Grumpy Old Manchild

I reblog a lot of nerd stuff. MRAs and TERFs not welcome here.

[higgsbison]

happy glorious 25th of may

[sleepynegress]

[thermocrying]

EVERYONE SEE I LOVE BOOSTERS NOW! you like weird, smart, eager satire? you like whimsy? you like practical effects? you like leftism? you like elements of sci-fi? you like fashion? you like eating pussy? IF YOU ANSWERED YES TO ANY OF THESE QUESTIONS, GO SEE THIS MOVIE.

[frommybookbook]

I'm going to see this on Tuesday and I'm so excited!

[snakebitcat]

Go in knowing as little as possible about it, and let it surprise and delight you.

[thezenangel]

[cdhurricane]

New Year, New Elf.

First draft of my Rook from just begun Veilguard playthrough.

[thatdisasterauthor]

The Texas State Aquarium has taught their crow to play connect four and I am DELIGHTED.

[voyage-of-the-porn-spreader]

tgis is so fucking funny to me. they accidentally Rock Lee'd a retired racehorse

[voyage-of-the-porn-spreader]

imagine youre a fat horse and your new neighbour is a personal trainer

[voyage-of-the-porn-spreader]

horse that reads Marcus Aurelius

[voyage-of-the-porn-spreader]

I was wrong. they didnt rock lee him. this horse is literally Gai. and i wish he was my dad

[pangur-and-grim]

genuinely what is his problem

[libraford]

Are YOU gonna let THE GOVERNMENT tell YOU what YOUR GENDER is? That doesn't sound like Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to me! PROTECT your individual FREEDOMS and call your senator: we want the GOVERNMENT to stay OUT OF OUR PANTS! GENDER FREEDOM NOW!

[libraford]

Two men in your neighborhood are married... to EACH OTHER? Congratulate them for exercising their AMERICAN RIGHT to follow the footsteps of our FOUNDING FATHERS! They've got a fully AMERICAN spirit of FREEDOM and REBELLION! GOD BLESS THE USA.

[libraford]

Your coworker has a different RELIGION from yours? Well, that's just INTERESTING and you should talk about it on your UNION-APPROVED LUNCH BREAK. The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was FOUNDED on Freedom of Religion and ANYONE should be allowed to seek the AMERICAN DREAM!

[libraford]

You think someone might be in this GREAT country ILLEGALLY? NO YOU DON'T! No one is in this country illegally! The minute anyone steps on our SOVEREIGN SOIL they're your FELLOW AMERICAN and where they come from is NO ONES BUSINESS.

[rosslynpaladin]

it's funny yeah, but guys this is actually how you reach the people who prefer these terms to frame all things Good and Correct.

[rosszulorzott]

[thathopeyetlives]

This... Isn't as manipulatory and "assuming the opposition is stupid and has no real principles and can be trivially influenced" as some forms of this that I've seen, but... it's still got major problems. You haven't addressed contradictions between the left-wing cultural politics advanced here and aggressively individualistic libertarian American politics.

Sure, this is framing, but the actual principles matter a lot and people can tell when framing is being manipulated pretty easily.

First: the *fundamental* problem with the whole Gender Conflict is that (unlike gay marriage) a lot of it (especially lately) has been really *counter-individualist* and has involved pressure for people to accept the trans / left wing way of looking at it. They're often in favor of government restrictions, but they don't see the fundamental issue as being handed down from the government at all.

Second: theres a few different reasons for people to oppose unlimited immigration. Some of them are just racist, some of them are economic (and won't be supported by the libertarian types who are the implied target of this post), some of them are more pragmatic, but when you get to the level of open borders / presumptive citizenship for anybody physically present, then one of the big concerns for immigration is just going to be *paradox of tolerance*, or more generally the question of whether people who immigrate care about this kind of freedom or want to maintain it.

Third: obviously this post isn't aimed at them, but a lot of Americans very much believe in a form of freedom that isn't as individualist and libertarian as presented here or where society is ordered within a certain range.

Fourth: this is legitimately in tension with nondiscrimination law.

Fifth: OP, you had better not be hostile to / weird about women who voluntarily choose to be tradwives.

[libraford]

What

The fuck

Do ya think

Freedom

Means

EARL?

