Psyche. I'm actually a human.

I'm Rowan.

[seriously-a-dragon]

Gonna preface by saying I’m just screaming into a void right now.

I’m absolutely terrified right now.

Last year, I lost my home and most of my belongings to water damage and rats because I was out of town for a couple months and home was a camper trailer.

I still live in a camper trailer, but a bigger one in a whole different zip code.

And something chewed on my cookie container.

I can’t do it again. I can’t see my daughter’s toys ruined. I can’t see my clothes and bedding torn up. I can’t handle this.

I have no money. I need traps, and bait, and copper mesh or steel wool, and caulk, and cleaning supplies. Plus I have to kill the roaches who are moving in.

My neighbors just… have them. We’re all low income. But they have cats and don’t care very much. I don’t have cats.

And it’s my worst nightmare reborn.

Please help.

[charlesoberonn]

In 2025 you gotta second-guess every new absurdist joke you see people making online.

Because it could be just a meme, or it could be something the president of the United States said.

[atombombtom]

what the hell even is a webp image. i dont care fuck why cant you play nice and just be a png. asshole image

[zhoudadudugongjin]

oh em gee just tried this and it genuinely works. for all image types. reblog to save a life!

[goth-queen]

[sotiriabellou]

im going to learn embroidery weaving pottery oil painting hagiography miniature crafting fiddle arabic mandarin spanish perfect french and im going to do it all within the next six months.this is true and incredibly possible and doable and i will do it all

[gfdcmjffjnrhr]

make a terrible comic day.... i missed it last year but not now

[glamrockmike]

are you five nights at fucking kidding me

[emmastory]

alla mingalёva

[homunculus-argument]

One thing I’ve learned about writing is ”give everything a face”. It’s no good to write passively that the nobility fled the city or that the toxic marshes were poisoning the animals beyond any ability to function. Make a protagonist see how a desperate woman in torn silks climbs onto a carriage and speeds off, or a two-headed deer wanders right into the camp and into the fire. Don’t just have an ambiguous flock of all-controlling oligarchy, name one or two representatives of it, and illustrate just how vile and greedy they are as people.

it’s bad to have characters who serve no purpose in the story, but giving something a face is a perfectly valid purpose.

[tlbodine]

This is the real heart of “show don’t tell”

[csevet]

statistically someone will end up being The Last Shopper In Target At Closing Time, so here’s some little reminders in case someday that person is you

yes, the employees are tired and would like you to leave so they can close the store and go home

if you are a normal human about it and treat the employees like they are humans, you will all be okay

when the “The Store Is Now Closed” announcement is read, it is absolutely no-exceptions time to stop shopping and head up to the front. there were 3-4 other announcements preceding that one.

any staff still on the floor will probably call on their walkie-talkies that they see you, some identifiable piece of clothing (grey jacket, green hat, etc), and the direction you are going.

you do not have to self-flagellate your apology, a friendly “i’m so sorry, i’m ready to go now!” is enough

if you realize at checkout that you forgot something, do the following calculation:

if you can live without it until tomorrow morning, just finish the transaction and deal with it tomorrow

if you can’t live without it for the next ten hours (baby formula. tampons. i get it) PLEASE tell the person helping you, or one of the half-dozen other front-of-store staff waiting to close the lanes. it is likely someone will RUN to get the thing for you. we want you to get your shit and leave!

and most importantly of all:

getting belligerent, screaming, cursing out the front end managers and staff, and otherwise making a problem of yourself will get you absolutely nowhere except kicked out, potentially without any of the stuff you wanted.

[catchymemes]

[catboy--slim]

Now In Forum Flavor:

[wedgemccloud]

*slams desk*

FUCKING BRING BACK FORUMS. THEY RUN ON BASIC WEB SERVERS. IT JUST NEEDS PHP/MYSQL. THEY STILL EXIST. THEY DEPLOY OUT OF THE BOX. STOP ALLOWING THE MODERN WEB TO MAKE MONOLITHS.

TECH PEOPLE ESPECIALLY. FUCKING RUN YOUR OWN SHIT.

BRING BACK FORUMS.

