gee whiz

[cobaltspartan]

fascinated by jeff the killer tbh. everyone in that creepypasta has generic white usamerican names (jeff, keith, barbara, billy, etc.) except for jeff the killer's doe eyed little brother liu. why is he liu. is liu chinese? it's okay if he's chinese. is jeff also chinese? has jeff the killer been chinese this whole time? am I a bad person?

[protiumplease]

"the killer" is a really common Chinese last name and it's kinda terrible that you don't know that

[thegaymertrainer]

Ribbon dancing I was not aware of your evolution 🤯

[parkchanwoohoo]

[wowwforever]

music jon bois plays before revealing the Arizona Cardinals didn't make the playoffs

[paper-mario-wiki]

in case you're wondering what the greatest AMV of all time is, it's this one from 2008.

[paper-mario-wiki]

[en-tailsgaythings]

y'all need to watch this this pride month

[lakevida]

i think its charming when peoples personal lives improve and they get drastically worse at posting

[fullmetalfisting]

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

[mysteryteacup]

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

[alarajrogers]

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

[chekhovs-raygun]

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

[fishglyph]

there's no way captain wasn't disabled after octo expansion is all i'm saying

[whiteshakira]

1 time i watched this youtube video called "every time a person of color has had a line in the harry potter movies" & it was only like 10 minutes long but also the "person of color" with by far the most lines was this shrunken head with a jamaican accent

[centrally-unplanned]

Tales from the heartland - transmitting electricity via physically running battery trains to bypass the regulatory barriers for building grid infrastructure:

Apparently at the right distances its not even much of a power loss! TIL this is viable.

[eightyonekilograms]

I'm a little sad that the aesthetically coolest proposals for grid-scale energy storage, like "giant warehouses filled with flywheels" and "an electric train loaded with concrete blocks that inches up and down a hill" don't seem to be very feasible, but "train filled with batteries" is a decent alternative.

[vocalsynthtextposts]

today's warm up doodle

[wizardarchetypes]

he’s made more than one of these and they’re making me insane because for two days i haven’t been able to stop saying ‘i knew it! he’s a vampire! i knew it! i knew it! he’s a vampire! i knew it! he’s’ (x)

[wizardarchetypes]

i knew it! he's a vampire! i knew it! i knew it! i knew it, he's a vampire! he's a vampire, i knew it! i knew it! he's a vampire! i knew it!

[wizardarchetypes]

i knew it! he's a vampire!

[gruelight]

stuff that stuck with me from bavitz's modern cannibals

modern cannibals is a "homestuck fanfiction" about consumption-as-formation, the horror of the artist-audience exchange, and the religious nature of fandom. i have never read a word of homestuck; modern cannibals is one of the best things i have read in months.

here is some fanart I doodled with my finger in ten minutes.

thoughts below. SPOILERS for @weaselandfriends' Modern Cannibals.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. CLICK AWAY NOW AND GO READ IT (IT'S REALLY GOOD AND IT'S NOT EVEN SUPER LONG AS FANFICS GO)

alright. earnest gushing below.

I'm not gonna tell you the prose is gorgeous. Instead I will say the narrative knows, textually and sub-textually, that you could spend the time you're reading it consuming literally anything else online. It therefore does everything possible on a prose level to court and retain your attention --- much like short-form web content itself. Cowabunga!

This story was cruder than what I tend to read, but it never felt gratuitous. To deal with its subject matter in any other way would have been dishonest --- and I have never seen anyone deal more skillfully with the themes it presents. For someone who grew up on the Internet, it was incredibly cathartic for its darker corners to be straightforwardly explored.

I hate head-hopping, and the switch to Kiki's POV came at the perfect moment. Even Graves' lewd metatextual interludes felt justified. Lavinia Roddlevan's consciousness in Z.'s head was the story's coup de grâce, IMO.

Z.'s developmental lags, her all-consuming intensity, the way adults relate to her ("what a precious child;" Maximilian's limerence), her despair/confusion at her friends' emotional abandonment --- prototypical ADHD. What it is like to be in an ADHD brain was rendered with verisimilitude pretty much to a line. An early passage that made me squirm in self-recognition:

Serious Z. time. She straightened her posture and became serious, no more jokes. She focused her brain on this one subject, telling it not to wander.

Cecily. I am so glad this narrative used Cecily well, that it took a minimum of cheap shots with her, that it turned its tremendous empathy upon her too. A lesser story would have made her the butt of every joke. Instead it used her love of Faerie Endless to shine a light on what "post-post-modernism" is missing, what "saintly love" looks like, and what's really at stake when we talk about sin.

