Game of Thrones Daily
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The Stonewall Inn
izzy's playlists!
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
h
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Claire Keane
#extradirty
art blog(derogatory)
EXPECTATIONS
d e v o n
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
cherry valley forever
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Stranger Things
seen from Morocco
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@northshorewave
Announcing his controversial return to family life, local resident Uncle Greg told reporters Monday he will attempt to make his long-awaited comeback during a family barbecue in a relative’s backyard next month.
Once a mainstay of holiday get-togethers, the 39-year-old uncle has long been written off by those who said he could never recover from a decade of strained relationships, social gaffes, and severed familial connections.
Full Story
Just got back from The Odyssey. Not sure how I feel about Polyphemus falling in unrequited love with Odysseus instead of trying to kill and eat him, but I respect the vision, you know. Tumblr tells me that sex and being eaten alive are basically the same thing, emotionally.
Concluding that Americans were being forced to endure huge stretches of the year without any obvious social pretext for serving warm bread, a new study published Monday by researchers at Cornell University found there simply aren’t enough occasions where you get to eat rolls. “Our data shows that the vast majority of people would welcome more frequent instances in which a little roll is placed next to their plate, especially when the roll is warm and comes with a small pat of butter that melts right into it,” said lead researcher Arthur Guevara, adding that while rolls remain popular at Thanksgiving, Easter, weddings, and certain steakhouse chains, those opportunities are nowhere near sufficient to meet the nation’s demand.
Full Story
Little girl in the grocery store: "Moooom, it's coooold!" (which it was, I hyperbolically would guess they had it at 55 but bet actual money on it being no higher than 68)
Mom: "I know honey, we're just gonna be here for a little bit and then leave."
We've spent all summer making fun of the Euros for having the opposite problem but a trip to the grocery store should not evoke the same emotional reaction as your car breaking down in the mountains in January!
Never ask...
A woman (or man) their age
A man (or woman) their salary
Anyone, anything, ever. You sick fuck.
After speaking to the others, Kacheram entered his fourth auditorium of the morning. Over his years in this job, he’d learned that his maroon skin and broad, pointed ears made earthfolk think poorly of him. He was apparently a close match to any number of demons. Not that it mattered what they thought. Still, he wore his finest silk robe and combed his golden hair. No need to scare them without reason.
He stepped to the center of the room, where his voice would carry. “Good morning to everyone. My name is General Kacheram of the Ukhadi Army. But seeing as how none of you are my troops, you may call me Mr. Kacheram. I am here to tell you the truth. You may hate me for it. You may spend months, or years, not accepting it. But the truth is the truth.”
He reviewed his notes from Dr. Swaff, these in his own language. The 268 earthfolk assembled here made up two-thirds of a town called ‘Murrysville, Oregon.’ Several days ago, in the dead of night, they and their homes and belongings were violently flung through the portal that connected their and Kacheram’s worlds. One of the biggest Crossings he could remember, and one of the most eclectic. Plenty of elders, frail and confused. Children, too. Kacheram wondered sometimes at what point such children thought their old lives were the fantasy, this world the only truth.
“To those of you who demanded to know from your handlers whether you have traveled from your world to another—‘Isekai’d, as some of you put it—the answer is yes. Welcome to Ki Maak. Hope you enjoy your stay.”
“Now, the good news is, you’re not the first. In fact, according to our records, we’re coming up on forty thousand since the Crossings began, from 171 countries. If you count their descendants, we’re well past six figures. Many of their colonies are within a day’s travel. None of you are alone. Frankly, you all have a far better chance of living privileged lives than most people born here.”
“But none of you are ever going back home. Not now, not ever. Almost all of those forty thousand tried, one way or another. One hundred percent of them failed. What’s more, there will be no communication with home, even one-way. Perhaps the disappearance of Murrysville, Oregon has become a national obsession back home. Perhaps reality has been remade, as though it never was.” He clapped his hands. “Hell, perhaps you are duplicates of those people, and they are living their lives like nothing happened, which, to them, it didn’t. You do not know and you will never know.”
“I recommend accepting these truths as quickly as you can, and beginning to move on. I won’t pretend Ki Maak is safer than your world. I won’t pretend we have achieved your level of technology. I like to think we’re getting there. I wish you no ill will; I hope every one of you can make a new life for yourselves. But I simply do not care to hear about the family or friends or career or coffee shop you’ll never see again. I assure you, everyone within a hundred miles of this room has heard it before and then some.”
Not the main book this time! This is from that fantasy project I was talking about yesterday. This is very first-draft and I don't have a lot to say about except that I'm trying to do something with isekai/portal fantasy dynamics that I haven't really seen done before, and that at the moment I have precisely 0 of those 268 refugees sketched out beyond "basic archetypes".
Embarrassing personal anecdote that I apparently won't get over until I get it off my chest below the cut:
So yesterday I was tooling around horny-tgtf-fetish-rp-reddit yesterday, seeing if anyone could help me pretend to not hate my body for a few hours, and I found someone who seemed to be a similar wavelength: namely, they said they cared more about the experience of being, and being seen as something different, of living that new role (in this case she wanted to be turned into an animal or inanimate object, with an outright emphasis on loss and lesser-ness) more than actual sex scenes. To top it off, she was a trans woman in her thirties. Clearly we would have things to talk about!