[unpretty]

specifically re: running your own shit

namecheap and hostinger both offer shared hosting for $2 a month, which is cheaper than discord nitro (both of those are intro rates but you can buy multiple years of hosting at once to maximize savings and then wait to add more until cyber monday). there are other places to get hosting but those are two cheapos with which i am familiar and who haven’t screwed me yet.

namecheap includes domain options with hosting but the price on customs vary if that’s something you wanna get separate. according to namecheap, vidyagaymes.online is available for $2.88 a year, for example.

i’m gonna use hostinger here because that’s what i have available to screenshot, but basically all shared hosting works the same way. some use cpanel or softaculous, but regardless of what they call it, they will have an area where you can “install applications”

personally i’m partial to myBB because i think it looks the least like shit, but phpBB is the classic, and simple machines forum is allegedly good. if you really want you can install wordpress and use a hideous mishmash of plugins to make it act like a forum. i don’t know why anyone does this but it’s an option. once you have your forum installed, you can do fun things like install a theme to make everything hot pink, change all the fonts to comic sans, upload as many custom emoji as your little heart desires, and disable attachment uploading because otherwise people will upload massive images and eat up all your cheap hosting with 4k cat memes.

anyway. this is all to say that you do not need to be good at computers to have a webbed site of your very own. if you can make an account and edit your theme on tumblr, you can run a forum for under $30 a year. moderating a forum is also, from my limited experience, a million times easier than modding a discord.

not that any of this addresses the issue of facebook/twitter/google normalizing the idea of having a single account that you can use to log in at multiple websites and apps, leading to people defaulting to whatever option involves not having to make another account. probably as a side effect of people using the same password everywhere and therefore if vidyagaymes.online gets hacked then all your accounts everywhere are compromised. so you’d rather just use the big corporate app because it feels safer. that’s. sort of a different issue and much bigger than this post in particular.

[delvinanaris]

I run a small browser-based game that’s kind of a relic of the early 2000s. For a number of years, we had a thriving forum (self-hosted, SimpleMachines). Over the course of the 2010s, however, forum activity gradually slowed.

As soon as I made an official Discord server (by very popular request), it exploded with activity. Many people who had never been interested in the forum joined and became active members of the game’s community.

The forum is still there. There were even posts on it last month…but only three. And that’s the first time in months.

I would *love* to have the forum replace Discord again. I hate that the de-facto communication platform for so much of the gaming community, and for many other online communities, is now one that’s fully proprietary, with no interoperability and a single corporate owner. (Plus the increased difficulty of accessing older information on it.)

But that’s just not the reality. Community goes where the people are, and right now, at least within my niche, the people are on Discord, and don’t want a forum.

[sarahseeandersen]

[tyrantisterror]

Conservatives yap and yap all the time about how kids don’t understand “woke” culture, but today the school age kids at the daycare had a field trip to a park and saw a really weird swing, and one immediately said “that’s for people with disabilities.”  And the others were like, “Oh, people with disabilities, yeah that makes sense.”  Like, the whole, clunky, politically correct phrase.  These are kids who spend most of their time on tablets and don’t like using five words when three words would do, and they said that phrase like it was natural to them.

Sometimes my kids will be making up characters and write pronouns on their pages.  One day a girl turned to me and said “This character is they/them.”  They don’t think of it as a foreign concept - different genders are just as new a concept to them as all the other stuff they’re learning at this age, and like all that stuff, they regard it not as something to fight about, but just another facet of the world to learn, understand, and incorporate into the stories they create.

The kids handle learning these things just fine.  It’s the adults who are moaning pissbabies about it.

[anatomiau-deactivated20240816]

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cat inspecting a fallen star outside in the garden

[doodlebloo]

Do you guys fucking remember the late night Ranboo stream where Tubbo was like “What is American pudding?” And Ranboo explained like what chocolate pudding is and how it’s bought and stuff. And Tubbo was like “Huh… Do you like pudding?” And Ranboo was like Yeah I’d say I like pudding :) and then Tubbo hit him with the absolutely Earth-Shattering “Pudding deez nuts in your mouth.” And Ranboo went silent for like a full five minutes while Tubbo scream-laughed. How did Ranboo go on after that

[catgirl-catboy]

No, kids should not have unsupervised acess to the internet.   Yes, I got that and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.    Its a paradox.

[penrosesun]

It’s not a paradox – it’s a different net.

When we were kids, the internet was a sandbox-style open world – full of dangerous things, yes, but also nearly unlimited potential – and we learned to be careful, and we learned fast, and we learned fairly well.

Now, the internet is a series of black box silos built by corporations to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else.

I may have seen Two Girls One Cup by accident and at the tender age of ten, but I never had to deal with companies using gambling-addiction-creating strategies pioneered in literal casinos to try and make me hand over hundreds of real dollars at the same age. I may have been exposed to vicious bigotry in anonymous and pseudanonymous messages boards, but I never had algorithms spoonfeeding me explicitly far right radicalizing content. The blithely unfettered access people of our generation had is just genuinely not the same as what kids with unsupervised access are getting today.

[todaysbird]

[anobodythatsall]

....Poor as in poverty. Clarifying that for OP before someone becomes a headass with the misinterpretation

[todaysbird]

yes now i see that was a poor choice of wording. neglectful pet owners ARE bad pet owners, but it has no correlation to wealth or lack of it