The Grasshoppers Ate Joliet

Remember when I posted about video games all day? Those were good times. they/them 30 to 40 years old and do not need this

[theweirdwideweb]

[ceruleanheaven]

religion is so fucking funny the world is just too beautiful there must be a higher entity behind all this. lets oppress women

[nextlevelsmp3]

[exhaustedcatgirl]

Frankly, I think companies presenting basic health and consumer safety information as "boring," "uncool," and "not worth your care" should carry a hefty fine based on the revenue that company generates

[boobachu]

The lameo gay crap we're legally forced to tell you: You may die of diseentary

[artbyblastweave]

There are two intuitive ways to do an Iron Man deconstruction, in my head. The first is to go back to the original depiction of the character who, stripped of the 1960s anticommunist propaganda framing, is straightforwardly a deeply evil motherfucker. This is the tack taken by Spider-Man: Life Story, and to a significantly lesser extent The Ultimates, where he's portrayed as genuinely well-meaning but nonetheless deeply complicit in atrocity as a byproduct of his job and his Intelligence community connections. To an extent this was also what Garth Ennis did in The Boys with Tek-Knight, where the irony was that despite Tek-Knight being one of the more genuinely well-meaning heroes on a personal level, the power armor he used to participate in the superheroic lifestyle was called out as a truly grotesque and unjustifiable misallocation of resources that could only occur due to the ridiculous sway that capitalism allows a single well-positioned egomaniac.

The other method is that Stark's company outlives him, was always going to outlive him, and moreover was always going to metastasize into an unrecoverable force for destruction because once the ball was rolling it was never actually within the power of one figurehead visionary, no matter how plucky and heroic, to reign that process in. Stark loses the company during a takeover and doesn't wrest it back, or the sprawl becomes so great that systemic evil becomes an unacknowledged inevitability of how many systems the octopus is interfacing with every single day even if he's ostensibly trying to exercise oversight. Stark eventually shrivels up and dies somewhere while the Company integrates itself into the bedrock of global infrastructure and starts to chew. His ultimate failure was thinking he was a sufficiently singular heroic force that he could wrestle the corporate leviathan and win, or even try to tame it; ultimately he was less a visionary and more some guy reading passages aloud from the Necronomicon.

[galaxycepheus]

If your system doesn't account for the fact that Parents Are Going To Be Abusive/Neglectful/Insufficient then it objectively sucks I'm sorry I don't make the rules

[galaxycepheus]

Monitored bank accounts for those under 18. Requiring parental consent for medical procedures. Parental controls on personal devices. "We won't teach this at school because parents are supposed to address it at home." Anything that puts all of the child's power onto the parents' hand, anything that assumes parents are going to inherently do enough of a good job no one else needs to interfer, every single one of these IS going to be used by controlling, neglectful or unprepared parents and already are, and if the system did not account for that very real, tangible, dangerous tendency, then it's not worth fucking anything. You shouldn't make things "for the youth"/with children in mind if you are going to overlook this painfully common aspect of their lives u_u

[arte-artem-artibus]

Gustav Klimt - Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee), 1901–02, oil on canvas, 100.5 x 100.5 cm

[heckyeahponyscans]

I watched the live action version of "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" on Youtube and I was not ready for the utter lack of emotions from the CGI animals.

Nala looking concerned about Simba hiding something about his past, a comparison:

Also, in CGI this song called "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" does not take place at night.

[naamahdarling]

[xanaxfarts]

A tiny insect clinging to the head of a horned viper

[nattousan]

#ratatouille

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You must imagine the character I’ve created here wearing a suit and a monocle, by the way.

[thesilvertophat]

During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.

The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors. The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general! Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.

[doctorcigarettes]

Hanzo is just sasuke for people who wanna fuck dads

[chris-huy]

How fucking dare you. Hanzo has a richer and deeper backstory than that angsty sack of shit

[gavlan-deactivated20180830]

fanart of him fucking mccree isnt lore

[rederiswrites]

Look, I realize that the whole Schrodinger's Mitch thing has real political consequences on a national level, but since I'm not from Kentucky and have no say whatsoever in the outcome of the situation, I'm honestly just finding the entire thing grimly hilarious. Has Horrible Turtle Man died? We don't fucking know! Turns out senators can just not show up to work indefinitely and there are no consequences! What fun!

[rederiswrites]

Cannot believe this post is still relevant completely unedited. This timeline is utterly off the rails.

[occasionalauthoring]

pls ignore this i'm sleep deprived

jav i can't-- what the fuck-- why can I see it

.... @superman-creampieing-batman

[dailycatsblog]

[cjstine]

Jan. 10 Coord

[opendirectories]

[tanadrin]

personally i think if you need electronic amplification or a prerecorded backing track you're not ready to be a busker. go back to busker school until you are, or play those bagpipes with fervor like god intended

[tanadrin]

@yeebles

genuinely interested in elaboration on this take!!

ok i'm not exactly a neutral party here bc i cordially loathe buskers but as long as you're going to do obnoxious noise pollution with your crappy music there should be a point to the whole exercise, right?

and the conceptual value add of the busker is, i suppose, the romance of live music: if you just stood there playing your stereo and asking for tips in return you'd be like any old asshole in he subway and one who demanded remuneration to boot. busking is a performance, albeit a low stakes one. so the more you depart from that live performance aspect the more you cheapen that notional romance, the point of the whole thing

if you cannot perform to your desired standard with the instrument you have chosen, you either need to pick a different instrument, pick different music, or engage with the constraints on the medium as they actually exist, rather than trying to replicate the in-concert/cabana/scottish highlands vibe that this subway station is most certainly not going to provide. it's like painting one cloud on a photograph and calling yourself a landscape painter. they're not even like. sampling and remixing to change the context/vibe of a piece of prerecorded music. it's just a shitty recording of a drumbeat! the only thing i hate more than a shitty busker is a lazy one!

[0player]

Ok but why aren't amps fair game? Some instruments don't even function without one, and I feel like that's preferable to straining even the poor acoustic ones for more volume.

[tanadrin]

they make it harder for me to escape the shitty music by walking to the other end of the platform

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[untimelytophat]

@crabussy

[crabussy]

as someone in the field of ecological conservation, I can promise without a shadow of a doubt that people DO care. SO MANY people care.

I have to race to sign up to volunteer trips because even with dozens of spots available, people rush to devote their unpaid free time to helping the environment. these trips often fill up within hours. people care.

you will see a lot of bad news because that is the kind of news that people pay the most attention to. I know this more than you'd think from my optimism- not only do I live somewhere facing some of the most extreme ecological issues on the planet, I also spend my time studying the Bad Stuff every single day.

to see all of this firsthand and stay hopeful is proof enough that there IS hope. I promise there is good news, brilliant news, all the time. it's just less visible. but it's no less important or impactful.