"you don't know what you have until you lose it" works for things that suck too btw. sometimes you need to experience life without something for a while to realise oh damn that was some bullshit
During yesterday’s game I made an off the cuff remark that Infernal music uses a system of nine modes named after the layers of Hell as opposed to the traditional seven in Western classical music so of course I’ve been coming up with a system of nine tones per octave for no gain whatsoever, I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time on something with absolutely zero game effect
I haven’t had the time to play around with it so it probably sounds horrible, but okay it’s a system of alternating half-steps and full steps but with two sequential half-steps. The basic Avernal mode in C would be C, Db, Eb, E, F, Gb, Ab, A, and B (and with a final half-step to bring it back to C).
I mean it wouldn’t be hard for me to write a piece like that. It won’t sound “correct” to western ears because the root note, C, in that scale will sound like it wants to resolve up to the Db, but if your goal is for music to sound like it’s from Hell, then it’s doable.
The crux of the story is Brother Dean.
Brother Dean was…is…a hate preacher. Red or blue, everyone agreed on that. His origins and his motivations, those were a little more mysterious. Different groups had their own legends. I had a class with a guy that was part of the campus pro-life movement, and the tale he gave me is the one that I give the most credence to.
According to him, Brother Dean had started out as a “normal” pro-life preacher. He’d gone around campus, led parades, given speeches… And then he’d gotten punched in the face.
This led to a lawsuit against the school. Something about failing to provide adequate protection? The main result was that he got something like half a mil.
Half a mil is an incredible amount if you’re still working, but he’d tried to use the money to fund a sort of pro-life career, and it had just… trickled down. Ten years later he was running dead low on funds, and had taken to the particularly dumb strategy of trying to get punched in the face again. You know. For economic reasons.
It had become kind of a vicious cycle: He’d started off saying some objectionable shit to try and goad someone into taking the punch. The worse the shit he said was, the harder it became for him to find work doing anything else, and the harder it became for him to find work doing anything else, the less he had to lose by saying really objectionable shit. Throw in two years of living on ramen, and he was so desperate to get punched that he was quoting the Westboro Baptists. If you know, you know.
The pro-life group, to their credit, hated him the most out of anyone. They viewed him as the ultimate sellout, someone who was actively making their positions and beliefs look worse by the day, solely for his own enrichment. The other conservative groups held him in the same regard. The rest of the campus hated him for simpler reasons. It would be difficult to find anyone more detested anywhere else on site.
Brother Dean’s antithesis was the Trojan Warrior. TW was a normal student by day, but maybe once a month or so he’d don his hoplite armor and roam around, handing out free condoms. Trojan condoms. It was kind of his shtick.
Between the costume, and the whole character that he had going on, most people didn’t really recognize his alter ego. I myself am pretty good with faces, so one day I noticed he was behind me in the foodcourt and decided to thank him by paying for his smoothie. Small tangent, but if you’re looking to get good stories, buying lunches for interesting people works like magic.
TW decided that he was going to thank me for thanking him by giving me something like 10 feet of condom roll. I was mortified, aggressively single, and on SSRI’s. He was not sure how many of those were permanent. I wasn’t either. He wound up giving me just a handful, and said that if nothing else, they could probably be used as water balloons.
I accepted. Who doesn’t like water balloons?
I finished my lunch with the warrior and left, considering targets for the "balloons". I passed by Brother Dean near the main commons and had my lightbulb moment. I spent a few minutes watching him from a distance, trying to find the optimal angle to get him without getting caught on camera (he always had someone filing in the background, it was a necessary thing for his hopeful future lawsuit). The time delay was useful for helping me realize that it really wasn't worth it. The sun had been bearing down so hard that the glue in my shoes had melted, and getting him wet would be a favor that day.
So, mildly disappointed, I shelved my dream and left.
A week later the monsoons hit. I left one class and ran to a campus computer commons to try and get some shelter and study between classes. Just before I got through the door, I saw Brother Dean, umbrella in hand, setting up his speaker and mic. He wasn't technically allowed this far into campus (the commons were owned by the city) but he'd gone to where his audience was and security was probably holed up somewhere cozy. I could hardly blame them.
I made it up to the second floor and started studying when the mic picked up. All glass buildings are not very soundproof. He was loud, and he was annoying, and he was outside a library, under a balcony, and-
And I had condoms. Water balloon condoms.
And he was under a balcony.
I put my laptop away, pulled out my condom roll, and went to the bathroom. I wasn’t sure how big a condom could actually stretch, so I just kept filling it until it was about the size of basketball. Maybe a smaller watermelon?
And thus armed, I waddled my way out into the halls.
I cannot emphasize enough just how unsubtle this was. I was cradling this big, overfilled condom like some sort of phallic ghost baby, and it was so heavy that I sort of had to squat as I went. People saw me. Lots of people saw me. I passed by one room full of computer science students, all learning C++, and three of them waved at me.
And I waved back in that my-arms-are-full-but-I’m-excited-to-see-you-too way, where you jut your wrist up a little bit and flap your hand around excitedly.
I did, eventually, make it to the balcony. The building’s high ceilings made the second-floor thing kind of a misnomer: I was easily forty feet up. I scooched my way to the edge, and the view I had… it was perfect. Brother Dean was directly underneath, thank God. If he’d been even seven or eight feet out, I’m not sure if I could’ve shotput the condom-bomb far enough to hit him directly. Better yet his cameraman was only a few feet away from him, far too close to catch any action going up 40 feet above.
I managed to wrestle the payload onto the balcony, and with a gentle push, I sent it and Dean to destiny.
