I don't remember finding fart jokes particularly funny even when I was a child.
Five year old me, watching a movie with fart jokes: "Oh, how gauche. They're pandering to the lowest common denominator."
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@theartofmadeline
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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will byers stan first human second

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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

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@phidauex
I don't remember finding fart jokes particularly funny even when I was a child.
Five year old me, watching a movie with fart jokes: "Oh, how gauche. They're pandering to the lowest common denominator."
I don't remember finding fart jokes particularly funny even when I was a child.
Five year old me, watching a movie with fart jokes: "Oh, how gauche. They're pandering to the lowest common denominator."
Mariposa's Submarine Sandwiches. Niagara Falls, New York.
[id. Foto de la portada del libro "Cómo hablar con tu perro acerca de homosexualidad y comunismo" con la foto de un French Poodle bajo el título. end id]
English translation: How to talk with your dog about homosexuality and communism
The answer to "How did these Ancient People do this????" is basically always
1. A lot of dudes. Just a ton of fucking people from beginning to end of the process.
2. Ancient people weren't stupid, they just figured shit out the same way we do: fuck around until you find out.
3. We're gonna plan this out and it's gonna take ten fucking years, and you will cope.
4. Sticks and string are surprisingly versatile and can be used for a variety of purposes, like moving stuff and making sure things are even and go in the spot you wanted to put them in!
5. I want to make this easier and more efficient to move. If I put this on the round thing and push, it will move. If I put this in water, it will move. If I get some animals and rope and have a whole bunch of them drag it, it will move. All of these things are a better option than one guy trying to pick the whole fucking thing up.
A good book that makes some of this practical is By Hand and Eye, George Walker and Jim Toplin. It is a woodworking book, but teaches how fine furniture was made before complex formulas and tape measures, by relying on tools available at nearly every point in history - string, sticks, and the divider, and a reliance on ratios over specific measurements.
Very practical for anyone who makes things, and a very clear example of how craft relies more on vision than specific tooling.
what the hell did I just read
Honestly im rly curious and i think the other poll's range is a bit ridiculous:
What temperature would you rather spend all day doing errands in
100° F (37.7° C)
0° F (-17.7° C)
This is a good example of why I’ve grown to appreciate Fahrenheit more over time. Yes it is a pain in the ass for science, but it is comfortably human-scale. 0 is fucking cold, and 100 is fucking hot. Anything in between is reliably in between.
Here's the part where he claims copyright over all of human history
Ah yes, the key defining feature of Humanity - working for money and earning an annual salary.
Also, why doesn’t the ghost bullet guy just shoot a bit to the right, then apply intelligent pressure only once, hitting the target with 1/3rd the ghostly action?
My latest Guardian Books cartoon
This is what it looks like when a community stands up to power. When ICE came for workers, this Minnesota neighborhood said: not today. On a freezing day in Minnesota, ICE agents showed up at a construction site in Chanhassen, intent on making arrests.
Two workers fled upward, trapped on the roof of a half-built house as temperatures plunged below zero. No heat. No shelter. Just wind, ice, and federal agents waiting them out.
And then the community showed up.
Neighbors, workers, organizers — people who understood instinctively that letting someone freeze to make a political point is cruelty, not law enforcement. They brought blankets. Hot drinks. Food. They stood outside in the cold for hours, refusing to leave, refusing to let this end quietly.
While ICE agents lingered below, the crowd did what the state would not: they protected human life. They checked on the workers. They shouted encouragement. They made sure those men were not alone on that roof, isolated and expendable in the eyes of a system that treats immigrant labor as disposable until it decides to punish it.
This is what solidarity looks like in practice. Not slogans. Not hashtags. People physically placing their bodies and time between vulnerable workers and a federal agency that has perfected the art of intimidation.
After nearly two hours, ICE left. The workers came down. One was treated by medics. Both survived the cold. No one was dragged away in handcuffs that day.
It’s worth sitting with that for a moment.
