sure if they got everyone from the family or not, but I do remember that one of his friends was supposed to be visiting and teaching a class later in the week, so I’m pretty confident they caught him too.  I’m pretty sure they were some sort of mafia, because I remember overhearing a conversation between my parents about the amount of paperwork and meetings my dad had to do to convince the higher ups that he had no idea he was letting mafia members into his fire hall.

I also had to go to a couple of interviews with the police since, technically, I worked for them.  It didn’t take them long to see that I was just a nerdy little thirteen year old, and that there was no way I was actually involved in this mafia.  I got some serious street cred, though, and when I started grade eight in the neighbouring city that fall, I got a lot of questions about what it was like to be in a mafia.

I still don’t know how the police caught onto them, or why it took them five years.  I definitely would have kept my job at the studio through high school if they hadn’t been arrested (it was infinitely better than working as a cashier at the tiny grocery store), and I sometimes wonder how much that would have gotten me mixed up in their real business over time.

So yeah.  That’s the story of how I was taught martial arts and self defense from drug smugglers and accidentally worked for a mafia.  It was also definitely the most interesting thing to happen in my town ever.

[cenobitic-anchorite]

oh hey, I actually have one to add.

My grandparents raised racing horses, and when I was a little kid (early to mid ‘80s), I would spend summers at their place. Big breakfasts and all the feral-girl-with-access-to acres-of-wilderness bullshit I could get up to, for the low, low price of helping to clean out stalls and help birth foals at like 3 am. A steal, honestly.

anyway, horse racing is mobbed up. Has been for decades. My grandmother’s family had been in horse racing for decades. While we’re not Italian, do the math. Plus, totally different story, my grandparents moved to the Midwest to set up their farm, because my Grandfather wasn’t allowed in New York anymore because he kept winning cash on the table card games with some big players.

ANYWAY. Sometimes I even got to go to the track. I met my grandmother’s old school bookie once, saw the big track stalls where the horses wait. There are a lot of sturdy, well-suited men in these barns. A lot.

sometimes we went out for dinner after the race with these well-suited men. Little kid me, my garrulous old grandfather who served in WWII, my NYC grandma, and boisterous italian dudes who guided us to these unusually quiet spaghetti joints they knew.

I have no idea where the fuck these restaurants were.

I was a teenager when I realized I was eating spaghetti dinners with the Detroit Mafia.

[just-shower-thoughts]

An electric toothbrush and an escalator are two things that can stop working and still accomplish their original goal.

[randomslasher]

Ah, wonderful! This post can help me illustrate something I’ve been trying to articulate for awhile: the concept of benign or unintentional abelism.

Escalators and electric toothbrushes are perfect examples of things that many able-bodied people assume exist for their own convenience, and this post is a perfect example of that unconscious assumption.

An escalator that has broken down is still perfectly functional, right? 

Well, sure–if you could have used the stairs to begin with. 

But for people like me, for whom the escalator was not a convenience but a mobility device, a broken down escalator is not functional. 

An electric toothbrush might seem like something that could be just as easily used turned off as turned on, but for someone with Parkinson’s, or any other number of nerve, coordination, or grip issues, the function of the electric toothbrush is a necessary feature, and without it, the task at hand becomes far more arduous (or even impossible). 

I’m not angry or trying to point out why this post is “bad” or “wrong”–I’m simply trying to point out that people who assume every time or energy-saving invention was created as a means to help able-bodied people be lazier should consider re-examining those assumptions. It might help you become more compassionate toward your disabled friends and family, or at least more aware of the struggles we face daily. 

I’ve had plenty of folks ask for examples of abelism and I am terrible at coming up with them on the spot, so here you go. This is a great one: assuming every modern convenience is only a convenience for everyone, when for some, it is, in fact, a necessity. 

[adaswordlace]

^ When I heard that this is why all those infomercials show “impossibly clumsy able-bodied people” - that these random convenience devices are really made more for people with troubles like randomslasher describes, and it’s just able-bodied actors trying to act those mobility issues out - I kinda had to stop making fun of those clips.

[notactuallyasuperhero]

And the reason they use able-bodied actors instead of showing real people with disabilities use the product is because if they did that, able-bodied people would see it and be like “oh what a neat product for people with x disability” and not buy it because they assume it’s not for them. And even though that’s true, the companies need able bodied people to buy it so they can make enough revenue to stay in business and continue to produce the product for people with disabilities.

[dnd-apothecary]

^^ also the more able bodied people that buy or have a product intentionally designed for someone with disability is that it helps destigmatize it. Which is super important. 