I realized that I’d made a mistake almost as soon as the condom began to fall. You know that sound that bombs make in cartoons, that long drawn out whistle?
The condom made that sound.
I had a second education in the seriousness of my mistake when the condom hit Dean’s umbrella. It did not pop. Of course it didn’t pop. I had no experience with condoms, I swear to you, I promise, I did not know how much they could stretch. You can fit your whole leg into them. You can fit them over whole park benches. A gallon and a half of water was nothing compared to that.
It broke Dean’s umbrella. It hit the top, and it snapped the stem like a twig, and then-
Violence. Unspeakable violence. It clipped Dean’s shoulder and stretched down to his knees before recoiling back to its original shoulder height. It did not bounce. It floated in space, no wasted energy in the collision. One hundred percent of the kinetic energy, all 3300 Joules of it, were discharged into this sad wretch of a man.
He did not collapse. There was no time for that. He rotated on his axis. It was as if the hand of God had reached down and grabbed him about his waist, only to twist. In a fraction of a second, his head filled the space where his ass had been and his ass filled the space where his head had been, and then his cheek, carried by the shuriken motion of his body, slammed into the pavement with a noise like Shaq slam dunking a porkchop. Maybe wetter.
He did not move.
I panicked.
I want to make it clear: I did not mean to assault this man. I meant to get him wet and embarrassed. But I also have to confess that this was a beating. Mike Tyson himself can only put about 1600 Joules into one of his punches, and if he hit me I would bounce off five walls before I fell. I would not wish 3300 Joules upon anyone.
I walked into the building and sat myself in the back of the C++ class. The people next to, to my immense and eternal gratitude, did not question why I was wet.
A minute later, Brother Dean stormed into the building with his microphone.
He yelled. He screamed. He hollered. He informed the entire world that he had been assaulted, with a condom, by someone on the second floor. I was ecstatic that he was alive.
Every person in that class knew who had brought this hell upon them. Every single one of them knew it was me. And if I’d done this to someone else, some Steven Crowder, some Ben Shapiro, someone would’ve thrown me to the wolves. It would have only taken one person in that room of sixty. But Brother Dean was hated by everyone, literally everyone, and so the entire class sat in silence.
Some of that silence was gleeful, and some of it was bored, and some of it, a very small amount, was directly disapproving, but even the disapproving silence carried an understanding. A note of, “Yes, yes, that was very irresponsible, and you should not do that again, but who could blame you? Something needed to happen. Not that something, but…something.”
Security could be given grace to ignore the man when it was raining, and he was just outside the building, but they were not given such grace when he was inside with a microphone. Just a few short minutes later, a golfcart pulled up, and he was summarily marched out. There was maybe a minute of silence after that before the professor announced that his class was not open to visitors.
I left. He’d made his point.
It was a few weeks before I saw Brother Dean again, and his black eye still hadn’t healed all the way when I did. He was, however, still preaching the same old things as always. Percussive maintenance works better on vacuum tubes than human brains. I will say that he definitely made a point to stay away from balconies after that. And the next time it rained, I actually went out to watch him put his speaker and his mic into the back of a wagon and wheel it off the campus.
It appeared that he’d developed some opinions about the kind of weather he was willing to preach hate in.
Y'all for real please do these. Even if you're certain your posture doesn't suck. One day you will wake up with impinged shoulder pain like I did and let me tell you it fucking HURTS. Do these exercises even just once a week and it will make such a difference. Especially my fellow creatives out there, stop shrimping over your work and go do these right now. RIGHT NOW.
Also, if you’re even a little concerned about getting a hump or having trouble standing fully upright in your old age, this is how you prevent that. If you want to be up and about when you’re old you have to start when you’re younger. And keep in mind there is no bad time to start and it’s never too late. Starting today is way better than never starting at all.
Discord is supposedly saying this is going to affect "only 10% of users", but I really don't believe them at all. It's always going to be way worse and affect more people than what they claim.
So in case anyone needs it:
After Discord announced plans to require age verification for all users, a free, HTML-based tool emerged that aims to bypass facial scans on
i think the absolute best way for it to happen is him mishandling a gun on the 4th of july and dick cheneying himself on live tv. like, he tries to do some revolver ocelot shit to look cool during a military celebration and blasts his shit clean off. no blaming that one on the radical left, hes just stupid
james ortiz headcanoning rocky and adrian's relationship as an arranged marriage that worked out better than either of them anticipated is an absolute game changer for me personally. like hang on a second. the implications.
so you're telling me that rocky was forced into an arrangement that overrode his consent for the good of society and the continued survival of his people? that despite the circumstances he made a connection with someone he could love? that he didn't think he'd ever be able to experience that kind of wholehearted belonging with anyone again after they had to separate to save the universe itself, until a second chance to invest that unwavering faith born from love in someone miraculously presented itself? wow. that's crazy. i can't possibly imagine anyone else who might have gone through something similar.
those little rock people are about to experience the most sociopolitically turbulent hostage negotiation in eridian history when rocky and grace pull up in orbit with the taumoeba after four years to get realllll comfortable baring the most intimate vulnerable parts of themselves to each other i think
i've had this garfield panel saved forever and i even marked in my calendar today as "the monday that wouldn't die" so uh. happy(?) monday the 22nd aka the monday that wouldn't die
The Trump administration is cynically exploiting calls for stricter AI regulation to pass broad censorship measures at the federal level.
So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.
So, if you live in the US and hate censorship and AI you know what to do, contact your congresspeople and tell them do not fucking dare let this through or so help us god...
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