Still Sen

Expect nothing...anything..everything all at once. 

[freelance-philosopher]

“Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach what is called honesty.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[tactlessly-sen]

The weight of loving you

Just because I no longer believe in hell does not mean I am any less deserving of it; I will make hell for myself.

I love you, and you know it. That’s why you don’t meet my eyes. Because loving someone like me, and being loved by me — truly loved — comes with consequences. Every time I try to say "I love you" to someone new, it lodges in my throat like the ghost of your name. I taste you like blood.

Send me a picture of your art, and I’ll see your hands. I always do. The canvas is nothing — it was always the artist. Nothing has ever held more meaning than the hands that make it.

I warned you about me.Early. I even thought I was brave, admitting it this time. I said, this will burn. And you said, I don't mind the fire. Where are you now?

We were too close. Too fast. I think we asked for it — or at least dared it to ruin us.

I’ve outgrown who you are now, but I still grieve who you were. That version of you— lives in me like a second heartbeat. It’s cruel, how every good memory I own has been poisoned by the person you've become. You managed to turn nostalgia into a slow-acting toxin.

Everyone loves to talk about their "toxic traits" — quirky little flaws like overthinking or catching feelings too fast. That’s not toxic. Toxic is needing to stay sober on my own date because I know drunk-me will moan your name. Toxic is trying to jam the wrong jigsaw pieces into the wrong spaces just to not be alone. Toxic is craving someone the way I once yearned for you — and breaking them in the process.

A man smiled at me in a coffee shop today. I smiled back. You’re gone, and yet somehow that still felt like betrayal. This morning, like always, I made two cups. Without you here, beautiful and half-dressed and sleepy in my chair, I drank both. Finished twice as fast. Felt nothing. 

I don’t romanticize death, not really. But I used to imagine dying in a bed you visited every day. The sheets would smell like you. Your books on the nightstand. Your laugh still echoing in the room.The same light through the window that once fell across your collarbone like a blessing. I get weaker. Slower. I’d fade in warmth. It is terrifying to go slowly — you have to think about passing for longer than you should. I have a hard time romanticizing death. But to die in a bed you’ll never visit? That’s what terrifies me.

I’m over it, I think. Mostly. But I’m scared. Scared that one day, I’ll pass a stranger reading a book you once begged me to finish — one I never made it to - and fall apart in public. It’s sad — deeply, unbelievably sad — that you’ll only ever know I loved you as long as I was around. But I love you past that. Silently. With no audience. No reply.

I meet a date in a coffee shop. He asks me what makes me happy. And the first word in my head is still your name. Four months later, I’m still with him. Still in that same coffee shop. He’s complimenting the poems I wrote about all the ways I fucked up. And I’m smiling. But I’m thinking, they weren’t really about me at all.

[havingapoemwithyou]

VI. wisdom: the voice of god by Mary Karr

[distinguishedbaloney]

[eilooxara]

Non cooking spray stick

[eilooxara]

Non spray stick cooking

[that-house]

Non cooking stick spray

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

yeah okay ill reblog that

[lindleland]

"save me, substance abuse!" i cry. before you can moralize to me about the dangers of addiction, a noble and powerful steed gallops into the room - my horse whom i have named "substance abuse". you learn an important lesson about making assumptions. i snort a line off its back

[adeebobo]

this reminds me of me and my friend’s horse named Drugs

when i was in middle school me and my friends had a small yellow horse eraser we fondly named “drugs”. this lead to a lot of middle school tomfoolery around his name and saying shit like “Ma’am, so and so took drugs from me” and other dumb shit like that.

eventually, our english teacher, Mr. R, caught onto the joke. instead of writing us up or sending us to the principal though, he played along, making similar jokes like “(name), stop taking drugs.” “hey. you three. you need to share drugs if he’s going to be at the table.” “no drugs today, guys?” so on and so forth.

by the end of the school year it had become a very fond joke between us and this english teacher, so we decided since we were moving onto our freshman year, we decided to give our eng teacher this little yellow horse eraser.

so we go find our english teacher, Mr. R, who was setting up cornhole with our principal and other “big important people” for our 8th grade graduation party, and we hand him the little eraser.

to which he yells as loudly (and happily) as he can: “YOURE GIVING ME DRUGS?!!”

i actually went back to visit him before i left for college, and to this day he still has Drugs on his desk, and regularly tells his new students about me and my friends. ty op for reminding me about Drugs the Horse

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[fleshengine]

I want to be forcefully pet by at least two people. Like the way a group of people will gang up on a dog and pet it real hard and it loves it? I need that in my life. I need to not be able to keep track of the hands on my body.