[all-pacas]

in no particular order and for no particular reason: best examples of fjord and veth fucking with one another

the whole saga of captain button beard, which veth fully realized was him being patronizing and sarcastically played along with, and then repeated and threw back at him in the tunnels to xhorhas, to which fjord not only played along but outright echoed her “this fucker!” line when he did.

the first use of veth’s disguise self being to turn herself into a mini version of fjord, arguably setting off their rivalry forever

the first use of disguise self after fjord regains his powers being to turn himself into a huge version of nott

fjord letting her cross a dangerous river and only then parting the waters, rendering the effort pointless, after assuring her he would do no such thing. (bonus: caleb, ever biased, using her rope anyway).

that time fjord woke her up by gently picking up her while she slept and then fucking dropping her

i will throw you in the lava... you couldn’t

when fjord got swallowed by that worm thing and veth tried to pull him out, failed her strength check, he made fun of her, and she decided to push him back in instead

[all-pacas]

SOME MORE:

the time veth turned invisible and told caleb to tell fjord that she was dead

and caleb immediately being like “yeah she told me to tell you she’s dead” and fjord just Going With It, dramatically, NO!!! NOT MY GOBLIN!!!

“i know you don’t like me” “i like you!” “oH SaY ThaT AgAiN???”

“hey veth you can just one-shot this trex for us right?” “oh yeah i’ve always had that ability i just never used it” and then fjord’s grin when she falls out of her tree a minute later

fjord: [says something decisive and leaderly] veth: uh huh anyway our leader, caleb,

[lady-averie]

So while doing some pirate research for the play I’m writing I stumbled upon one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. In the 5th century A.D. there was a Scandinavian princess called Alwilda who’s father tried to set her up to marry Alf, the Prince of Denmark. Alwilda wasn’t cool with this so she and some female companions dressed as men, stole a ship, and sailed away. Eventually they met a company of pirates who were in need of a new captain and they were so captivated by her that they elected her as their new leader. Her crew became so infamous that Prince Alf was sent out to stop them. When their ships met he took Alwilda prisoner and she was so impressed by Alf’s skill that she agreed to marry him after all and eventually became the Queen of Denmark.

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

I stopped caring whether this was factually accurate about halfway through because it’s completely AWESOME.

[oldshrewsburyian]

Medievalist here for triumphant fact-checking: this story is, if not true, at least true according to the history of the Danes (Gesta Danorum) written in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus. You can read his account of Alwilda’s story in the original Latin here, or in English translation here. Highlights include:

She exchanged woman’s for man’s attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.

I love the implication that there were lots of Danish maidens just WAITING for the opportunity of a life of piracy…

[lady-averie]

Reblogging my old post for this A+ addition to it

[snakebitcat]

Also, I love how her problem with Alf was less a case of being opposed to marriage and more a case of wanting him to make an effort.

[pangur-and-grim]

he doesn’t need to do this

[snakebitcat]

It's not a question of need.

[thebibliosphere]

the 9/11 to Hunger Pangs pipeline is real and I will not be silenced

PLUTO, LMAO.

[thebibliosphere]

No, but wait. Hold on. Wait.

Okay, so. 9/11 happens, and MCR is formed. As a result, Stephanie Meyer has the most Mormon wet dream ever about Gerard Way, which gives us Twilight.

Twilight gives us 50 Shades of Grey, which leads to a boom in indie and self-pub erotica, directly creating a further boom in the publishing industry, and as a result, I get hired at a romance house. Thanks to both franchises, Crucifix Nail Nipples happens, and then 4 years later, my blog goes viral.

This leads to a sudden influx of people following me for writing and other weird shit, as well as writing prompts to try and get more amusing shit out of my brain like squeezing blood from a stone. One of such prompt was one about a vampire and werewolf in a polyamorous relationship, which four years after that became my international bestselling debut novel, Hunger Pangs.

I... I don't know what to do with this information.

[segamascott]

[bi-astolfo]

Yes, investigation claimed at least 1,200 detainees 'dropped off the grid' from 'Alligator Alcatraz'

The claim is not new — the Miami Herald published its findings in summer 2025.

