Here I Am

Writer Learning to Use Blender Scared of Existence

[mysillycomics]

[wizardarchetypes]

I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS When Maggie last visited me in Dublin I asked him to bring me my two favorite snacks I was missing from the U.S.: Goldfish crackers and Swedish fish (obviously Swedish fish are Swedish, but I couldn't find the specific type I'm used to in Ireland).

Maggie brought them both and a few days later I was in a (very casual, snacks allowed) Zoom meeting with some Phd students and our academic advisor and I was talking about my upcoming fieldwork in Irish salmon fishing communities and eating my snacks and someone else in the meeting said, "hang on. I'm SO sorry to interrupt. but are you eating exclusively fish-themed snacks on purpose?"

[elodieunderglass]

And you said “yes,” right?

[miyuliart]

Trying to figure out how to draw armour. These are some of my notes I uploaded on patreon. A lot more to come since I really want to figure this one out.

[therabbitthatpostthings]

I will never relate to a character harder than I do Howl Jenkins-Pendragon.

He had a choice: Give your heart to a Fire Demon and live in an ever moving castle as you are being hunted by a vicious witch who wishes to consume you

OR

Pay back your student loans

And he chose the former. So real of him. I would done the same, no second thoughts.

[elodieunderglass]

@mmarycontrary spotted you being hilarious exactly one year ago!

[thejesterstears]

Damn it’s been a good run but we really are dying for real once the show ends 😔

[ventismfsblog]

[riceballart]

pomni, we are SO fucked.

[lakeyyyyu]

Responding this screenshot, yknow, cause, yknow.

[1-marigold-1]

TADC ep 8 spoilers

Wyd when you kill your ai son on accident

[sanchensky]

White lies 🐝 (please read more under the cut <3)

So happy I finished this thing before ep 8 oof

Anyway, the comic was born out of

my thoughts about Caine's model lacking many essential facial features (as if he was never intended to show any emotions) and yet him being literally the most expressive character in the circus despite everything.

me being low-key obsessed with the implications episode 7 left us with. Players questioning everything they've been told and Caine being in the center of it all.

Just to be clear, I do believe Caine is written as a sentient AI who is just struggling to understand humanity and everything that comes with it. And I think these thoughts about him faking his emotions are inherently wrong within a story. He's oblivious and desperate but not malicious. But couple it with the fact that he's been lying about many other things (so far I'm inclined to think it was for players' sake in his own eyes) and that humans have been suffering for a while dealing with a literal god that doesn't understand them... Well, I have a feeling that they will doubt his motives and literally everything they know, rightfully so.

The amount of attention this little comic received is a bit terrifying and overwhelming and seeing all the different interesting interpretations people come up with I just wanted to explain mine own a little better <3

I want them all to be healed and happy, little guy absolutely included, but man the situation is rough, and the odds are against us

(Also please ignore typos, I'm hyperaware of them and even messed up writing my on name, i was really, really tired :') )

Update after ep 8: oh boy :')

[letterful]

pretentious grad students, intellectual snobs, and highbrows of all stripes FOR fanfiction

[letterful]

via @orchidego ❣️

[letterful]

(via @mariemulle)

exactly! exactly.

[letterful]

(via @gothicastles)

[remnantglow]

cant stop thinking abt ursula k. le guin’s essay abt the carrier bag theory….. she’s like, maybe the first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds, a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. let’s shift the narrative of humanity from that of violence to that of safekeeping. and i’m like

[remnantglow]

and THEN she’s like, a novel is also a carrier bag. there’s the Hero’s story, sure, but there’s room enough in fiction for every experience, for every little thing, and it’s that other story, the life story, that she seeks……. o|-<

[remnantglow]

turns out the entire essay is online (thanks, Anarchist Library) and i really can’t recommend it enough

[rem-ir]

[strangestorys]

*slaps novel on the hood* this bad boy can fit so many facets of human experience in it

[mumbledletters]

The first link’s broken so here’s another one

[transcyberism]

one of the first plants we ever started growing on purpose, the bottle gourd, was grown exclusively because it could be filled with water or other things and carried. pottery is actually older than domesticated gourds, and it’s likely that baskets are even older than that, but it’s just really nuts to me that the early neolithic farmers devoted entire fields just to growing not food but completely inedible bottles. and then those people took their bottles with them everywhere, including when they left Africa, and today they are on every continent. and we don’t even really use them anymore, but we still grow them just for decoration, because they’re shaped like something we carried for thousands of years and we cannot put them down.