In an era when we’re constantly told resistance is futile, that enforcement is inevitable, that there’s nothing regular people can do — a small group of neighbors proved otherwise. They didn’t need weapons or power. They needed resolve, warmth, and the refusal to look away.
This wasn’t about “open borders” or abstract policy debates. It was about whether we accept a country where men are forced to choose between freezing to death or being detained. It was about whether we let federal agents use weather as a weapon. It was about whether community still means something.
Too often, ICE operates in the shadows — early mornings, isolated workplaces, silence as strategy. What happened in Chanhassen broke that script. It showed what happens when enforcement meets witnesses, when fear meets collective presence.
This is the lesson: solidarity works. It slows cruelty. It saves lives. And it reminds those in power that their authority is not absolute when people decide, together, that enough is enough.
In the dead of winter, a community chose warmth. And that matters more than any press release ever could...
Are the weird metroidvania ideas more a tribute to love of the genre or love of the discourse?
I have a pathological fascination with player-hostile design as an artistic medium. (Which anyone who's been following this blog for any length of time should know!) Trying to draw a bright line between player-hostile game design per se and the online discourse it provokes isn't productive – the act of play doesn't cease the moment you put down the controller.
That last bit isn't just me being glib. Let me illustrate:
Suppose, in the course of solving a puzzle in a video game, you put down the controller in order to make some notes and try to work out the solution on paper before picking up the controller to enact it. Was making those notes part of playing the game?
Suppose that instead of pausing to make notes, you text a friend and collaboratively work out the puzzle's solution with them. During the span of that text conversation, are neither of you playing the game? Are both of you playing the game?
Suppose that rather than having a one-on-one text conversation about the puzzle, you post a screenshot to a forum and receive opinions from ten strangers. How many people are playing the game?
Suppose that the puzzle's developer-intended solution is part of an extrinsic ARG. Does the fact that your forum conversation was anticipated by the developer change your answer regarding how many people are playing the game? Why or why not?
Obviously, there's a minimum level of engagement beyond which one can no longer meaningfully be said to be "playing the game", but my point is that pinning it down is less of a binary and more of a continuum.
I just lost the game
Also an example of player-hostile game design.
#I think if I was playing a metroidvania and the solution to a puzzle was contained in an external ARG I would get into a physical altercation (via @lord-freed)
Arguing at the resulting trial that punching the dev in the nuts was clearly part of the intended experience of play.
Developer-hostile game design.
@theemmjay replied:
What are your feelings re: player-hostile design in video games vs. player-hostile design in TTRPGs?
Player-hostile design in the sense we're discussing here is actually very rare in tabletop RPGs. Most tabletop RPGs which are described as "player hostile" merely prescribe a particular set of adversarial relations between players. (Remember, the GM is a player.) It's hard to make generalisations about tabletop RPGs where the text itself is hostile to the act of being played in the same way that the text of ergodic literature is hostile to the act of being read simply because there are so few of them. Normality, certainly. Arguably some portions of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist. There's not a lot of competition there.
(Some deliberately unplayable joke games might qualify, but the vast majority of them aren't hostile to being played so much as they are indifferent to the prospect, being clearly positioned as things to read and think about rather than to actually play. I don't think the pseudonymous author of Violence: The Role-Playing Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed (1999) expected anyone to actually mail him money to purchase XP coupons, for example!)
That raises a question though; at what point does "a game which the creator never expected anyone to want to or be able to play" stop being a game and start being a piece of non-game art that uses game-associated stuff as its medium? Is that even a meaningful question?
I'm primarily thinking of the various stuff from the @200-word-rpgs event, because that's my main exposure to Weird Games, and also because there's a few of them which I personally wrote as basically a shitpost with no intent or desire for anybody to actually PLAY it; like, beyond the NORMAL "I don't think anyone will actually play this" you get with indie games. Does it depend on if the creator has hypothetical players in mind?
