Stand Tall and Shake the Heavens

(she/her) 40-ish

[kungfuwushuworld]

Miaodao

[pussyronin-deactivated20260120]

Me: my god.. i did it.. i killed him..!

Angel on my shoulder: we're extremely fortunate. You shot him in the side of the head and you're wearing gloves. Place the gun in his hand and set the house ablaze. Officer Goger's tragic suicide will be the perfect cover story

Devil on my shoulder: Goger was always eating stuffing and spelt wheat and steel cut oats. Bet he'd taste reeeeal good on a spit with an apple in his mouth. Come on, i've seen the way you've looked at him..

My tulpa, a 6'9" DD smokeshow hottie PS1 graphics anthro leopard girl in a lab coat: you must put a baby in me Your Highness, quickly!

[wheelie-sick]

sometimes people experiencing psychosis and/or mania will come up to you on the street and talk in confusing or upsetting ways. your job is to either have a regular human-to-human conversation with that person or politely leave. your job is not to call 911. do not call 911. you might kill that person if you call 911.

[wheelie-sick]

I don't even have the energy to screenshot and respond to your tags- what the actual fuck is wrong with you? "the cops are scared and rightfully so" "mental health calls are the scariest for cops" OH so this isn't about the safety of psychotic & manic people this is about piggy feelings?

and no, actually, this is not USA specific and no, actually, people from other countries should not ignore this post. police violence and sanism weren't invented in the US and they are certainly not unique to here. if you (or anyone) thinks that this bullshit doesn't happen elsewhere then you are not listening.

[headspace-hotel]

cops r Some Guy with a Gun

do we want Some Guy with a Gun in this situation? answer is usually "NO"

[uncivilliberties]

This is legitimately useful reframing. A while ago I started replacing the word "cop" in my vocabulary with "a man with a gun." It really puts things into perspective.

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

It makes it very clear what you're saying. I can call a man with a gun to threaten or hurt someone mildly inconveniencing me. You're not calling the cops, you're calling A MAN WITH A GUN into a situation that does not warrant a firearm handled by a volatile lunatic who will not be held accountable for his actions.

[headspace-hotel]

^ ^ ^

[cosmonautroger]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (sound on)

[veliseraptor]

The great critic Barbara McClay has written about the "politics creep" in every corner of human life, though really of bourgeois Anglophone human life, where every act from reading a novel to lighting a scented candle can be justified - and in fact, self-consciously needs to be justified in advance - as a bold act of resistance. Pretending that self-care is a brave political act detracts from actual political acts, and it sucks the life out of life itself: turning every moment into a performance for an audience, for an imagined crowd of other people on social media. This is other people not as fellow complicated human beings, but as fearful object, whose inner lives are imaginable only insofar as they might be watching and comparing and judging us for whether we've done enough, whether we're wasting our time. And books and movies and TV shows and every other form of fiction will always be, to some extent, a waste of time, as having friends will be a waste of time, as being in love is a waste of time, as every possible action or thought you may have could be considered a waste of time if every second of your life has to prove its value, and has to get a job.

from Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold

[wilwheaton]

I've been hearing this (or some version of this) as long as I can remember, but it was only today that I knew what it was. I'm so happy I found it, even if I'm like 150 years late to the party.

[dimmadoome]

FROM LEGOS TO POLICE CORRUPTION: The Bricks and Minifigs, Reckless Ben and Stolen Lego situation in a nutshell.

Ok. So it all started when a guy named Bryan Mansell went to a lego reseller store called Bricks and Minifigs to sell his 80+ year old fathers lego collection so he can pay for his fathers medical bills. Mind you, this lego collection is all OG Star Wars legos all the way down and worth aprox. 200k.

Bricks and Minifigs, which I will call BAM for ease of time, is a franchise and the store he went to was located in Utah. The owners of said location, Benjamin and Chrys Gorman are not BAM at large, they are just people who signed a contract to go into buisness with BAM under their name as a franchisee.

