The hbomberguy video is amazing, but the fact that he had James Somerton on the ropes and TODD IN THE FUCKING SHADOWS came out of nowhere with the steel chair is batshit way to begin the end of 2023.
todays bird

Andulka
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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NASA
Jules of Nature
tumblr dot com

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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cherry valley forever
RMH

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@theartofmadeline
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oozey mess

pixel skylines
Show & Tell
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
dirt enthusiast
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@paladinhistorian
The hbomberguy video is amazing, but the fact that he had James Somerton on the ropes and TODD IN THE FUCKING SHADOWS came out of nowhere with the steel chair is batshit way to begin the end of 2023.
Sometimes I remember that "I'm so fucking normal right now" is a line from disco elysium. like that's such a sentence from a tumblr post to me but no. harry du bois said that. out loud. he would do numbers on here
I feel like it would be useful if people conceived of causing emotional harm to others more through the lens of being the emotional equivalent to stepping on someone’s foot. Like obviously you can step on someone’s foot deliberately and maliciously, but most of the time if someone tells you you stepped on their foot you’re going to go “oh sorry I didn’t realise!” and stop doing it and try not to do it again. Getting caught up in how it makes you feel to be Someone Capable of Stepping on Others’ Feet would be a transparently self indulgent distraction from the other person’s pain, but also like… that’s just a status you hold by virtue of being human. Never ever ever stepping on someone’s foot is not really achievable, and therefore is not necessary to being a Good Person: what matters is that you do not step on others’ feet deliberately, and – most importantly – that you react kindly and calmly to any inadvertent foot-stepping you have been doing being brought to your attention, so that you can make best use of it as something that will help you reduce the amount of foot-stepping you will do in the future.
What's funny is that this was actually the exact metaphorical framing that social justice Tumblr adopted ten years ago or so; but back then, the logic progressed from "You still need to apologize for stepping on someone's foot, regardless of intention" (true) to "intention doesn't matter" (umm...) to "therefore stepping on someone's foot by accident is exactly as bad as intentionally stepping on someone's foot and you're a terrible person if you do it!" (No!) Anyway, I find it interesting that we're now using the foot-stepping metaphor to explain the absolute futility of framing this in "terrible person" terms (and I approve)
the grim reaper being armed with an enormous razor sharp scythe becomes a lot less intimidating when you understand just how common a tool scythes actually were in the pre industrial era of agriculture. it's like if we invented a personification of death called "the dark handyman" who takes souls by unscrewing them from the body with his wrench.
Couldn't stop thinking about that tweet, I love the idea of a god promoting his faith.
Fun fact I never got to share on stream: Tucker Carlson's most recent book did not make the NYT bestseller list. Do you know what book beat it out? Baking Yesteryear by that tiktok cooking twink.
Human beings b like. *sits and stares peacefully at a fire* *sits and stares peacefully at the ocean* *sits and stares peacefully at a sleeping animal*
a small rhythmic motion: is happening
us for 6 million years and counting: talented brilliant showstopping incredible
Fantastic reconstruction of an Archaeopteryx I saw at Southampton Fossil and mineral show. It was part of an exhibition of fossil replicas exhibited by Southampton University.
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let's try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.
"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it
prev tags, text ver. below the cut
I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.
a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.
a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!
I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.
now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.
but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.
This is obviously not exclusively a cishet woman thing but cishet women do deal with a different flavour of sexual repression than queer folks (not better or worse, just a different flavour!) and those fantasies really are about power, just not how you think.
The fantasy is that here is a powerful, aggressive, even violent man, and he wants you and needs you so much that he would burn the world down for you. The central fantasy of the romance novel is that the heroine is so desired and loved by the hero that he is both metaphorically and literally forced to his knees for her. I'm not with my books or notes right now so I can't remember the exact quote, but I think it was Jayashree Kamblé who said that this aggressive/Alpha male subtype of romance heroes is "a lion among men who is a lamb before his woman". That's the fantasy. It's really powerful! If your life experience has told you to expect to do all the care work and to minimise yourself and your needs to be palatable to others and to be grateful for any crumb of attention because you're too fat or too outspoken or just generally not perfectly feminine enough, the fantasy of someone going absolutely feral because they want you so much is really powerful and empowering!