Tabletop RPGs which are intended by the author to be read rather than played are a well established subgenre, and have been nearly since the hobby's beginnings. They come in several common types, including:
the deliberately unplayable joke game, as discussed;
the worldbuilding bible for the author's original setting, with some perfunctory mechanics stapled to it because nobody will pay for a standalone worldbuilding bible unless you're George R R Martin;
the essay about game design which includes game mechanics purely for the purpose of demonstrating its own thesis;
the game-as-art-project where the formal structure of the rules is the art object, and any consideration of actual play is strictly secondary to their function;
the lyric game where the process of reading the rules in the order in which they're presented frames an allegorical narrative entirely separate from any narrative which might be explored in play.
(This phenomenon isn't restricted to indie games, either. It's often been observed that many first-party Dungeons & Dragons adventures from the 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition eras are better approached as a form of esoteric literature than as functional play aids.)
A popular competition in the bicycle chopper gang world (groups like Black Label Bicycle Club, Chunk666, Rat Patrol, etc) is to build the most unrideable bicycle that is still technically rideable.
The idea is that it is easy to make a bicycle rideable, and it is very easy to make it entirely unrideable, but riding the perfect line between the two is an art form.
At various big events, like Bike Kill in Brooklyn, though there are regional variants all over, idiots will bring their unrideable bikes, and other idiots will try to ride them. The winner is the bike that has the lowest number of successful riders, greater than 0.
The variants I’ve seen can be wild, clever contraptions like bikes with reversed steering, hinged frames, a tall bike with two riders and independent front and rear drivetrains (I was involved in this abomination), etc.
A winner I saw that was hilarious was just a regular bike where sections of the top tube and down tube were replaced with big steel springs (motorcycle coil springs, maybe?). It could sort of maintain shape, but flopped chaotically while being ridden. One guy was able to coax a ride out of it, but it was shockingly difficult.
Anyway, seems like a physical analog of point 1 and 4, a joke bike, but also art. It seems like many of these unplayable forms of games do sort of rely on the idea that they could be played, if only barely.
Taking a shower with the lights off always makes me feel better when I feel like shit for no reason. Though I don't understand the exact details of how it works, the process itself is a matter of simple alchemy: Like cures like.
The oils in soap (good, clean, refreshing) are different types of oils than the oils in my skin and hair (gross, greasy, stinky). By some process of mysterious natural forces beyond my comprehension, mixing the two while in the shower makes the gross oil come off easier, and I can simply rinse it off myself and it goes down the drain.
The darkness in the shower (neutral, soothing, natural) is a different kind of darkness than the darkness in my head (emotional, unhelpful, evil). By some process of mysterious natural forces beyond my comprehension, mixing the two while in the shower makes the gross darkness come off easier, and I can simply rinse it off myself and it goes down the drain.
not to derail but i know how soap works!
its not actually an oil, though sometimes the scents come from oils. soap is actually a binder between water and oil (which dont mix obviously) so the soap binds to the oils on your body and hair, and then the water catches the soap and washes it away! voila, no more oil!!
Neat!
Can someone also explain how darkness works?
Electricity works like plumbing. When the switch is on, electricity flows out and is converted to light. When the switch is off, it acts like a vacuum because there are lights on other places that now need the electricity, so it sucks the light out of your room and sends it to your neighbors house. That slight sucking sound is darkness being made.
why go to the grocery store or to a restaurant when you can just get food delivered why go to the mall when you can get same day shipping on amazon why go to the library when you have kindle why make art when there’s ai why go to the cinema when you can stay at home and watch netflix. we are in a loneliness epidemic btw
the loneliness epidemic was invented by BIG SHIT to sell you more SHIT
Imagine rushing off in your fire truck to save some old lady and KURT VONNEGUT gives you a fucking thumbs up. That would be rad.
You have to explain the last thing you ordered online to a medieval peasant, and if you can't then you have to EAT IT. do you survive
yes
no
The last thing I ordered online was a meal. A succulent Chinese meal.
A brake rotor. It would look mysterious at first but as long as we shared a common language the I’m confident I could explain how we use it to slow down our carriages.
After Crumb