[standwithdaanes]

source for the congresswoman thing as well, because i hadn't heard about that:

Rep. LaMonica McIver Faces 17 Years in Prison Over ICE Jail Inspection

The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to restrict or thwart congressmembers’ access to ICE jails.

[ms-demeanor]

I'm working on a client report and my CEO looked over it and asked how made it. I asked him if he meant, like, the graphs and he said "No this whole thing is really nice with the text and the images put together so well. Did you use an AI tool or something to arrange it like a book?" And I just have him kind of blank look and said "No, I've been doing print layout and design for twenty five years. I'm building this as a template we can use with other clients that will just need images dropped in. And the graphs are all screenshots from tools we already use."

And then he gave me kind of a blank look and said "Okay, that is. Very good to know."

I suspect I've unexpectedly solved a problem that I was unaware of.

[ms-demeanor]

For the record: the CEO *hates* AI and nobody else at the company has any experience with InDesign.

The deal is that we just fired a member of the executive team who had been asking our practice leads to put together scorecards each month so that he could put together 20-slide powerpoints to go over data that he didn't understand particularly well. The scorecards were taking up at least 10% of each practice lead's time with work that we couldn't bill to the client, the clients thought the presentations were confusing, and the CEO tasked me with putting together three slides for each client and leading those parts of the meetings.

I built a dashboard in our PSA that collected most of that data, have collected links to the info that the practice leads gathered so I can screenshot it for each presentation, and totally on my own because i like data and design i decided it would be a good idea to create a client report "book" with the data we were presenting before and insights from the trends over time in case the clients asked about the info that was no longer in the presentations that i can share with the clients after the meetings along with answers to any questions they asked me in the meeting that i needed to dig into.

So I basically freed up about 100 billable hours a month (six practice leads at four hours a week) for our T3 techs and apparently also alerted the CEO to the fact that I was not fucking around about professional design skills so he is no longer looking for a contractor to do our client education materials all while costing decidedly less than $120k a year.

So I'm not really worried that he's going to take credit or that I'm making myself replaceable with the templates, I'm mostly worried that I'm setting myself up to make more work for myself, but realistically doing it this way saves me time over the way the former exec had me doing it so really I'm just annoyed that this means they're going to make me go to more meetings.

[ms-demeanor]

Everyone thinks I'm very funny in meetings because I am but also because my "I have an infodump prepared on that topic if you'd like to drink from the firehose" face is very obvious to our team and it is apparently amusing to watch both me and the clients when I'm given the opportunity to, like, talk about password managers or server licensing models or access control protocols.

Also apparently I'm better at live data lookup than anyone was aware of until they started watching me do it in meetings? I don't know if that's because I'm better at using our RMM than the people who lead the meetings or if it's because I can recognize the part number, serial number, and processor model patterns of desktops and servers from major manufacturers for the last fourteen years on sight so i don't *have* to go digging in the records to figure out when something was purchased i can just tell you what year the processor was released and if the serial number was late or early into that model year because I know it off the top of my head.

Which I did not realize that other people at the company didn't know also until they started including me on lease replacement meetings.

[bigolechompers]

totally not bragging at all

[ms-demeanor]

Why would I not brag? I went from feeling like an exhausted failure banging my head against broken processes in a job i hated in February to having half my coworkers and my whole management team look at me like I'm doing arcane magic when I do something that's easy for me in April.

It has been very weird to see what "normal" is for the rest of the team since I'm no longer isolated in procurement but it has also been very gratifying for coworkers who thought I was stupid or flaky to understand that I'm not, i was just ill-suited to my former role and burned out after doing it for over a decade.

[ms-demeanor]

Also i did my time in the product mines - i was genuinely surprised that people didn't know about the processor lines and serial numbers (literally some of the serial numbers encode the manufacturing date, this is tremendously handy to know, I figured everyone already knew that) and such so after gaining that knowledge while kicking and screaming its nice that the team knows that the project leads don't have to do a bunch of tedious research (it is *annoyingly common* for computer manufacturers to make it hard to find the manufacture date or look up warranty start date by serial) and they can just give me a spreadsheet and i can get them estimates accurate to the year by looking at a couple data points we already have.

Ideally the database I'm working on will use APIs to collect this info in the future but for now API stands for "Alli Probably knows It."