Again, not exclusively cishet women, and also sometimes you just think a scenario would be hot if it happens within your mind where you are 100% in control and can just stop if it feels bad. That's also fine! That's normal! We need to stop shaming people for their romantic or sexual fantasies, especially those of us who clearly have no idea what a fantasy is and what it does for the person indulging in it 🙄
a friend of mine is a science educator. not a classroom teacher - he does the kind of programs you see in museums, fun experiments with lasers and dry ice and shit.
yesterday, a young girl asked him why he was allowed to pour liquid nitrogen all over his own arm but he didn’t want her doing it. I braced myself for some dumb “well I’m an adult so I’m allowed” non-answer, but instead he surprised me by giving some of the best science (and life) advice I think you can give a young person:
“well, it’s one of those rules designed to keep you safe. and following the rules really can help you stay safe, but they’re not perfect. sometimes, usually because they’re too simple, the rules let you do things that aren’t safe, or don’t let you do things that are safe if you know how to do them. one of the reasons I’m good at what I do as a scientist is I try to understand how things work so I can figure out my own rules for keeping myself safe. and sometimes my rules are little more complicated than what I might hear from other people, but they work better for me. like, I let myself play with liquid nitrogen, but only in really specific ways that I’ve spent time practicing. you should follow the rules you’re given at first, but if you take the time to understand how things work, maybe you can make your own, better rules.”
I loved this response. it’s a great encapsulation of two really important things I think people need to learn and re-learn all the time: on the one hand, listen to genuine authority figures; when someone knows more than you about a subject, don’t treat their expertise as “just another opinion” and act like your ignorance is just as good as their knowledge. but on the other hand, don’t obey anything or anyone blindly. recognize that rules and systems and established ideas are never perfect. question things, educate yourself, question things more.
and then, of course, a parent had to butt in and spoil this wonderful lesson by saying:
“but not the rules mom comes up with!”
everyone in the room laughed. except me. I gave her a death glare I’m pretty sure she didn’t notice.
because no. no. your rules are not above reproach if you’re a parent. the thing about the dictates of genuine authority figures - people who deserve to have power, and to have their positions respected - is that they are open to question. genuine authority figures are accountable. governments can be petitioned and protested and recalled. doctors must respect patients’ right to a second opinion. journalists have jobs terminated and credentials revoked if they fail to meet standards of integrity and diligence. scientists, to bring us back full circle, spend their entire careers trying to disprove their own hypotheses! you know who insists on being treated as infallible? megalomaniacal dictators, that’s who. oh, and parents.
I’m beyond sick and tired of this “my house my rules, this family is not a democracy, I want my child to think critically and stand up for themselves except to me ha ha” bullshit. my friend gave this kid the kind of advice that doesn’t just help people become good scientists - if enough people adopt the mentality he put forth to that girl, that’s the kind of advice that helps societies value knowledge and resist totalitarianism. and her mother shut it down because, what, she didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience of having someone question her edicts about whose job it is to wash the dishes on Mondays?
we already know you’re more likely to be a Trump supporter if you’re an authoritarian parent - and that this is a stronger predictor of your views on the current president than age, religiosity, gender, or race. I’ll say this another way in case you didn’t catch the full meaning: people who believe in the absolute, unquestionable authority of parents are more than two and a half times as likely to support Trump as people who don’t, and that’s just among Republicans. we can’t afford to treat the oppressive treatment of children or the injustice of ageist power structures in our society as a sideshow issue any longer. the mentality that parents should be treated by their children as beyond reproach and above dispute is a social cancer that has metastasized into the man currently trying to destroy the foundations of democracy in this country.
in short: parents, get the hell over yourselves before you get us all killed. and kids, learn as much as you can, and then make your own rules.
My mother is fond of quoting something that happened once at work (she’s the director of tourism for the neighboring county).
She was on the phone with my brother, who wanted to do something (I forget what, I think he wanted to go camping with some friends and she was worried it was going to be too cold that weekend or whatever)
And finally she got off the phone and sighed and said, joking, “When I taught them to question authority I must have laid it on thick, because now they’re questioning mine.”
And it got really quiet in the office. And then her secretary pipes up with “You taught your kids to question authority???”
Like she couldn’t believe that you would.
“You didn’t teach yours to?” Says mom, equally incredulous.
“No of course not!”
And mom says that right there in that moment she realized what was wrong with a huge part of the world.
Teach your kids to question, people.
For a short while as a child I had sanctuary from an abusive home in a lovely home with good parents. One of the things that completely shocked my taraumatized little soul was how deeply the adults respected children’s thoughts, feelings, needs and wants.
Whenever a kid thought something was unfair, the adult would ask why it felt unfair and talk to them about it. Sometimes the reason for the rule or decision was immovable, like, “this isn’t safe” or “this isn’t possible with the time we have and the responsibilities that fill it”, or “homework has to be done even if it’s boring, because it helps you practice skills you will need later on.”