[fleshengine]

Girl I felt faint writing it

[fleshengine]

This is the energy we’re going for btw. Except like… more hands…

Artist is sugarcollars on instagram btw.

[maybeallieart]

An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.

[skluug]

fucking bizarre that computers heat up while operating. like dude it’s just math

[official-kircheis]

i too heat up doing math. They're not special

[tanadrin]

it’s worse than that. the laws of physics require doing math to produce waste heat.

[ceausescue]

it's bonkers that the answer to "can i make a more efficient steam engine" is "no, and btw all good is temporary", but it's objectively even funnier that the answer to "can my fucking cpu stop throttling" is "no, bc otherwise you could make more efficient steam engines"

[tanadrin]

rolf landauer, looking at a steam engine: “this is just a very bad computer.”

[xanaxfarts]

Tree roots following the pattern of concrete footpaths

[girlnephew]

[ryanthedemiguy]

I don't think this is possible????

[physicallyimprobable]

Hello Ryan I am here to help. So the first step is pretty easy: Three cheeseburgers are worth 18, so each one is worth 6. If these are dollars, that's a steal!

From the second equation we get that cheeseburger plus fries-squared is five. Subtracting cheeseburger, which is six, from both sides, we get that fries-squared is negative-one. Math fans will know that there are two solutions to this; either fries are the "imaginary unit" 𝒾 or they are its negative, -𝒾. We'll do the rest of the problem with 𝒾, keeping in mind that at the end we should also take the complex conjugates as solutions.

Finally, we have that cup to the power of fries, minus cup, equals three. Replacing fries with 𝒾, and moving a cup to the other side, we get that cup-to-the-𝒾 is equal to cup-plus-three.

Now, the weird part about this is the cup-to-the-i. The problem with this is that complex exponentiation is technically not a thing. That is to say, there is no one function which is mathematically equal to "input-to-the-power-of-𝒾". In fact, there are infinitely many such functions.

Fortunately, due to reasons that take about six pages to explain (trust me I've done it), there is one particular function that many people have agreed is "the most reasonable one". This is not a mathematical notion, but a human preference. Seeing as this question was presumably written by a human, I am comfortable with using this function.

So, what function is this? Well, given a complex number r∠θ written in polar form (if you don't know what that means don't worry), where -π < θ ≤ π, then (r∠θ)^𝒾 = e^(-θ)∠ln(r).

Applying this to our problem a value r∠θ will be a possible solution for cup if e^(-θ)∠ln(r) = r∠θ + 3. Splitting this into real and imaginary parts, we get two equations: e^(-θ) cos(ln(r)) = r cos(θ) + 3 and e^(-θ) sin(ln(r)) = r sin(θ). We can graph these equations on Desmos:

The possible values of cup are the intersections between the red, green, and purple. There are infinitely many of these which have an angle of around -π/3, and there are two weirdos: One which is a complex number very close to -2.98, and one which is somewhere around -25. The possible values for cup are all of these infinitely many solutions, and also all of their complex conjugates.

[tactlessly-sen]

still dont get it but appreciate the effort. you're cool man.

[thisbibliomaniac]

[animentality]

[idk-bruh-20]

Tony, the futurist

Buckle in folks, I've had some thoughts and I'm about to make it ✨everyone's✨ problem.

Been thinking about Tony Stark, the futurist who saw the end of the world.

Tony, who in IM1 escapes kidnapping and torture and says, "I shouldn't be alive. Unless if was for a reason."

who, in The Avengers, has this exchange with Bruce Banner:

Tony: You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart. This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a… terrible privilege. Bruce: But you can control it. Tony: Because I learned how. Bruce: It's different. Tony: Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should've killed you. Bruce: So you're saying that the Hulk… the other guy… saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what? Tony: I guess we'll find out. Bruce: You might not like that. Tony: You just might.

Right after this, Cap tells Tony, "You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you."

And then Tony flies a nuke into a wormhole, tries to call his girlfriend because he thinks these are his last moments, did not go in there expecting to survive.

Although he survives, he witnesses an alien army so terrifying, so unbeatable, it gives him crippling PTSD nightmares and panic attacks, knowing they are not prepared to defend the earth.

I'm thinking about Tony who, in AOU, gets manipulated by Wanda into witnessing his worst nightmare.

Which, by the way, involves losing all of his newfound friends.

