O'er the Land of the Brie

IDEK. Have some chocolate.

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[these-violet-delights-fic]

People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!

[dontbelasagnax]

Mentioned to my mom I'm asexual a couple months ago and today.... we got into the car and she hit me with, "So you use they/them pronouns now?"

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"

"Yes, mom."

[savetheworldkissaplushie]

[valmillion]

i spot a plus size honey across the bar and start to chat her up until her bisexual boyfriend with a magic the gathering tattoo comes over and starts yelling at me so i turn him sideways so he can't make another action until his next turn

[honeylemony]

Rough out there for bisexual Alex

[dayquil-driver]

so embarrassing when i forget im checking someone's blog and i start scrolling through and liking and reblogging shit as if it's just my dash. it feels like wandering into someone else's apartment and not noticing and making myself lunch

[dayquil-driver]

reblog if i can wander into your apartment (blog) and make myself lunch (like and reblog as if it's my dash)

[concerningwolves]

Every now and then this little card falls out the back of my journal (where it will live until I decide what to do with it), and every time I'm like yes, thank you, I will meet the pygmy shrew again. and I am delighted to do so! i also think many people on Tumblr would like to meet it too

[concerningwolves]

Vital context: this came in the packaging of a bag of tea. I don't see what relevance the pygmy shrew has to Kenyan loose leaf tea (except, perhaps, that it is very cute and therefore always relevant, all the time?). But ☝️ I realised today that the brewing guidelines specify one 5g scoop of loose leaf tea. the pygmy shrew is as light as, if not lighter than, about 2 tsp of tea leaves.

[jewish-rock]

using your pygmy shrew as a scale balance for your kenyan loose leaf tea 👍

[writertobridge-deactivated20230]

Saw this on Twitter and wanted to share.

[senatortedcruz]

Wonderful photo

[toxetta]

me at the antarctic research station like hey hey :3 if you gimme twenty dollars i'll eat the funny popsicle with a primordial plague preserved inside it :3 bet you won't :3

my coworker who is actually a penguin who killed him and took his place and is hoping nobody notices: 🐧

[thejadedkiwano]

I like to think of myself as a free-thinking sophisticate, but at the drop of a hat I can easily turn into a basic bitch

like if you meet me and think I'm edgy and cynical, just show me one of those vortex bowls for washing berries and I'll crack

[oneheadtoanother]

[hbmmaster]

vision: light makes contact with different cells in the eye which are sensitive to different frequencies within the visual light spectrum

hearing: the ear detects the vibrations of the air

smell: this one's just magic

[hbmmaster]

I made this post years ago to express my own confusion regarding how smell works and I have since then learned that actually nobody knows how smell works. like the general mechanism is understood, there's a bunch of receptors in the nose that detect different chemicals, but unlike the other special senses there is no model for predicting which things will produce the same or similar sensory experiences. nobody knows how to tell how similar two arbitrary chemicals will smell without just smelling both of them. so yeah I guess it is just magic

[yzuposts]

Jesus fucking Christ. In the US they’re separating the MMR vaccine into three different shots?? Let me tell you fucking something: YOU CANNOT GET THESE AS SEPARATE SHOTS IN THE US! It is physically impossible to get these three shots separate.

So I guess kids are just going to get measles, mumps, and rubella now! Even though we have a perfectly good MMR vaccine for all three-in-one! Fuck Trump. Fuck Kennedy. Fuck Bill Cassidy and any of these republican dickheads who aided and abetted this grievous wrong to the future of America & all the children who WILL be affected by this. Goddamn monsters in charge.

[doubly-magic]

wait, are the shots only effective when theyre together? /genuine questions

[daysleftofsecondterm]

No, it’s just that the vaccine is only available together because the diseases have been eradicated for so long, we straight up do not make them separate anymore. Which also means that when people do get these diseases it’s gonna be a lot harder to treat and a lot easier to die.