Now I'm too much of shut-in to know if the 'dom shortage' is a real thing or a meme, but on subreddits like this it's definitely a thing. Everyone wants to be tf'ed, no one wants to do the tf'ing, so there are so many posts looking for a dom or a GM/narrator who will do all the acting while they do the reacting. Like most social tragedy-of-the-commons problem, this makes sense on an individual level--of course it's more fun to have someone cater to your whims without having to cater to theirs, but without some give-back, you're left with a male-vs-female-experience-on-dating-apps situation: the supply-demand imbalance just leaves everyone embittered and paranoid, after a while not even responding to genuine interest.
For the record, I did look at her wills-and-wont's list first, because there's a positive correlation between an RP partner who has very specific likes and dislikes and one who's willing to be creative and put in some effort, ime. And while there were a few things that were a bit red-flag, a bit "oh, so you're THAT kind of 'ethical kinkster'" ('don't message me if you're under 24', 'I won't RP with anyone who doesn't hate Trump as much as I do') but there was also a lot of "I normally don't like this, but I'm willing to hear you out" and "It depends on how it's framed or used in the RP" for this or that fetish, and one very explicitly stated "even though I'm queer IRL I don't mind playing out traditional gender roles as long as there's a bit of ironic remove" (I'm paraphrasing as best I can remember; I blocked her and I don't care enough to log out and go snooping around for her page again). So I was under the impression that she was, in principle, willing to compromise and do some give-and-take.
So I made my pitch; I turn you into my car, you turn me into a sexy woman. Perhaps it was ill-advised to phrase it as "I'll absorb your femininity to turn you into an object", but again, I was on the transformation fetish roleplay subreddit, talking to someone who explicitly wanted an RP where they surrendered their humanity. I don't think I'm faultless here, but I think at most I'm like 20% at fault. Because she then flipped out on me, yelling at me for being so selfish and trying to make it all about me, including "as soon as you said you were a newly-out transwoman I knew this was coming, like 90% of you only care about getting your rocks off and don't care about other people", which, I don't know how you could say that as a trans woman to another one (yes, I've accepted that's what I am now; doesn't mean I'm happy about it) unless you really wanted to hurt them. I tried to brush it off like "OK, I asked and you said no, no one's in the wrong, let's just move on" and she just kept coming at me with the how-dare-you and you're-so-selfish and I eventually said that if you're this much of an asshole over an honest misunderstanding, then RPing with you would likely suck shit anyway, and blocked her.
So yeah, not happy about it, like I said. Weirdly enough, before it all went down I had been musing on this post and how to give a take on it without it seeming out of pocket. Because I never had that relationship with my parents, and I know I'm lucky for that. But you know who I've had that relationship with forever? Online progressives and leftists. "hides passion because they were insulted for it" yes in fact I've been part of conversations about Problematic Media and Harmful Tropes, thanks for the memories. I am not the first left-of-center person to wonder why leftist assholes viscerally piss me off more than rightist assholes, given that the latter are more destructive to my values and, at the moment, more powerful. The words I keep coming back to are sliminess, hypocrisy, hollowness. When I see a social media profile festooned with all the progressive trappings, it is a reliable signal to trust that person less, to never actually be honest with them, because all friendships with them are conditional, the worst possible interpretation will always be the default, and all honesty is something that can be used against you in the inevitable schism.
If some drive-by conservative was somehow party to this conversation and said ""go to hell you fucking perverts" before dipping out, I'd already get over that. That guy and I don't have anything to say to each other under any circumstances. But no, we can't just be two kinksters who didn't vibe, she has to let me know, at length, what a terrible person I am, and how much of that is explicitly because of my identity, an identity that I am just barely beginning to be comfortable saying in my own head. The whole "if you were a good person we wouldn't need to have this conversation" act. Maybe I just expect less from other people, maybe I just don't interact with the worst of them.
I know the healthy thing to do is just realize that I interacted with one of many millions of extremely-online misanthropic, probably mentally-unwell assholes with impossible standards of behavior and move on, but clearly it happened at a bad time. Part of it is feeling if I keep going the direction I'm going, I turn into her eventually: lashing out at the world for not immediately and unquestioningly perceiving me the way I wish I was perceived.
"I don't think A is true, but I think B, a much weaker form of it, might be."
"So given that you think A is true...(some other bullshit)"
Anon, it's been a long week, and I'm tired, and you make some good points but people like you fucking exhaust me and I've had enough of that shit recently so you're going in the suggestion box. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Starting to suspect that some weaker form of "without religion everyone would act like monsters" is in fact true, in a way that's not convenient for anybody. Even in a world where humans were, like, psychologically incapable of believing in the paranormal, there are plenty of obvious prosocial, reasonable, even self-serving if you simply must frame it that way, reasons to not go around killing and robbing and raping everyone. But I do think that "without some prestige-having order one incurs social costs for rebelling against, the behavior of a large-enough-to-change-things number of individuals will default to socially-corrosive levels of selfishness, cynicism, and paranoia" is a much more defensible construction. It's only recently that we have the technology to potentially destroy everything beyond repair, at the low ebb of such a cycle.