The owners put those legos of Bryans up on consignment. Meaning Bryan still owns them, but the store gets a cut of that money for selling the legos themselves. It is explicitly stated in their contract with BAM that they can sell things on conisgnment.

Corporate BAM comes in once they learn of the lego collection and takes the store away from the owners. The owners previously had decided to move country for Benjamins job so they had contacted BAM about selling the store. BAM just fucking took it. They sent a guy named Brandon Best (more on him later) to get the keys and kick the owners out. They didnt let the owners take any of their personal property out of that store. Not even their fucking bird. But in the process of this, Brandon does say, on camera, that he is going to take on the liability of the consignment. BAM then puts new people in the management spots of that specific location. Josh Johnson and ...well lookie there....Brandon Best.

The store then starts selling those legos and not giving the money to the old man who owns the legos, saying that they dont DO consignment.

In comes Reckless Ben (Ben Schneider) who is an investigative youtuber. He goes all out to try to get these legos back to the family. Even suing the two new owners in small claims court to get that money back to the family. Which he won BTW. Meanwhile the CEO of BAM ,Ammon McNeff, threatened the old owners of the store, which they have recorded, saying that if they take BAM to court, BAM will drag out the court case out so they can drain money away from the old owners. Even ending the conversation with "if you think this is a threat...well...it is."

His words, not mine.

So Reckless Ben wins the court case. Josh and Brandon now have to pay that money back. They don't pay that money back and in fact, Josh threatens Ben on the phone (recorded) that if he persues this, he will claim Ben stole the legos and SWAT him.

Again, His words, not mine.

BAM, Josh and Brandon close that store so they can get out of paying for those legos.

Ben, not to be deterred, files a second lawsuit. He can't get it to go through until he can prove that he has spoken to both Josh and Brandon about getting the situation resolved. So he does.

He goes to Josh's house. The cops are already there. They pull him over for failing to stop correctly at a stop sign, despite having evidence on their own cop car dash cam that is available to the public saying otherwise. They ash for Ben by name. Ben is NOT driving.

They get off with a threat and a warning.

They then go to Brandon's house. Brandon comes out but says nothing. He looks like hes on fucking queludes or something this man is GONE. He sticks around for a few minutes and then fucks off back into his house.

That part of the court case is accepted. They tried to have a conversation, it failed. Got it in one.

Now they gotta go try to talk to Josh again to get everything sorted out.

This is where shit starts to really go down.

They get to his house. Cops are there again. They get pulled over on suspicion of HEROIN possession. Obviously the cops don't find anything but they break shit and threaten this kid anyway. Hours later, Ben gets home. His lawsuit is accepted. Now he has to serve them papers personally.

He goes to Josh's house again and tries to get the papers served. Four times the cops came by, three times they were like "Oh are these papers real? You arent doing anything illegal. Carry on". Until the fourth time where they, ON CAMERA, confirm with the court system that yes, the papers are real and yes they needed to be served.

So they arrest Ben for tresspassing.

Ben gets off on bail after a week.

He decides to do a go fund me for the family. He brings a huge banner for it and puts it up on the public sidewalk across from Josh's house.

The cops are called again. They know its not illegal to do what they are doing. The cops go back to their car, talk it over, admit its NOT illegal, poorly redact the body cam footage saying that and come up with a convoluted reason to arrest Ben again. So they do on suspicion of stalking.

They try to keep him in jail for a month, no bail. A judge went over the order and decided that it was crazy to do that and changed the order to let him go with bail again. Ben goes home.

THEN THEY SWAT THE PLACE HE IS STAYING ON SUSPICION OF HIM HAVING STOLEN THE LEGOS! Remember that threat that Josh gave Ben? Well, it came true. Ben was arrested again. This time they dislocated his shoulder and sent him on his way when they didnt find anything of note. Still, The kid gets harmed, threatened and bullied for the crime of...making an enemy of this company and those people.

And then the cops issue ANOTHER warant for Bens arrest. This time with no chance of bail at all.