[ms-demeanor]

[ms-demeanor]

Intel processors in the "i3/i5/i7/i9" lines were released about once a year and the first one to two digits after the dash represented the generation with the other characters denoting power or performance characteristics. That went on for 14 generations and then Intel released the core line, we are on the second generation of Intel Core processors, so you can think of that as iX-16XX, so if you want to know how old your computer is you look at the number that comes after the dash, say iX-9XXX, and subtract that number from 16 for a decent estimate on the computer's age, in this case a 9th gen processor should be about 7 years old. (Just checked Wikipedia and yep, released in late 2018 and early 2019.

[ms-demeanor]

Synology is easy, in older models the first two digits of the serial number is the model year. APC is easy and PRECISE, either the 1st to 4th or 3rd to 6th digits are the manufacturing year and week, so 2232XXXXXXX or XX2232XXXXX was manufactured in the 32nd week of 2022 (early august).

[ms-demeanor]

Mac requires access to a sketchy website, a vpn, and the ability to read rudimentary German. (Apple my beloathed, strange german angel who made the decoding site that's been running for 20 years my beloved)

[doberbutts]

“trans men don’t experience misogyny because they’re men thus cannot experience women’s oppression”

I hate to tell you this but even cis men experience misogyny if they step a toe over the line of what our incredibly sexist society sees as “proper” for a man. You really don’t think that a man with interests or expression the world sees as “female” aren’t treated with violence?

[doberbutts]

“would you say that of other privileged groups? do you think white people experience racism?”

I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.

Their ability to make it stop by saying “hey, I’m white actually” only goes as far as the person enacting violence on them is willing to believe them. They still have to live with the trauma and physical scars from the altercations. We live in a racist world and thus there will be violent people who force all others to pass a whiteness test and eliminating or harming the rest.

[doberbutts]

Got an ask that I just block/deleted but it was basically “so you think cis people experience transphobia!?!?!?!?” and uh

If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.

Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.

Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?

All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.

Everyone is at risk. Oppression doesn’t care what your label is. Some people are more visible targets than others, and as a result those people are the more common targets. That doesn’t mean no one else experiences it.

[doberbutts]

My first post to reach 2k without people clowning in the notes I feel so proud

[sophie-baybey]

[mantisliberationfront]

I think venus flytraps should be intelligent and ambulatory. I think they should get into the cupboards. I think they should purr when you pet them.

[prismatic-bell]

OP there is an entire Broadway musical explaining why you don’t want that

[bbcwhereareyou]

There’s a Broadway musical about them, too.

[foldingfittedsheets]

There is a word I’m not allowed to use. I love it. I love it so much. But my darling beloved wife hates it with a fiery passion.

I came across it from Anne Lister’s diary, where she says that she would “grubble under women’s skirts” and honestly. The word perfectly encapsulates the fumbling feeling of fighting your way through layers of fabric to reach the promised pussy land.

However the word has been forbidden, reviled from the first moment my beloved heard it. They shuddered and it’s truly one of the only restrictions they’ve ever placed on my vocabulary so I don’t say it. But I do think it, on occasion.

Sometimes the word will pop into my head and I will think it too hard and my wife will turn and glare at me and accuse, “I know you’re thinking it!”

“But I didn’t say it!” I protest. But they’re always right. Even with no context they always know when I’m thinking it.

Today I told my wife, “I shared the unmentionable word with Astrid today and she quite enjoyed it. She repeated it several times.”

They bellowed liked a dying wildebeest and said, “I can go months without remembering that word exists and then it comes up again. It’s so disgusting, it’s what Sméagol would do on the ground digging for worms!”

I was laughing and protested, “It sounds like fighting through skirts, the groping around.”

“No! That is something that happens in the muck and the filth. It’s negative sexy.

“Bet you're gonna take to Tumblr and share it and some people are gonna be like, ‘Oh what a great word! We should definitely use that in our lexicon. Top tier word!’ And you know what? THEYRE WRONG. GARBAGE WORD. GROSS.”

I listened to their impassioned hatred while cuddled in their arms and radiated love at them and remorse for having reminded them about the existence of grubbling. But now you get to hear about it. As a treat.

[snakebitcat]

The word being gross is what makes it hot tho.