[sainttheosylas]

I need to hype this up and I already made a graphic for @wolfehorror’s FANTASTIC #sludgepit event on bluesky so here goes:

NEEDLEHEART is the working title of my upcoming dark medieval fantasy novel about a depressed, ostracized nun on a suicide mission that would usher in the end times. While her quest, her beliefs and the real world clash and she starts to doubt everything she’s ever been told.

Heavily inspired by Between Two Fires, INDIKA and the countless cult survivor memoirs I’ve read.

[crowboy-bebop]

oh my fucking god

[im-mender]

post: I noticed that in act 1 there's a loaded gun mounted on the wall there. I bet by the end of act 2 it will have been fired

all the replies: you're a fucking idiot

*after act 2*

all the replies: how the fuck did you know that

[im-mender]

okay but we can't know for sure that the loud noise and bright flash offstage—which occurred after the character who was holding the gun exited the stage with it—was a gunshot, because we didn't get to directly see it

[orpheuslament]

bro im not driving pass me the victor hugo there are men who seemingly are born to be the verso quote

[orpheuslament]

the way it all boils down to this......

[murkymarco]

Caught myself spiraling and then remembered it's just my body not wanting to exist in these temperatures

[mousidy]

the delicate art of cracking someone's egg honestly has a lot of parallels to trying to help a friend who you think might be in an abusive relationship

[mousidy]

the egg prime directive is stupid as fuck because yes, you don't just assume based on incomplete information that your friend is in an abusive relationship and then try to force them out of it, but you don't just fucking do nothing either. you have to employ finesse

[sainttheosylas]

adding tags later

MORE POAST: meet my twilight cleric, Bernadette! She’s one of about ten worshippers of a nameless, faceless musician who drowned himself out of loneliness.

She tried to seem so cool and mysterious when she joined the party but has been revealed as the ultimate ‘save or suck’ character who will functionally disable the boss then spend the rest of the fight screaming and crying and stress vomiting.

She’s engaged to a cringey goth boy with a journalism degree

[mail-me-a-snail]

everytime i think about the concept of soulmates i mourn the fact that it's never turned on its head as a tragedy

[mail-me-a-snail]

stands up on my chair i think having a soulmate should be a kind of divine punishment

[hiveswap]

Everyone go look up the song nasa banned from space

[hiveswap]

Don't forget to play it loud as fuck

[kowai-kabuki-tanuki]

please….listen to the whole thing. And imagine that you are IN SPACE in 1973 and you JUST woke up. Every time you adjust…it escalates somehow.

This song had to be designed in a lab for the sole purpose of fucking with astronauts. whoever added it to the NASA playlist was a genius.

[hiveswap]

It took them two tries to ban it?

[kvotheunkvothe]

[ryan-sometimes]

Working an office job will truly make you have the wildest enemies, bc why is my nemesis rn a woman I’ve never met and who exclusively haunts me by sending diabolical emails, and also a specific guy who left my company before I even worked here and made the system so fuckass that it ruined procedures for like a year

[ryan-sometimes]

Yesterday my nemesis (woman I’ve never met and whose face I’ve never seen) sent my office an email so rude, basically saying we had fucked up every project she ever ordered from us, one of the worst emails I’ve ever read in my life.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

It was the most satisfying workday I’ve had since I got hired.

[winnie-wine]

[mephostophilis]

are non brits aware of count binface.

[mephostophilis]

to give some entirely bizarre context, nigel farage (extreme cunt) has stepped down from his position as MP for clacton (due to a scandal where he received £5 million from a crypto billionaire that could have been laundered) only to run again so that he can prove people like him. and the only person running against him is count binface. who has been a staple of british politics for many years. and now the british press is forced to interview him seriously while he sits there with his binface.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

A 75 yo man proudly came into the cafe wearing an Ultra Maga hat. I excused my barista from the register to handle the transaction.

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

Anyone wearing that type of shit and preying on workers for their own spank bank material is a brainless fucking sheep.

[thelawfulchaotic]

This is beside the point of this post (which is correct in every way). I’ve seen very many posts lately about like “how do I even know when I’m an adult, I feel the same way I did at 16/20/25/etc.”

You know when you see a problem coming and you say to someone else, step back and I’ll handle this one. And then you handle it.

Kudos OP for real. Honestly more for excusing the barista than your lovely conversational judo.

[bayesic-bitch]

If you read interviews with homicide cops, two things quickly become clear

It is really not all that hard to get away with murder. A basic amount of foresight and prep will get rid of enough evidence that the police either won't find the killer or will be unable to make the charge stick.

Despite this, most murders do get solved, because someone who decides that murder is the solution to their problems is probably not the kind of person to be levelheaded and careful enough to avoid getting caught.

