Catastrophize Benedictine
Forgetful Ice Cream Sandwich
Unstoppable Rage Sandwich
Inattentive Licorice
Paranoid Chicken and Waffles
Anxiety Baguette
Sade Olutola
Game of Thrones Daily
Peter Solarz
One Nice Bug Per Day
$LAYYYTER

@theartofmadeline
Stranger Things
h
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Origami Around
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
occasionally subtle

Kaledo Art

pixel skylines

tannertan36

ellievsbear
art blog(derogatory)
wallacepolsom

seen from Canada
seen from United States

seen from Australia
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Australia
seen from Brazil

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
@rosstmcd
Catastrophize Benedictine
Forgetful Ice Cream Sandwich
Unstoppable Rage Sandwich
Inattentive Licorice
Paranoid Chicken and Waffles
Anxiety Baguette
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
Martina McBride didn't win Country Music Association Song of the Year for a song about how burning your house down with your abusive husband still inside it is good, noble, and an allegory for the American Revolution for people to act like the genre belongs to bootlicking fucks
other things people didn't do for you to act like country music belongs to bootlicking fucks:
Garth Brooks winning video of the year at the ACMs for a song about how none of us are free as long as there's racism and homophobia
Reba McEntire charting with a gothic horror song about an innocent man being executed by an incompetent judge and a corrupt sheriff
Willie Nelson being, well, his entire self tbh
Dolly Parton recording the hating capitalism banger of all time
Kacey Musgraves telling everyone to ignore the haters, smoke weed, and be a bisexual slut
how the hell did I leave Morgan Wade off this list. wrote a song about being depressed, alcoholic, and suicidal and how mental illness stigma sucks, saw how much people connected with it, wrote a Part II of that song about how she's doing better now but you're never totally free of the risk of relapse. fucking icon.
I specifically curated this list so people couldn't be like "ah yes but you see here is my simple binary of good and bad country music which always works", I made sure to add different genders, eras, subgenres, etc and y'all are still pulling that shit in the tags!
listen. Alan Jackson, the archetypal mister big hat man sitting on a tractor singing about a pickup truck, wrote a shockingly normal song about 9/11 that was like "yeah I don't know jack shit about politics but my copy of the bible says we're supposed to love everyone" and then went on the radio and explained how he specifically wanted to write a song about that day that "wasn't vengeful". Miranda Lambert took the southern leftist slogan "y'all means all" and made it the title of a corny ass pop-country song for the Queer Eye soundtrack. Kenny Chesney stole a horse from a cop and Tim McGraw put the cop in a chokehold defending him, and I know that's not about their music but it is, and this is very important, fucking sick as hell
it's fine if you only listen to female country artists or pre-1990 country artists or whatever the fuck you want but stop acting like you've cracked the secret code to dividing a whole genre of art into good pure anti-establishment folk songs vs bad corrupted right-wing sellout pulp
updating this post for 2025:
Luke Combs covering Fast Car and keeping the line "I work in the market as a checkout girl" and doing an interview about how he couldn't change a single word because it's not his story. king shit
Morgan Wallen doing I Had Some Help, literally the first song that spoke to me as a male survivor of domestic abuse. also shoutout to the guy for getting caught saying a racial slur and responding by specifically telling his fans not to defend him and raising a bunch of money for the Black Music Action Coalition. bro had an engraved invitation to the culture war and said "nah I'd rather be normal"
Shaboozey just absolutely obliterating the drunk roadhouse anthem glass ceiling
Maren Morris and Brothers Osborne with a song that okay, released in 2019 but I didn't hear until recently, about how good friends mind their own business and let you love whoever you want and also get high with you when you're broke
Kimberley Perry! If I Die Young Part 2!! "actually I'm glad I lived, bitch" ass song that I bet is gonna mean a LOT to kids fighting depression
Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan with Cowboys Cry Too. okay it's shallow and corny but genuinely a shallow and corny song about how men shouldn't be afraid to have feelings is what a lot of men need
bringing the full version of this post back around because people are pissing me off today
So, I have this to some extent. It's not shame for me though. It's that what used to be an anonymous transaction has suddenly become a relationship, and relationships have expectations and take work.
My relationship energy is limited and what there is of it is already dedicated to maintaining my existing marriage, family, and friends. If I'm suddenly supposed to create and run a mental model of the person who now considers me a regular, then I'm doing the emotional equivalent of digging through the couch cushions looking for spare change to pay for it.
And I feel bad about it! I know this person means me nothing but good and is genuinely happy to see me. I would like for them to be happy. But it does have a cost to me, and sometimes I can't afford it. Which sucks, but there it is.