In those cases, the rule wouldn’t change but the child would understand why it was a rule, and feel listened to and respected. And best of all, sometimes even if the rule didn’t change, an adult might help the child brainstorm ways to make it easier to follow the rule, or find alternatives to the thing they couldn’t have.
Sometimes, the rule or decision was for more flexible reasons, like “We can’t do this because you need supervision, and I have work to do which means I can’t supervise”, in which case a child’s suggestions, like, “What if I call a grandparent and see if they’re interested in supervising?” were encouraged and listened to.
This taught the kids, me included, so much more than we ever could have learnt by being shut down by, “I’m an adult and I said so.” The system was designed to teach us to make good decisions and to give us as much information as possible about how to do that before we went out into the world. Teaching us the reasons for certain rules helped us respect them and to understand how to make good rules for ourselves going forward.
In my original household, the central rule was “Do whatever will keep you from getting hurt by the person with the most power.” From this we learned to make choices based solely on fear of consequences, no innate ethical system, so we learned to misbehave without getting caught.
We learned that if you can force someone to do something they don’t want to, you’re allowed to, because that’s how rules are decided, the most powerful person always gets their way.
We learned that asking questions of someone with power over you is dangerous and you have to figure everything out on your own. We learned to keep secrets about how badly we were hurt. There was no oppenness, no conversation, no negotiation or questions or teaching, just fear and hatred and a lot of pain.
Which household do you think taught me the best lessons, the ones I can use to build a healthy and responsible life for myself?
My older son (almost 8 now, god) said to me in a conversation this year, “You can say no to anyone, even grown ups,” and I almost cried with relief.
Just to go back to tdf’s bit: “Whenever a kid thought something was unfair, the adult would ask why it felt unfair and talk to them about it. ” Y'know, after I ran away from home, if an adult had started a conversation like that with me, I would’ve thought it was a trap and clammed up. I’m not sure exactly what I think needs adding here, but there’s something about abusive parents training their children to not trust the absence of power abuse.
Source
Source
thanks to unity's downright evil new pricing model that charges per-install (including reinstalls), it will now be impossible to sign a deal with a publisher for your unity game because i can guarantee there are zero publishers who are willing to lose money every single time your game gets downloaded and installed.
great news, are you a marginalized game dev? awesome. now 4chan can organize a mass uninstall/reinstall hate campaign and bankrupt you in minutes. unity claims they have fraud protection but i must stress that it's literally not possible for them to determine where an install came from, the intent of the install, what storefront the install came from, or even if the install was from a pirated copy or not.
if a dev gets targeted by revenue bombing it's now on the developer to file a dispute
they also are just guessing lol
If you write down the results and properly format the paper, it even counts as science!
When I was in college, there was a solid year where our lgbt group did this with two bathrooms at the end of a hall that were used by like, maybe 20 people. They would put up gendered signs and we kept stealing them. And then we started writing random things on the walls INCLUDING full word for word copies of personal ads from the back of 1980′s advocate magazines.
It got to the point where the building management was on a hunt trying to find who was doing this and we had to start hiding our faces so as to not get caught on the security cameras. Our faculty advisor came down to the office one day and was like “do you guys know anything about this” essentially as we’re trying to close a comically full drawer of stolen bathroom signs, and we’re like “no” and they were like “great.”
They never caught us.
My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn:
Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined.
I like this so much better than the idea that our ancestors would be embarrassed or ashamed of us for being “soft” or some crap like that.
My ancestors, watching me stuff my face with fried chicken while studying: She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar. WE MADE IT
She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar
My ancestors watching me use my stand mixer while living in a small apartment and attending university: Thou hast kneadeth bread in FOUR hail marys??? FOUR??? And thou ist poor as a churchmouse, yet liveth in a fine cottage with four pounds butter and fresh berries in thy larder!! And two featherbeds! And thou attendeth the King’s college, as a lord!!
My ancestors being like:
Look at this fine young lady! She can paint she can sew and embrody, she sings and read
And without a wealthy father to pay for that, plus she is florid in the body! She doesn’t know hunger!
We did it!
Me: /wearily studying/
My Ancestors: TRULY SH— what? They? A little unorthodox, but reasonable I suppose. TRULY THEY PROSPER, FOR THEY LIVE IN A DWELLING WITH MANY ROOMS AND ONLY THEIR SPOUSE TO SHARE IT WITH! THEY HAVE DOGS WHO DO NOT PERFORM A FUNCTION! THEY HAVE MANY BOOKS AND DO NOT HAVE TO SPIN THEIR OWN YARN! THEY BATHE AT A WHIM WITH GENTLE SOAP FREE OF LYE! OUR DESCENDANT BRINGS HONOR AND PRIDE TO OUR LINEAGE!
