One of Nature's Bachelors

doumeki shizuka is my son * he/him

[miragefannumber3]

creates a porn sideblog and you look in there and its just pictures of fucked up stairs leading nowhere

[shittysawtraps]

can i be a big hater about something unrelated for a second

[shittysawtraps]

ok awesome

so i have finished a psychological thriller novel, and have begun the process of doing research so i can prepare to query agents. now, my novel has some pretty intense triggers in it, so i am aware it’s a bit of a hard sell– that being said, many agents have a “do not send me your novel if it has these things” list, so that’s what I’m looking for so i don’t accidentally trigger someone.

so i’m going down this list, and i find this agent. their “do not send me” list includes the following: non-consent/sexual violence, age gaps, teacher/student relationships, stalkers, cheating, everyone dies at the end, miscarriage/pregnancy, and abuse masked as love.

okay, cool! everyone has different tolerances for stuff, and it’s perfectly reasonable to not want to be involved with a story that has stuff you’re uncomfortable with. not the agent for me, but good on them for defining their boundaries.

but then i scroll back up and they’re requesting for gothic horror.

excuse me?????????

gothic horror without pregnancy or miscarriage? gothic horror without cheating? without stalking? gothic horror without major character deaths? GOTHIC HORROR WITHOUT ABUSE BEING FRAMED AS LOVE AND THE INTERROGATION OF THAT DYNAMIC?????

HEY CAN I GET A GOTHIC HORROR WITH NOTHING???

THAT’S JUST A STORY ABOUT A BIG HOUSE

[fluffysheeple]

christian bad driver: my guardian angel watches over me, I don't need to look before I merge

atheist bad driver: I will rely on my own skill to see myself safely home after a mere 8 drinks

agnostic bad driver: no one knows where all these dents and scratches came from

[byjove]

Dr. Watson: You’ve never been gainfully employed, not once in your life?

Raffles: No.

Dr. Watson: See, this is indicative of the morally corrupt, bloated, hedonistic, impotent nature of the English gentry. Wouldn’t you agree, Holmes?

Bunny, drunk, half-listening: Impotent? He is not impotent. Most assuredly not.

[hazard-symbols-that-fuck-hard]

i want to see some absolutely dogshit, piss-poor renaissance paintings.

ik the masters were great and everything, but not everyone back then could have been a master. i need some frame of reference over here.

[valdevia]

May I introduce you to "The Ricotta Eaters" (1585), a painting I could only describe as Ontologically Evil:

I know it's technically competent, but it just has a horrid aura surrounding it. I don't even care about disrespecting the Italian master Vincenzo Campi anymore, he should have looked at this painting and destroyed it like a sick beast.

[elodieunderglass]

They’re eating ricotta in a way we did NOT choose to continue

[pippinstook]

oh sisko i love u like how u love basebal...

[reefsharkivist]

go back to sleep puppy *holds chlorophyll over your face*

[eategg24]

haha yay! *starts making sugars*

[m41-d]

i love this post and always reblog it because it reminds me of a game i used to play in the bath tub as a child which was called “plant sugars” and the premise was that i was a plant organism and i had to produce starches to store in my tuber

[kuttithevangu]

All fantasy authors wish they had a bigger bathtub in their house. You can tell by every bathing scene ever written into a fantasy novel

[youtuberconfessions]

[eccedeus]

While trying to to find this Chinese meat ball dish I saw on a cooking show I stumbled upon this website by a man who translates Chinese recipes and a book he published that immediately went on my wishlist.

It is the first English translation of one of the earliest Chinese culinary books and the only premodern Chinese cookbook written by a woman. It is also apparently the first work to mention soy sauce.

[cryptotheism]

I'm frankly frustrated with the coal vs nuclear vs solar debate in modern leftist circles. Ideology seems to be blinding us to the fact that the Lego rock raiders solved all this shit with power crystals.

[elucubrare]

i wish my brain were not full of gludge. i would like to be using it & because of the gludge i cannot do that.

[kremlin]

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

[andmaybegayer]

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

[ms-demeanor]

I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.

[emotargaryen]

one of the tweets of all time to me

[bookpdf]

oh this phrase is not going to leave my mind for a solid week at least. obsessed with this collection of words

[bookpdf]

le doohickie in question btw:

[nunchler]

sometimes i look at a dog and im like pablo neruda was right you ARE un león desorientado

[soup-mother]

Sober as fuck at the back of the club going onto Wikipedia and typing "List of birds"