I think something very similar is true of sockpuppet accounts. It's not that hard to make a convincing sockpuppet. However, people almost always make sockpuppets as a way of defending their egos, of making it look like they have more support than they actually do. And this passionate defense of someone the sockpuppet ostensibly doesn't know and has no reason to care about is a dead giveaway. So if you want to validate a sockpuppet you have to lose an argument to it. You have to get owned. Once it makes you look like an idiot, basically no one will ever suspect it again.

Unfortunately, by posting this, I've burned my only chance to actually do it. From now on, whenever you see me getting dunked on, you'll assume it's staged sockpuppet validation. and you'd be right. i have never lost an argument on this website. every single one was staged. i did not get owned. i did not get owned.

[ainecdote-remade-deactivated202]

tired of cannibalism as a metaphor for love or sex. can we get into cannibalism as a metaphor for colonization.

[sloppity-bilepiper]

1. Europeans using Egyptian mummies as medicine

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

4. Zombies (which I would class as cannibals, since they were human and need to eat humans to live) have a root in Haitian folklore and represented enslavement.

[vintagedean]

adding that, if you can find it, cannibal culture by deborah root is about exactly this. the way the white western world is a hungry, destructive force that cannibalizes non-white cultures and creates wealth and status through the cannibal colonization of those cultures.

here's the intro

i almost think there's an essay in bell hooks' black looks about this too? yes! just checked, there's an essay called "eating the other"

[blackfilmmakers]

Don't forget that "cannibal" was a slur, popularized by Christopher Colombus to essentially call Indigenous people of the Carribbean a bunch of savages 😬 X

[crimeronan]

i think if you're worldbuilding psychiatry and mental health into your sci-fi/fantasy world then your first consideration should NOT be "what words would they use to describe our world's mental disorders??" even though that Can sometimes be useful.

granted, i DO prefer a world that slaps "melancholic" on in place of "depression" or "post-birth hyper-grief parental syndrome" onto postpartum depression or whatever, as opposed to just calling everything depression and schizophrenia and ASPD, as if our own western psychiatric words are the """correct""" ones and would logically be emulated by the whole of any other universe.

However.

i think it is MORE useful to think FIRST about your fictional society's values. and the power structures in play, or lack thereof. and how elements like religion and spirituality and magic and sci-fi tech shape and influence everyday life.

mental disorders and neurodivergences are things that mark a person "other" from someone who is the """expected""" product of their environment. crucially, in our own western conceptions of mental health, there is a STORIED history of people being labeled Other because they did not cooperate with the oppressive social norms of the time. see: insane asylums, lobotomies, drapetomania. etc.

how does your fictional society treat people who are Other? is mental health treatment more focused on compliance and the erasure of symptoms, or on self-acceptance and accommodation? is there a taboo against being labeled Other? what is the history of self-advocacy and human rights for people in these groups?

you don't Have to go the pessimist route and write in, like, horrific atrocities as a backdrop for your story. especially if you are not a horror writer like me. LOL.

but i do think it's disingenuous not to think about these things on a structural level.

what would these people consider a mental health disorder / neurodivergence, and why? what thoughts or behaviors cause that to be labeled a mental health disorder?

how are neurodivergent people in this world supported or unsupported?

what are the consequences for having an untreated mental health issue in this world? are there reasons someone might hide their mental health issue, or is there a baseline of trust socially?

if there IS an automatic baseline of trust, what social norms enforce that trust? what are the expectations of conduct for both the mentally ill and those helping them? what happens if that trust is broken by a mental health professional or carer -- what recourse does the mentally ill person have?

are there any Pretty Shitty social norms that would be reflected or encouraged in the mental health system?

these basic questions are Much more interesting than just going on thesaurus.com for the DSM-5. and the answers will make your world feel significantly more grounded.

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

friends, if I can give you one piece of advice for those of you who are new to work, or are about to enter the workforce, especially if you have any sort of office job:

Do not work on your days off.

"But--"

DO NOT WORK ON YOUR DAYS OFF.

[theprofessional-amateur]

Do not work on your breaks

Do not “answer a few emails” on your vacation

Do not work off the clock

Doing this doesn’t reward you with more money or whatever. It rewards you with more work.

[prokopetz]

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

[calloutnevvegas]

For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

Don’t fuck with flamingos

[revretch]

….. Didn’t know most of that

[iamthekaijuking]

Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.

[revretch]

Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.

American flamingos just drink that shit

[bogleech]

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

[assuming-dinosaur]

Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.

[is-the-post-reliable]

requested by anonymous:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’

[adaginy]

… @todaysbird ??

[todaysbird]

yeah they’re just like that

[juney-blues]

information that is also important