I really like bottle gourds

[boiwcndr]

god i love vic so fucking much

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[obliviousmelon]

headcanon that a ferengi tradition is putting your new baby up for sale at a ridiculous price to show how valuable they are to you (everyone has to be polite and not actually buy them or hands will be thrown, people will be sued, etc etc)

[libraflyter]

I love the idea of Ferengi traditions that are both ha-ha capitalism but also create a functioning culture that’s more than a metaphor.

[thecottageinthedark]

[datasoong47]

So, this is related to a headcanon I have. There's a kind of ritual sale of childhood goods as part of the Ferengi coming-of-age, which was featured in an episode of DS9. The ostensible purpose is to raise capital for the young Ferengi male. But, like, if the Ferengi were approaching this in their usual capitalistic mindset, you wouldn't really get much from what's basically a glorified garage sale

My headcanon is that it is the accepted practice to buy those goods at much higher prices than you would normally pay, serving as a culturally acceptable way of effectively giving financial support

[shiroikabocha]

Oh I love these, especially because of the spoken and unspoken meta-traditions around the tradition! Maybe they work similarly to the “speak now or forever hold your peace” thing in human marriage ceremonies. Everyone at a human wedding understands you’re not actually supposed to say anything at that point, it’s just a formality—but you see characters do it all the time in literature and entertainment, because it makes for such a juicy plot twist.

I bet “newborn gets purchased by evil jealous ex-business partner” is a classic plot hook in Ferengi soap operas. It’s their version of getting sold to One Direction.

[son-of-land]

Once again Avatar posting because I've never seen it pointed out how in S1E15 when they go ice dodging and they're going up against some rocks that they can't sail through (not without difficulty), Bato tells them to turn around and find another way, that Sokka (and the rest) have already proven themselves, that due to the attempted genocide (and successful cultural genocide) of the south Bato has likely never seen their ships how they could have traditionally been.

Noone can remember a time where the southern tribe had benders, where they had an actual bending culture. Where the hunts and the fishing trips and the foraging in the tundra and literally everything was accompanied by waterbenders. Throwing up snow or ice to block the route of an animal, gathering up fish and safely navigating sudden rapids, clearing and creating paths to local flora and strengthening ice sheets so noone fell in.

Sokka is the first of the Southern Water Tribe to relearn how to sail with a bender, to trust that they can navigate far beyond the capabilities of a rudder should they need to.

Katara brought bending back to the South, and Sokka matched it every step of the way (well,,,,, every step of the way post Kyoshi lmao) and I'm so,,,

I forgot just how autistic I am about this damn show

[balaclava-trismegistus]

United States self defense laws generally consider drawing a firearm to preempt an escalation of violence to be "brandishing," as does it generally consider pulling a gun and not firing to be a crime, because one could argue you didn't actually have to draw your weapon if you didn't shoot it. So, quite seriously, the culture around defensive handgun shooting in America is mainly focused on drawing and getting accurate shots on target as fast as possible. Genuinely, like cowboys. People post their drills on shot timers to Instagram so they can brag about being Objectively Better. A common tough-guy thing is to go "post groups and splits bro" to anyone you disagree with at all. Splits being your split time between shots. So a lot of talking about guns to people has become instagram-mediated dick measuring.

[qui-bono]

It's a lovely perverse incentive... kinda like how it's generally considered "better" to kill the other party outright, so they can't sue you for injury.

[philosophysicsuniverse-blog]

all i'm hearing is the lack of jokes about them being a "quick shot".

me? i've running from the gunshots so i'm working on my stamina if you know what i mean.

badabing badaboom. bow chicka bow wow as per lavernius tucker of blue team from the hit show by rooster teeth red vs blue

[whiterabbitloveposting]

For those wondering - Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1 #338 (Hobgoblin sprays Spider-man with poison) and #339 (Doc Ock reveals the poison only becomes lethal when combined with cocaine).

[philosophysicsuniverse-blog]

you know what? I like that the guy asked for clarification.

we got such a beautiful and wondrous answer.

the world truly is weird