So he flew to Mexico and is right now, currently in Mexico while he confers with lawyers over his situation.

The most fucked up part of the whole thing. Every cop and judge that harrassed him was Mormon. The CEO of BAM and Josh And Robert are all Mormons and every single one of em donate hella money to the Mormon church. Like, crazy amounts of money.

I am not making any of this up either. Like there is body cam footage, there are doccuments, emails, arrest records, court orders, dockets, contracts ETC that tell the story better than any words can.

I am not shocked at all by the corruption happening here, but I am hopefull that this is a thread that can be pulled to its source, that something good might come of how exposed these people and their crimes are by their own blatant assgrabbing tomfuckery.

But holy shit. What a development in the lego collection sphere. BAM seems to be going full force into destroying any credibility they have. Because if they can do this to anyone, they can do this to you too. How do you know if the legos you are buying arent stolen? How do you know theyre going to honor your consignment deal? How do you know theyre not gonna send the cops to break your fucking legs if you express any wish to get your rightfully owed money back from them?

This shit is heinous. Unspeakably heinous.

[your-mighty-words-astound-me]

So we definitely need more positive representation of DID, but you know what would be funny? Mildly inconvenient representation of DID.

Oh the world is ending and you need to know about this one specific thing? Yeah I have a guy for that but he doesn't feel like fronting right now

Sorry what's happening rn is this the bad guy? Yeah I just switched in idk what's going on

I know you're dating one alter but we're currently co-con with another alter who hates you so idk how I'm feeling rn

And just who do i think I am? It's funny you should ask that I actually don't know right now

[thestarseersystem]

Wait I just remembered this. here u go :3

[munneknight]

honourable mention

[netherator]

[sockopsockop]

I just had to browse tags on this one

Anti mint guy is really getting me lol

[alanaisalive]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[iguanamouth]

oh shit

[throughshadow-to-the-edgeofnight]

[alanaisalive]

As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.

[striving-artist]

At time of posting, this is at 711.6k notes

29 Days Remain

[nelc]

Only 12 days left.

[triflesandparsnips]

It’s Saturday, May 30, 3:18 PM EDT

The note count as of 3:12 PM EDT was 742.4K.

We’re almost 258,000 notes short of the Committment To The Bit Tumblr Curse goal, or what I am choosing to call:

The Bear Nessiecity

You know what to do.

[suppermariobroth]

In Super Mario Bros. 3 (shown here in the Super Mario All-Stars version, but equally applicable to the NES and GBA versions), Boomerang Bros. are coded to have a 50% chance to jump every 256 frames (4.26 seconds).

However, the timer used to count these frames is not tied to whether the game is actually running, and continues counting even when the game is paused. As such, if the game is paused while the Boomerang Bro is in the middle of a jump, and unpaused when it is time for him to jump again, the Boomerang Bro will do a mid-air jump.

This is shown in the footage, where three lengthy pauses are used to force the Boomerang Bro to make a quadruple jump. With enough patience and either luck or tool-assisted luck manipulation, it is possible to make the Boomerang Bro ascend up to an arbitrary height, including completely off the top of the level.

Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: MrPyt1001

[plain-flavoured-english]

As a Greek, in response to the current controversy about Matt Damon being cast as Odysseus, I'd just like to share that one of the moments that changed my brain chemistry as a kid was reading a novelized version of the Odyssey and coming across the following description of Odysseus when Circe sees him for the first time and thinks he's hot: "his hair curled like a clematis and his eyes were very brown".

So may I present my own casting choice for Odysseus:

[plain-flavoured-english]

Excuse me???

[ruffboi-mags]

you are right and you should say it.

[instantduckninja]

Is this the face of a man who would put his own infant in front of a plow to avoid going to war?

Absolutely not

You know who would try that shit?

Is this the face of a man who would defy the very gods to get home to his wife?

You know who would defy the gods just to show he could get away with it?