Me: /yawns and sips my coffee/
My Ancestors: /cheer wildly/
Me: *hunched over at my desk nursing a headache.*
My Ancestors: “Truly, we prosper; see here, our infirm descendant need not even work on her poor days, but has the luxury to rest as she sees need! A doctor attends to her illnesses; her clothes are warm and free of pests; she cares for exotic and dangerous animals within her own home! We have found the height of luxury!”
Me: *treats myself to a pineapple and a bunch of bananas*
My Georgian ancestors: ZOOTH SHE HAS BOUGHT A PINEAPPLE! NOT MERELY BORROWED ONE! TRULY SHE HAS ACHIEVED FAR MORE THAN WE COULD KNOW!
me: [puts on warm socks and a blanket, is now warm regardless of the weather outside]
My impoverished Russian Jewish ancestors:
Me: [learns to knit from youtube videos]
My ancestors: Our descendant, the heir to all our hopes and fears for a far-off future… She can buy fine clothes woven and knit by automatons, with but a fraction of a day’s earnings… and she does… she has so much free time to do as she pleases… and she uses some of that time to do what we did.
One woman from rural Poland, who died from smallpox in 1717 CE, a grandmother at 35: I knit roses and peonies into my and my children’s gloves… it wasn’t much extra work to dye the red, once I had already cleaned the wool and spun the yarn, and to knit in the designs… and I wasn’t a gifted knitter but I was a good knitter, and I thought, well, it might not make a difference to how warm the glove is, but it made the children happy and it made me happy. I liked to make things beautiful when I could.
Another woman, a peasant from what’s now France, who died from getting kicked by a mammoth in 8995 BCE: [Patting her on the back] I made my family’s clothes too. Every day my sister and I wove and wove and tended our children. We went out of our way to make the cloth lovely. Not a trace of it remains anywhere on earth now… But it mattered to us. And she might not know our names, or know it was us, but evidently, it matters to her too. She has so much beauty available to her, in every direction, and she wants to make it where we once made it.
[everyone sobbing and high-fiving each other.]
A man from Britain, 1104 CE, sitting at the trans-temporal telescope, reporting on my doings: She’s stopped knitting and now she’s playing minecraft.
The other ancestors: Ah, yes, the dream of building. We know this one well. What vision doth she design now?
Telescope man: Looks like… Some kind of floating temple?
Everyone: [Goes completely apeshit]
Me: studying Marine Biology, out in the middle of the Elkhorn slough absolutely fucking covered in the most foul-smelling mud and swamp scum you can imagine, deliriously happy as I spot a tell-tale bubbling in the mud. I jump off the small dock and drive my entire arm into the mud like a Mortal Kombat Character ripping someone’s heart out of their chest, and pull out a 4lb, two-foot long Geoduck Clam and hold it aloft, triumphant.
My Homminid ancestors, who were doing exactly this with much smaller clams 900,000 years ago: *going absolutely literally apeshit over my flawless technique and the marvelous size of my quarry* CLAM! CLAM! CLAM! CLAM! CLAM! CLAM! CLAM! WHOOOOOOOOO!!!!
OH MY! I love this.
9-8-23
there’s got to be at least one trans woman named eve out there whose deadname is adam. and she’s the funniest person to ever grace this earth with her presence.
She’s right
I was honestly incapable of even conceiving of anything as evil as Unity is pulling today. Like holy shit. Will we let these fuckheads take our hands and arms when we give them a finger!?
Game developer unionisation is more imperative than ever fucking before now.
I'm very worried about my close friends using the engine. Some of them say they likely won't be affected, but can you really know? With the wordy, shoddy and vague FAQ they posted, they have all the room and us developers none. Fucking barf
Just googled it and damn wtf
After a couple years of futzing around with Unity without much progress, I switched to GMS in 2022 when they canned their internal gamedev team and started focusing on partnerships with shady transaction processing services instead. I figured that the writing was on the wall as far as their priorities were concerned, and the user experience would only continue to get worse and not better
I did not predict something like this lmfao
If you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity.
Excellent GameDeveloper article that perfectly breaks the changes down and how this company has been fucking gamedevs over for years now.
FYI when John Riccitiello was CEO of EA in 2011, he proposed a monetization scheme for Battlefield where players would be charged $1 every time they reloaded their gun.