Remember Snuggies? The blanket with sleeves? It was designed for wheelchair users/people with mobility issues so they could be warm and still use their arms without being trapped under a blanket. They were SO popular for a while, and everyone had one… which meant that if someone who was able bodied came over to your house and saw you had one too, it was less of a chance of being made fun of for it, and more like an opportunity for a conversation on about how they want one too. 

The slap chopper is also another great example. I know so many people who are able bodied that had/currently have one and sure it makes things quicker and easier for them, but someone with motor control issues or bad arthritis can use it. It won’t be an awkward “why do you have this thing” conversation. It is a “woah, I have one too!” or “I love mine, so glad you love yours too” sort of thing 

By selling/marketing them to able-bodied people, this makes it better for those of us who are disabled. It can destigmatize, which in turn normalizes it, which helps us become less Other and more Accepted. 

[thehmn]

I love when a show has a cast of younger characters and the older, more experienced generation that came before them. The older generation is always entertaining and Inside Job got the most entertaining oldies.

JR has come to be my absolute favourite. Between him moving his employees’ pensions to his own account to buy a Bond villain’s evil lair, buying a dating app to bribe the users, always carrying a sword for human sacrifices, being a sub, getting gangbanged by Illuminati people, repeatedly throwing himself on his knees in front of everybody in desperate situations, having a very diverse group as his top people and appointing a part asian woman to be his successor, you get a picture of a fun loving, power hungry, bottom bisexual man who cheated, murdered and slept his way to the top with zero shame but also happens to be all for equality. He’s an absolute treasure.

Take note: if people are unsure if your character had sex with the main character’s dad and/or Oprah you’ve done something right.

[gallusrostromegalus]

The worst thing I ever did at a D&D table was when our DM ran out of place name ideas and told us the name of the port town we needed to go to was "Bar Harbor".

So I tricked him into roleplaying the slightly-too-helpful town guard into giving us directions to- Well you see, the party has been out in the wilderness for like a MONTH, we're all a mess, the dwarf's beard is out of control, so can you tell us- Where can we find the Bar Harbor Barber?

But we were not done. We each took turns, like a pack of velociraptors.

We also had Dryad in the party and a few of her branches got broken in a fight and now her whole canopy is unbalanced and it looks awful, but she really needs to see a specialist, is there a Bar Harbor Arbor Barber?

The Paladin also wanted to look in on a small church he'd heard of, that the city had a patron saint, who was boiled alive in a cauldron of ale, so where is the temple of the Bar Harbor Larger Martyr?

It was around this point that Chris started to tire of this nonsense.

The bard, naturally, wanted to go carousing, and he'd heard this town had some of the most attentive and welcoming Ladies of the Night on the continent, known by thier brightly colored stocking bands, so had he seen any of the Bar harbor Ardor Parlor Farber Garters?

Chris immediately escalated to threats of a Total Party Kill.

Unfortunately, I'd had time to prepare and-

"What do you want?"

"I just wanted to know if you'd seen my cousin."

"...Your cousin?"

"Yeah, I know it's a long shot, but he's got a pretty distinctive appearence and you might have seen him around town."

"Oh No-"

"Okay so he's Welsh and the whole family used to be in the wagon-making business but he got into clothes manufacture until there was an accident with a lamp black dye and now he's permanently stained a sooty color and that really turns heads, so now he's got a job drawing in crowds for the city funded swap meet- no, not the Drow that also works there, I mean like the inside of a fireplace- anyway, he got tired of people mixing the two of them up so he started wearing this fancy armor with a magical +1 charisma bonus-"

"Gallus I swear to God I *WILL* Summon the Tarraqsue-"

"-So have you seen my cousin, Arthur Carter, former Sartor but now he's the Darker Harker for the Charter Barter of Bar Harbor, the one with the Charmer Armor?"

Amazingly, we survived the Tarrasque.

[pikablob]

You do realise Bar Harbor is a real place, right? It’s in Maine:

[gallusrostromegalus]

Important Clarification:

Chris the DM is FROM Bar Harbor, Maine.

We did this to his Home Town.

[thebibliosphere]

Honestly, god bless my wee auld Scottish dad. It's been nearly a full year and he's still telling everyone he meets that his wee girl off living in America wrote a book about vampires and werewolves kissing and I do mean everyone.

Half expecting a review one day that's just "learnt about this after sitting down next to some wee auld guy on the bus who wouldnae shut up about it. anyway, no really my thing, but the patters good."

[thebibliosphere]

This is the same family I was afraid to come out to and accidentally did it by becoming a bestselling author, and now there's an entire call center on the northside of the Glasgow Quay that has to clock in every day listening to the wee auld guy on the front desk shilling his daughter's queer vampire porn and I think that's beautiful lmao