[luesmainblog]

It should be noted that this whole "get the shots separately" thing comes directly from the scam that andrew wakefield lead in the UK in the late 90s, and the effective birth of the modern anti-vax movement. the entire point was to scare parents into getting separate vaccines - which was a more expensive option that wakefield stood to profit from.

the theory behind it was that the measles in the MMR vaccine would leave trace amounts of RNA in the intestines(none could be found when this was tested), which would then turn into "morphine-like substances"(no specific chemical named or found), causing non-specific colitis(bowel issues of varying kinds) which would then, somehow, cause Chron's Disease. that last part got changed to "it causes Autism" later on. Wakefield has since lost his medical license, as it was found that, among other problems, he and his team medically abused children to try and create the evidence to back up their claims.

This is, at this point, a very old method based around lies meant to build up a scam using children as props and tools. It should be called out as such.

[brainscrewz]

tbh if someone just handed me a pressure washer and set me loose in the streets i would go into a trance and just start hosing shit down indiscriminately. it's not a question of how much i could clean, but how long until i get hit by a car and die

[monster2001]

13 years on this site what do I get. More ads

[queerautism]

Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?

This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.

[zorin-os-official]

THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS

GAMBLING IS NEVER PROFITABLE

RESIST THE URGE

[rudeboimonster]

#i cannot overstate they will make the horse girls gayer to get your money#im sorry thats just literally what it is#japan knows about yuri money

[prismatic-bell]

Listen, okay. I used to work in a gas station and as part of my job I sold lottery tickets. I'm about to tell you The One Big Secret State Lotteries Don't Want You To Know:

Scratchers have more prizes when the game is new, but those prizes are pretty much enough for you to break even and get addicted to the game.

They are the "first time it's free" wins. Because your brain doesn't remember that you won $10 on a $10 scratcher, it only remembers that you won. So you go back. And you go back. And in a few weeks you spend $100 to win $10 but it's fine, it's just a streak of bad luck, this game pays out all the time.

I once watched a woman pour almost $500 into scratchers, using her "winnings" to buy more and going back to her car and coming back in, jittery and shaky like every depiction you've ever seen of a speed addict in withdrawal. The symptoms didn't end until she lost her last dime. And then she tried to use our ATM. I'd actually called my manager in between buying bouts to beg her to let me do something, because I wasn't allowed to refuse the sale and if I did and it got back to corporate I'd be fired but I felt like I was handing lit matches to someone covered in gasoline, and she'd told me I could say the ATM was borked. So I taped a huge sign over the screen that said OUT OF ORDER STUCK CARD.

She was the most dramatic case, but far from the only one. I had people who came in every day after work and dropped $100 on scratchers. Daily. And that's not even the scariest part.

I had a customer I became friends with. We'll call him Jim. Jim invited me out for his birthday with his husband and a couple of other friends. We went to a casino, and because it was my first time I got a $10 free credit. And I was like "cool! I can play nickel slots all night long and never spend a dime of my own money!" And that is indeed what I intended to do. Early in the night, I won a $56 jackpot. I decided that was super-cool--I could fill my gas tank, grab a snack, and still have a little left over to throw in my savings account. Only five or six bucks, but hey! That adds up.

So I spent out the end of the original $10 and ended up with $63 total in winnings. At this point we'd been there like three hours, I was out of the money I'd been willing to spend/lose, and the noise and cigarette smoke was getting to me (the casino had gone nonsmoking but the carpets and stuff were still totally saturated, it was awful). So I said I was going to cash out and call it a night.

Jim physically took my playcard from my hand and forced it into a machine and said "no, no, you have to spend it ALL." He literally wouldn't let me leave the casino until I'd lost my winnings. And again, these were not huge winnings. These were "oh, that's nice." But he couldn't stand the idea of not gambling to the last penny--not just his last penny, but anyone's last penny. I hadn't realized until that moment that he had a problem--because he spread his lotto buys between multiple gas stations and never shared how much he spent at the casino.