Cal's arc was also outlined with real kindness, and his progression from "pretentious art bro" to pro-in-the-making who HAS benefited from taking his craft seriously all these years is one of the story's much-needed facets of hope.

To me, this is a story about intimacy. Kiki and Graves compulsively substitute sexual intimacy for the hard work of self-regard. Cal's sense of intimacy with Malkwon fuels a real drive to refine his art. Z. spends nearly the whole narrative with rejection sensitivity goggles on, chasing Max; Maximilian's entire persona has sprung from a lack of real connection. And Katsumata's magnum opus, the substrate for so much neckbeard porn, was created as an act of selfless paternal love.

Embarrassingly, I shipped Kiki and Z. for several chapters before the narrative indicted me in the most uncomfortable way possible. (Yeah, I thought this would be a fun, sexy roadtrip narrative. In my defense, it was on AO3.)

The whole story is very heavy on Christian symbolism and Christian-inflected interior states. The cannibalistic process it describes is basically the sacrament of communion.

This story is also obsessed with "the canon," in literally every sense of the word. Me too!

I will be saving some of the action sequences for close readings; I have such a hard time writing action and would do more of it if I were better at it.

I keep circling the idea of grace. Even under an acerbic voice, the author extends so much grace to every character in this story --- inviting us to empathize, to see, to feel, to know, to "clap for" each person. Maybe it is because this sort of clear-sightedness is a prerequisite to the intimacy we depend on? Z. says: "It doesn't matter, you're my friend, you're my friend despite the bad things, I do bad things too, we can do bad things together and be friends, we're two people out of seven billion, we don't have to be paradigms of virtue, and we can be friends and support and love each other."

Maybe clearly seeing someone is the first part of loving them. Maybe the problem with fandom is that the window is partial, mediated, transactional.

I think this story is a tremendous achievement, and it was a treat to read. I have no doubt I'm going to surface many more thoughts in the coming days.

[azdoine]

for all the many faults of Brockton's Celestial Forge I still fondly remember and enjoy chapters where Apieron helps his teammates become more human or leaves his workshop to heal people's chronic injuries and diseases

[azdoine]

I just really really really love when a nonsense OCP power fantasy mary sue type character flexes their undeserved mightypowers by helping and healing and creating rather than by just drawing their sword and destroying evil across all four cardinal directions of the map

[enki2]

[cpericardium]

[rederiswrites]

Next time you go to write a ten year old child, please know that mine just gave me a fairly accurate explanation of fiat versus commodity currencies, in those terms. So for goodness sake, just have them talk like the adults they’re around most.

Also I saw a post yesterday that said that children under ten don’t understand sarcasm, and I assure you, that is not the case.

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I talked like an adult when I was 10. So did all of my friends. Writing children believably is not about making them not know stuff, or making them struggle to express themselves. Kids can be very knowledgeable and very expressive, especially if they’re little book weirdos like I was.

To write a believable child, DO NOT make them:

- dumb

- inarticulate

- prone to outbursts

- superlatively innocent

DO make them:

- totally incapable of accurately calculating delayed gratification or the long-term consequences of their actions

- intermittently sociopathic

- sometimes choose to lie in a way that cannot possibly be believed, due to a dearth of life experience making it impossible to determine the likelihood of their own statements

- only sometimes, profoundly weird

[lacylu42]

I just want to add: intermittent competence. 

My 10 year old can do her own laundry, cook simple meals, look after pets, carry on a sophisticated conversation, make jokes that will make adults laugh (with her) for days, and do long division, but sometimes wears the same pair of underwear for several days in a row or forgets to wash the conditioner out of her hair. 

[heywriters]

My favorite thing about kids of all ages but especially pre-adolescents is they will casually observe and absorb whatever older kids and adults are doing and be doing it too within a day.

Also, if your little kid has older siblings/kids they spend time with, they have the advantage of learning stuff sooner than expected. Older kids are who you learn dirty, dangerous, and “grown up” knowledge from. If adults won’t tell you, older kids are only too happy to sound wise.

[ineffectualdemon]

There is of course a Calvin and Hobbes strip for this

(and yes this is exactly what raising a kid is like)

[trix-rabbit-sells-kids]

Chrysalis 20.1

[skitterstan]

@incorrect-wormquotes @incorrect-worm-posts

[cuddlef1sh]

@wre7ch