Later, he has this exchange with Nick Fury:

Tony: And I'm the man who killed the Avengers. I saw it. I didn't tell the team, how could I? I saw them all dead, Nick. I felt it. The whole world, too. It's because of me. I wasn't ready. I didn't do all I could. Fury: The Maximoff girl, she's working you, Stark. Playing on your fear. Tony: I wasn't tricked, I was shown. It wasn't a nightmare, it was my legacy. The end of the path I started us on. Fury: You've come up with some pretty impressive inventions, Tony. War isn't one of them. Tony: I watched my friends die. You'd think that'd be as bad as it gets, right? Nope. Wasn't the worst part. Fury: The worst part is that you didn't.

Tony's worst fear is to survive in a world he's failed to save. He has to "do all [he] could" or else the future he's terrified of will happen and it will be his fault.

(Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's a reason why Tony and Peter are so compatible as mentor and mentee.)

Tony's seen what's coming, and he's willing to do whatever it takes.

Here's the thing, though:

Tony doesn't actually want to die.

In AOU, when they're arguing about why he created Ultron, Tony says this to Cap:

"Isn't that the mission? Isn't that the 'why we fight'? So we get to go home?"

He tells Bruce that the reason they should create Ultron is to have "peace in our time."

He tells Pepper that his constant tinkering, his inability to ever, ever rest is because he needs to keep her safe from the oncoming threat.

Tony has a life he wants to protect, people he wants to keep safe. And, unlike the other Avengers, he knows exactly how impossible this will be to achieve.

Tony is the only Avenger who understands how severely outmatched they are. Maybe Thor understands the threat, but he has no ability to imagine losing.

Tony tries to get them to understand:

Tony: Recall that? A hostile alien army came charging through a hole in space. We're standing three hundred feet below it. We're the Avengers. We can bust arms dealers all the live long day, but, that up there? That's… that's the end game. How were you guys planning on beating that? Steve: Together. Tony: We'll lose. Steve: Then we'll do that together, too.

Well, they do lose. And they don't do it together.

And it turns out Tony was right about everything.

He was right that he would survive to face his world that he'd failed to save.

He was right that the Avengers would not be enough.

He was right that Bruce's powers would be worthwhile someday.

And, apparently,

some people think he was right that he was only alive for this reason.

Because, obviously, the only "reason" for someone like Tony Stark to be alive is to eventually sacrifice himself, right?

A character so traumatized can only find peace in death.

Right?

No.

Stop that.

Tony Stark may have been willing to risk his life for his family, but that doesn't mean he wanted that to be his end.

Remember when this happened?

Bruce: Saved it for what? Tony: I guess we'll find out. Bruce: You might not like that. Tony: You just might.

Bruce gets to live long enough to like his ending.

Remember when this happened?

All Tony ever wanted to do was make the world a better place.

And, what about this?

You're telling me that Yinsen didn't value family above all else?

That he thought Tony should die and leave them behind?

No.

Tony Stark is a futurist.

He is the Cassandra of the MCU. He warns the others constantly of the oncoming threat that only he, apparently, can see. (Even Thanos calls him "cursed with knowledge.")

No one believes him. Alone, he tries to prepare for the threat that he has witnessed. He sits with his nightmares and tries to find a way around them, constantly.

He builds a life worth living, finds people worth protecting, just like Yinsen told him to.

To protect the future, he does all he possibly can.

Tony deserved to be part of the future too.

[egberts]

im really pissed that palindrome isnt palindrome backwards

[viridiscrow]

Ah, yes but emordnilap is a word!

An emornilap is any word that, when spelled backwards, produces another word. Examples of emordnilap pairs include:

desserts & stressed

drawer & reward

gateman & nametag

time & emit

laced & decal

regal & lager

And therefore “emordnilap palindrome” is an emordnilap palindrome.

Which I, for one, think is really frickin’ cool.

[egberts]

dude

[seti-fan]

You know that bothered someone else in history so much they had to make the word emordnilap something so that palindrome could be used in a palindrome.

[fleetwood-mac-andcheese]

The plural of emordnilap is semordnilap and that’s just the best part of all this

[yr-tiktok-mom]

[animentality]

[quasi-normalcy]

The important thing that everyone remembers is that all of this magical, lighter-than-air-seeming Internet technology consists of massive amounts of real, physical infrastructure that companies like to abstract away from their consumer bases.

[veloriajones]

This is a huge thing people underestimate about technology in general. "Digital is great because it uses less paper" - maybe so, but do you have any idea how much water and minerals and fossil fuels are used to build and maintain the data centres making all this shit work? How much energy is needed to hold every single person's cloud storage data for every single organisation they might have an account with? The sheer volume is astronomical, but people don't think about it because it's tucked away out of sight of the average person.