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide (or was furnished with) a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleaned up and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
I was one of those kids, so this is illuminating.
I do remember hearing of discussions about when you brought your existing character to a session and they died, whether it was cheating or not to use that same character in another session of a different game.
And if it wasn't, did it become cheating if you still wrote down on your character sheet the items your character picked up in that session before they croaked.
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
I think another factor is that in AD&D, there aren't a whole lot of customization options for characters, with the result that aside from equipment there isn't really that much difference between one 5th-level dwarven fighter and another.
This means that AD&D characters could be a lot more fungible than characters in later editions. (They didn't have to be -- you could invest a lot of effort in backstory and roleplaying if you wanted to -- but as far as the rules went, dropping one character and picking up an essentially similar one wasn't that big a deal.)
feel free to cite the deep magic to me witch i was there when it was written but my memory is like REEEEALLY shitty
hey you. teenage girl writing in her diary. quit talking about the boy you have a crush on and start writing about the current political situation, the valuation of currencies, and the level of technology your people hold. your diary might be the only piece of evidence our society existed after nuclear war fries all of our data backups. future historians don't need to know about damian, they need at least a secondhand accounts of the great water wars and whether or not your leaders truly did worship a deity called "the free hand of the market"
Keep writing about your crush Teenaged Girl. About your clothes, and how that other girl wore the same dress as you. Paint me a picture of what you were like.
Historians are going to hear about Damian and they're gonna LIKE IT
Make those future Historians reverse engineer the socioeconomic hierarchies of the 21st century from dreamy descriptions of Damian's current fashions. It's giving them enrichment.
Talk about the things you want to talk about. You never know what mysteries your diary might solve in future generations bc you are the only person who talks about something that other people thought was too obvious to talk about, like whatever that third condiment dish that used to be on the table with salt and pepper was for.
Somebody should sell a product where you can write by, I dunno, etching onto ceramic plates or something that has a fair chance of surviving to be read by the archeologists of the future.
Because you know a minimum of 50% of people would be deliberately pranking those future scientists.
"Dear Diary (and future scientists, hi!) - how i wish I could sneak out to meet my secret boyfriend Damian tonight, but it's June 2nd and of course everybody has to stay home tonight with a whisk broom because of the carapaces."
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
that’s not the whole flag, now is it
hey staff what the fuck
hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose
HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE
HEY STAFF WHAT THE FUCK?
i really like this thing where websites will have separate "log in" & "sign up" buttons and if you click "log in" it takes you to a sign-up screen anyway so you have to click "i already have an account" and then it will ask if you want to sign in with your facebook account or with instagram or linkedin or deviantart or whatever, and if you choose "username & password" it asks if you want to put in your username or use your thumbprint, and once you put your username & password it emails you a confirmation code, and once you put in the code it says "do you want to give us your phone number for future sign-ins? do you want to sign up for facial recognition? do you want to give us your bones? give us your fucking bones?
websites prior to like the 2010s: sign in with your username and password
websites now:
The one that always annoys me is the weirdly large number of web sites where the front page is like:
Given that most people will create an account once and sign in to that account many times, you'd think the prominence would be the other way around, or at least more equal. But no.
Anti-city people are just plain fascinating to me
"yeah i mean you just have to have energy to go to the store every day even for a fast trip because you can't keep food at home"
people who think everyone should want this life are fascinating to me
I'm not even disabled, but a lot of days I have trouble winding up enough energy to figure out what I want to eat from the food that's already in my kitchen. If I had to walk to the store and figure out what to buy and walk back I can honestly say that there are days I would just put off eating until my blood sugar crashed and then I would eat, like, expired peanut butter out of a jar I found in the back of a cupboard until I had the energy to go to bed.
Awesome
honestly i think charlie would enjoy his life reincarnated as a purse dog
One of this dog's parents is also it's great-grandparent.
Misgendering someone is never okay.
Even if you don't like them, even if they're canceled, even if they're a CRIMINAL.
Identity is not a privilege that can be revoked at any given moment.