Now Jim was a very nice guy with a very big problem (a few months after this he ended up in therapy for gambling addiction). I don't say this to slag off on him. We're actually still friends on Facebook. But he lost tens of thousands of dollars, several friends, and almost lost his husband, and he was taking other people with him. He was so deep in his addiction that he was putting the financial stability of other people at risk. I drew the line at spending my own cash--I'd actually left my bank card at home on purpose--but what if I hadn't? What if I wasn't autistic enough to basically have a built-in timer for flashing lights and ringing bells instead of finding them attractive? What if I hadn't grown up hearing my mother say "never take more money into a casino than you're willing to lose"?

Gambling addiction isn't just life-destroying, it can (in a way) be contagious. Your boss buys you a scratcher to put in your holiday card as a nice little token. What can it hurt? Your church holds a weekly bingo game for cash. It's just a chance to get out of the house, right? Your friend has a little casino outing for his birthday. You're just going to have a couple of drinks, play slots or blackjack for a couple of hours, meet some interesting people and go home--

--until you do more than that.

Be wary, kiddos. Don't take more than you're willing to lose. And the minute you think "this time I'm gonna--" you get your ass up and get out. Because that way lies debt and destruction, and the people raking in the billions don't care.

[teaboot]

I was too busy laughing to take a picture but my son answered the door last night ready for an adventure 😭😭😭

[teaboot]

IT HAPPENED AGAINNN

[chutzpahchesed]

one of the most deranged things I’ve had the displeasure of reading that doesn’t come from a Neo-Nazi or a pro-terror outlet like Dropsite. no. this comes from NY Mag.

(nitpicking SWANA is not the issue, although the term seems to be deployed here instead of MENA very intentionally, as part of the effort to erase Israelis).

tabletmag:

The media is at it again, and the latest NY Mag is way worse than it looks. Naturally, we read the main articles so you don’t have to.

Yes, these are real.

I don’t know how we’re supposed to combat this or impress upon non-Jewish audiences how completely bonkers, frighteningly discriminatory, and nefariously antisemitic and xenophobic a piece like this. its entire purpose isn’t to uplift anyone, it is to cast suspicion upon and attempt to ostracize and force out and culturally erase one specific people.

I’ll say again: 70% of hate crimes in NYC are perpetrated against Jews. articles like this are working to perpetuate that.

[knight-of-skyloft]

"Jews stole from SWANA culture and turned it into slop to make money" is literally Nazi rhetoric but with "SWANA" instead of "Western".

[chutzpahchesed]

I shouldn’t be, but I’m still shocked that this has been so thoroughly accepted with barely a reinvention, it’s not even a fresh coat of paint.

“the Jews are not a part of us. no matter where they live, they are foreigners. unwelcome. inhuman. invaders. their existence victimizes ours. they have no culture, unlike us. they are puerile and violent. they are thieves. they have no food that isn’t stolen. they create no meaningful art. they don’t contribute, they just leech off of the rest of us. we are subjected to them and forced to do business with them, and it’s harmful to our morals and our society. we must not normalize tolerating them.”

it should not be hard to distinguish the subtext of NY Mag in 2026 from the messages of Mein Kampf.

[jewishgay4il]

listen i dont believe in gd or an afterlife but I am starting to, if only to not lose my mind and know that they will face some sort of justice

[prismatic-bell]

Is NYMag the kind of publication where we can write to the editor and complain about (if nothing else) the shitty editing job on this piece? Mamdani (African-born American) is Middle Eastern, but people whose families have been in the Middle East for 3000 years aren't because they're Jewish? Come on.

[alexseanchai]

worth a shot:

Letters to the Editor If you are submitting a letter to the editor and would like it to be considered for publication in the magazine, please make sure to include your name, location, and telephone number. Email your letter to us at [email protected].

Contact us for Subscription Services, Media Inquiries, and more.

and link to the offending article:

When Eating Out Is Political

The Middle Eastern restaurant scene has never been bigger, better, or more fraught.

[thejadedkiwano]

"And unlike Middle East...SWANA suggested a decolonial framework."

How amazing that in that vast decolonial region everyone speaks Arabic, I wonder why that is