Here's a poll from Gallup, another from the WSJ, both showing sharp declines in the self-reported importance of values/life goals like patriotism, religion, having kids, hard work, and community involvement (the last one they differ on admittedly; Gallup shows an increase, WSJ a decline) over the last 25-30 years, both showing increases in the importance of money. (tbc, I think a large part of the decline is justifiable--those 'institutions' fucked up in important and damaging ways during that time frame. But my point is they happened, they color how people see the world.) And I don't know if people have just never seen those polls or don't believe them, or what, but I suspect it's because it doesn't make anyone look good. If you're a liberal/progressive who thinks nationalism and religion are mind-viruses that hold society back, you should be troubled that sharp declines in their social value have seemingly not improved the world. If you're a libertarian who thinks rational profit-seeking can solve our social ills, it should bother you that people care about money more than ever at the exact moment the social order seems to be breaking down. If you're a communist who thinks that cold, hard material analysis is the only thing that matters, that the other stuff is bullshit exploiters use to keep class consciousness from developing, well, congrats, everyone's a materialist now, the opiates of the masses aren't getting anyone high anymore, but I can't imagine you're pleased with the state of things either.
It's been remarked upon many many times how shockingly nihilistic Trump and co are when you really break down their rhetoric: the flag-and-cross stuff is for the rubes, all he cares about is getting rich, punishing slights, and owning the libs. They say whatever comes to mind and don't care if it contradicts the rest because who reads anymore? This is in some ways better than someone genuinely, earnestly trying to reset the clock to 1954, worse in others, but I do think they're different. Because whatever you can say about American-golden-age conservatism, "a sharp decline in the importance of patriotism, religion, and family" is certainly not among them. That style of conservatism is flailing as much as anything is. Trumpiness is a cross-ideological phenomenon: the qualities that allow it flourish in such an environment also define the backlash to it. Everything you don't personally approve of is a conspiracy against you, everything is someone else's fault, no one you can't personally vouch for can be trusted, good-faith communication and taking ideas seriously are for suckers.
pop health science is so annoying bc it'll be like "did you know? eating strawberries will give you mega cancer" and you're like pfft whatever begone influencer. but sometimes then you'll see a reasonably credible article like "Study Shows Possible Link Between Strawberries and Mega Cancer" and you're not usually the type to follow that kind of thing religiously but idk maybe you should consider not eating strawberries? but then there's another article saying "Strawberry/Mega Cancer Study Debunked" and it turns out the original study had a sample size of 3 and was funded by Big Blueberry, and strawberries may have a small connection to mega cancer but only if you are genetically predisposed to mega cancer and eat 50 strawberries every day. so you return to your strawberry eating life. but whenever you eat strawberries in public someone tells you about the mega cancer.
Way on the backburner I have a big constructed-world fantasy setting (I've posted a map or two from it) that (to give me a base/keep things simple) shares a lot of features with earth (size, length of year, etc.), and with the various civilizations roughly averaging out to something in the 19th century, tech wise, I've been mapping out the population distribution of 1 billion people (600m humans, 400m other), roughly earth's population in the early 19th century.
...and holy shit one billion people on a planet this size is fucking nothing, everything is so so so empty. One country has 40 million people and still barely has the population density of Utah or Oregon and it's not even the biggest. I wonder if I should unprincipledly multiply everything by two.
"So jealous, literally me, hate to see someone living your dream" <- panoply of internet users who would crack and start desperately flagging down passing cruise ships after 33 days.
I absolutely adore dogs but I think dog haters are (usually) more justified than cat haters wrt their reasoning
your average cat hater: I don't like how they r bitchy and ignore me/ won't let me manhandle them
your average dog hater: I have been mortally endangered by an ill-trained dog
The intruder was actually a cop looking to plant some drugs and the dog went for the cock and balls first and he screamed "No, not my cock and balls! As a toxically masculine man, those are the load-bearing part of my identity!"
There, I imagined a made-up fake story with The Right Worldview and Deserving Victims to counter the imagined, made-up, fake story with A Bad Worldview And Undeserving Victims, you're safe, everyone's safe, everything's OK, everyone can drink a glass of warm milk and lay down for naptime now.
Darmanitan (2011) - Emerging Powers Artwork © Pokémon / Nintendo / Creatures / GAME FREAK
QUIZ TIME!! Take this quiz, then come back and answer the poll!
100 Different 'Pokemon' will be shown to you. Choose if you think they are FAKE or REAL. Goal is to get a high score so you can brag to ever
What Was Your Score?
0%-20%
20%-40%
40%-50%
50%-60%
60%-70%
70%-80%
80%-99%
100%! (You're one smart cookie!)
French on loanwords: "If you say 'Youtuber' instead of créateur de courtes vidéos destinées à être visionnées en ligne, Napoleon Bonaparte will come back to life and kill you."
Japanese on loanwords: "Just say yūtuuba or some shit. It don't matter. None of this matters."
Living that L.A. life rn (toxic smog, visibility < 400 feet)