You can say, "[correct name] is literally the worst person in history. I favor a massive government program to develop a rocket to launch [correct pronoun], specifically, into the sun," and it gets your point across without signalling to other people that you only respect their gender conditionally.
Do you think it's weird and/or predatory for a 13 year-old and a 30 year-old to be best friends if they're not family members or related by blood? Assuming everything is innocent and platonic. Nothing romantic or sexual.
Yes, it's weird and predatory
It's weird. But not predatory
It's predatory. But not weird
No, it's not weird or predatory
*This poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. If you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please check our pinned post).
unpopular opinion but I don't think there's anything weird or predatory about an innocent friendship
The question is why the fuck is a thirty year old hanging out with a 13 year old if not in their family?? The only other relation that could have them interact is through teacher/student and bring friends like that would be weird as fuck
found family? the kid not feeling safe in their house? the adult wanting to help? family / teacher / school isn't always a guaranteed safe place. should the kid and adult each have friends that are their own age too? sure. but if their friendship is genuinely innocent then I think the problem isn't them but people who project their weird and predatory thoughts onto them
Don't forget shared hobbies?
A 13 year old and a 30 year old could reasonably meet at a tabletop gaming store, a fiber arts group, a book club....
They could literally just be neighbors. This whole isolationist thing of never even talking to the people you live closest to is new and weird.
It is important to human social development to have extra-parental adults as advisors and role models!
Look the 13yo which has safe and healthy relationships with other adults that are not part of their family, they're probably safer than kids that don't because they have someone outside of their closed circle to ask for help.
Also stop pretending that kids are fucking aliens ffs, or that they're babies until they hit the magical age of 18! A 13yo is just as funny, creative, and thoughtful as anyone else, they don't unlock new ways of thinking or feeling, all the software is on board! Teenagers and kids are fully human and I am so sick of people acting as though a kid has nothing to offer in a friendship and that their presence must be a burden to everyone!!!
Youth lib is treating kids as human beings, and by isolating kids and young people from everyone who isn't their own age or an authority, you put them at more risk! Adult friends model appropriate behaviour, allowing the young person (who is at risk of manipulation and abuse due to limited life experience, not because they're a little baby who's brain isn't formed yet) to know when behaviour from adults is inappropriate.
A young person with adult friends can also approach them and go "hey Alex is making me feel really uncomfortable, is that weird or am I overreacting" and have their friend go "Alex is doing what?? No you're absolutely not overreacting, you don't have to put up with that." And help them get out of a situation before it develops.
I would consider it somewhat unusual for a 13-year-old and a 30-year-old to be best friends. Friends, sure, but I would be surprised to find that they're meeting each other's friendship needs so well that neither of them has a closer friend.
I’ve got a colonoscopy tomorrow to see why my tummy’s so grumpy and I’ve taken 12 SUTAB tablets per my doctor’s orders and currently I’m praying for mercy to any god who’ll listen and the whole time this tiny baby man son is snuggling me from the sink and he’s perfect and I love himmmmmmm 😭
If it helps at all, my experience has been that the procedure itself is actually kind of a pleasant experience, because they give you the good drugs. The prep sucks, but once you put on the hospital gown things improve significantly.
I'm reading Blindsight and Peter Watts' take on vampires is insane actually
Sure they were real but went extinct and we found their DNA and resurrected the species to capitalise on their extreme intelligence for corporate interests. Sure their natural ability to go into stasis for long periods of time as part of their hunting and survival strategies is great for genetically engineering hybrid humans so they can be put into stasis for extremely long-distance space travel. Sure they're stopped by crucifixes because a flaw in their fuckign. Multidimensional hyperanalytical predator thought processes makes their minds bluescreen when they try to comprehend right angles. Why not.
I was on board until the right angles. XD
The right angles are the best part
#vampires stopped by sugar cubes#wait... doors are fucking right angles#vampires would be fucking useless in modern society#my math notebook could destroy them
They have to take mind-dampening drugs to go out in public. In the lab they're kept in oblong rooms where the lighting is designed to not create right angled shadows. It's a whole big thing and probably a big part of why they went extinct, humans fucking love making rectangles.
Wait, is that where the idea that vampires can't come in to your house unless they're invited csme from in this universe? Invitation has nothing to do with it, they can't come in to your house because they blue screen when they see a doorway.