[fluffmugger]

The last thing Penelope's suitors ever see:

[hemipenal-system]

when i say autogynephilia isn’t real in any meaningful sense, i don’t mean that trans women don’t get turned on by themselves being hot. i mean that it is perfectly normal to do so and many cis people also do that

[mousidy]

I always think of it in the sense that every sexual fantasy includes both a point of view character and someone you desire. cis people take for granted that the point of view character in their fantasies (generally themselves) is of the sexgender that is comfortable to them. who you find attractive is only half of your sexuality -- the other half is who you feel attractive being. transition unlocks that entire half of your sexuality for those of us who don't get to take it for granted

[blignick]

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[valeriehalla]

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and

the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.

Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.

In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!

And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”

That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.

Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.

It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.

The vibe with “Saki” is different.

It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.

There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.

So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.

The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.

Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???

Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????

[purseownervolatile]

I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?

Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??

[lexiiii-vt]

Like this, mostly.

[tonights-episode]

[doubleca5t]

The boobs thing is arguably even funnier

[lexiiii-vt]

I have an important update to this saga:

In chapter 299, the main character unleashes a special attack (???), and immediately after, her boobs DEFLATE BACK DOWN TO A REASONABLE SIZE

And then later in the match, she has to use another special move

And now she's completely flat-chested

In Saki, magical mahjongg power is literally stored in the boobs, which in my opinion is the best possible explanation for all this.

[powerbottombrucespringsteen]

[butimnotasexyrussian]

Reading the replies is giving me anxiety. Listen to me, children, if you are in the US and your company offers a 401k or some other sort of retirement benefit, get in on that shit. I believe most companies will do some sort of match, so for example, if you put in 3% of your paycheck into the 401k, the company will also put in 3% on their end, which means you're getting 6% a year in your retirement fund (not including any stock market gains or losses, which historically has been an average of about +7% a year, even factoring in the years it crashed). Even my grocery store job (ily unions) and the shitty temp agency I worked for for 2 weeks without a college degree offered a 401k. However, if you do not work for a place that offers a 401k, you can sign up for an IRA (individual retirement account) or Roth IRA through a brokerage firm. Mine is through Fidelity.

I didn't think I'd make it past my 20s either, but you know what? Maybe one day you'll wake up and realize damn, I'm 30/40/50. It's easier to put away even $5 a month now and leave it alone to compound interest than it is to wake up one day realizing you're in your 60s and have saved nothing for the future. (Obviously if you can put away more, do.)

And if you do die young, you can name a beneficiary (family, friends, a nonprofit, etc.) for the money you've accumulated in that 401k. This is a good primer. (Shout out to investopedia, which saved my ass more times than I can count in college.)

I also recommend @bitchesgetriches, who are great at explaining financial advice in an easy to understand way.

It's not too late. Better late than never.

[bitchesgetriches]

Thanks for the shoutout, baby. You're absolutely right: it's never too late to start saving for the future. Even if you think that future is an apocalyptic nightmare landscape, I promise you'll still be better off going into that shitstorm with money. When bad stuff happens, it is always the poorest, most marginalized people who are hurt the most. So if nothing else, prepping for a wealthy future will put you in a position to help others. We talk about that more here:

Season 5, Episode 1: “Why Save for Retirement When the World Is on Fire?” 

[once-a-polecat]

This was pretty much me in my 20s. I worked for a big company, and they would match me 1:1 up to 3% of my salary. Free money as long as I didn't touch it for 45 years. OK, sure. (I mean, they were also committing wage theft against me, but that was a different matter.) I changed jobs, took my 401k with me and every time I hit a job with a match I put away just enough money to get the match. There were some shitty jobs & temp jobs and such that didn't do retirement funds or didn't match or I wasn't there long enough to qualify so I just didn't put any money away unless they were giving me bonus money.

I'm over 50 now. My 401k has over $200,000 in it. That's not going to be enough for me to retire at 65 by any means (yet), because people in my family live a long time. But it means that when I got to the point where I was like "holy fuck I'm getting old, I should do something about that" I had an account with 6 figures rather than zero dollars.

[cpericardium]