Madpie's Lair

This is a blog about everything and nothing. I pick up little posts I like and add them to my collection.

[dogpuppy]

[nineteenyearoldmeblog]

im fucking crying

[doppelgangerleaverite]

i just really feel seen on this website

[bloodiedopera]

My ambient (non-diagetic) playlists for Delta Green

Ease - For home scenes, briefings, and in general where there's no (known) immediate threat. Droning synth, piano, calm grunge guitar.

Tension - For uneasy situations, sneaking into places, when there might be something lurking around every corner. Eerie droning synth, slow drums, music distortion.

Investigating - For checking over crime scenes, interviewing suspects and witnesses, and diving into old files. Quick beat synth, grunge guitar, steady beats.

Combat - For when the gun goes off, desperate struggles, and maybe a chase. Rock gutair and drums, electronic beats, distortions.

Unnatural - For that which is unknowable. Eerie weird crap

[haron-stoneham]

I feel bad for the restricted section of Miskatonic university. Everytime it shows up in a story someone or something breaks in and an average of one professor ends up dead.

[probablyfunrpgideas]

Campaign Idea:

All the characters are substitute teachers, called in to cover a wide assortment of classes for Miskatonic faculty who have been possessed by fractals or crushed by Eihort or something. They get pulled into ongoing investigations by students, and need to survive the eldritch horrors while also figuring out how to grade papers in Ancient Greek (I can’t believe I said “fluent” on my resume, I thought I’d only be here for a week!)

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

today I found out my mother doesn’t know what dandelions are and now I’m wondering what other strange secrets she’s been quietly harboring

[krystal-prisms]

Where do you live that you don’t have dandelions?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

So after extensive interrogation I have an update:

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

gosh I enjoy this website

[authoratmidnight]

For comparison, this is a daffodil

[quietlygrousing]

See, folks in the southern US will tell you up and down those are buttercups, actually.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i don’t think so? i’m southern and buttercups are what we call these things (much tinier)

[maejacrezz007]

Wait I thought those bigger cup ones were Easter Lillies???

[fractiousrvt]

This is an Easter Lily. It is an actual lily and therefore deadly to cats.

[blood-trip-god2]

They’re marigolds and I know a bitch when I see one!

[delphinidin4]

This is a marigold:

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

….we need to start taking the phrase “go touch grass” more literally. go outside and examine a flower i beg u

[jmtorres]

“buttercups” is a name applied to MANY flowers. in my part of the south it was this one:

imo there’s correct identifications of dandelions, daffodils, easter lilies and marigolds in this thread, but buttercups are simply impossible to agree on and the only solution is for everyone to post pictures of their local buttercups

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

*squints* is that a motherfucking EVENING PRIMROSE?!??

[demon-and-human]

Hello I would like to add to the confusion:

That purple fella is a Morning Glory as told by my mothers (texan)

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

⬆️ morning glory

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

#amazing work everyone hit the flowers

[unfailingeagle]

The air is oppressive. The wallpaper, the dry wall and even the bricks are stained with the tinge of rotten yellow. Mold, water damage, cigarette smoke all but the waves of entropy besieging this fragile place. I see it, The King in Yellow, Hastur is here.

“Is this AI generated?” I ask him.

For such a statement Hastur forces me to experience ten thousand years of torment in an instant. Each neuron burns with the suffering of a dying sun.

[cryptotheism]

"Medieval Christians would have gone nuts for protons, neutrons, and electrons for trinity reasons" sounds like a jokey oversimplification historypost but I cannot really articulate how true that is. They would never shut up about it.

[ahopefulbromantic]

RIP St Thomas Aquinas you would have loved atomic physics

[maswartz]

[fractally]

This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.

[wisconsinwarlock]

Stolen from elsewhere.

[yesterdaysprint]

The Waco Times-Herald, Texas, June 19, 1936

[asneakyfox]

one of my favorite bits in lord of the rings is something the movies didn't really try to do because it's entirely internal, but sam's carrying the ring and it starts trying to do its work on him, so he's having these intrusive visions of himself marching at the head of a vast and terrible army, and he just starts laughing because, me? samwise gamgee? sam gamgee the general sam gamgee the dark lord are you for real? man i just want to go home and do some gardening. and the ring gets frustrated and it starts trying to figure out other stuff that would actually tempt sam and it's finally like, okay, but hear me out: imagine if you could have...A REALLY REALLY BIG GARDEN

[trapped--under--rice]

please behold the 24 Hours of Lemons race, in which you can only spend $500 total on a car to cross country race for 24 hours

named after the legendary 24 hour Le Mans race, Lemons rallies barely legal cars in an endurance race across America. had the privilege of sharing the freeway with this race and seeing the absolute art od this event

[friendly-neighborhood-patriarch]

This is so American I could CRY

[hogmilked]

oh this is nothing. some of my favorite lemons entries are:

an airplane stuck on a toyota minivan

this miata built by rocket scientists

the mr2 boat

the nyan cat bmw that i think actually played the song at all times

the homer simpson car built by uranium workers

this limo whose brakes caught on fire

the dumbest corolla and supra wearing funny hats

and so much more. 24 hours of lemons my beloved

[horsewheelie]

I'm never going to hell

[disgruntled-foreign-patriarch]

you're like that guy from the mummy

[inwardhardar]

[enba-and-luka]

[warcrimesimulator]

[keatxu]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[omikronsoul]

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

[justletmeremember]

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

[jollysunflora]

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality

[depsidase]

[serial-unaliver-deactivated2024]

[boopsloop656]

[sapient-simian]

Light Pollution: The Overuse & Misuse of Artificial Light at Night

Light Pollution: The Overuse & Misuse of Artificial Light at Night

[fazedlight-deactivated20251111]

The Dark Site Finder map lets you get a good sense of where near you might be good for stargazing.

[theunvanquishedzims]

[athelind]

The flip side of all this: twenty years earlier, when the freshly-minted EPA hadn't yet made a dent in the legendary Los Angeles smog, Angelenos probably wouldn't have been able to see much more than Orion's belt even with the blackout.

So as bad as the light pollution was in 1994, the AIR pollution had gotten SUBSTANTIALLY better.

(Source: Your Obedient Serpent lived in the Greater Los Angeles Area until 1978.)