I touched the Beacon

[porterr-robinson]

v.2

[usedtobehmc]

If I ever don’t reblog this, you can assume I’m dead. It’s just pure, sound-design gold.

The cuts, the slow ramp-ups, how it matches his dance moves.

MWAH.

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[tatangadragon]

water sports should be for adults too.me and the blokes at university should be allowed to shoot eachother with water guns

[tatangadragon]

post cancelled I've been told the term i used already exists in english and that it means something Very Much Different. english is a wicked language that i regret learning

[orcboxer]

kinda bullshit the English language doesn't have a discrete word for an unlit campfire. you light a campfire, but what is it before you light it? also a campfire, I guess. I need to invent a word that can be intuitively understood as "the arrangement of wood that is intended to become a campfire"

[dorian-they]

well "an arrangement of wood that is intended to become a campfire" sounds like it's just a bundle of sticks and I think there is a collective word for that maybe

[orcboxer]

[quietwingsinthesky]

very important for elf characters to freak the fuck out about the aging difference thing and pre-grieve like crazy and scream themself hoarse with denial when they can’t stop death itself and they still look the same as when they met the frail aged body that’s going cold beneath their touch and eventually settle into a numbness that they’ll call acceptance but they never really let anyone get as close as they did in the first century of their life unless they know they’re going to stick around as long as they will

[quietwingsinthesky]

“why are elves so snobby and exclusive and cut-off from everyone else” befriending you means they’ll end up burying you and your children and your grandchildren and they’ll still be young. exactly how many times do you think you could choose to do that. if you live through enough centuries, eventually you run out of days in the year to visit each grave.

[penandinkprincess]

funny to imagine vampires discovering new human drugs as they're invented.

like obviously they know what's in blood can get them fucked up, too, but humanity has gotten INVENTIVE with recreational drugs, especially in recent history.

like imagine being a vamp used to like. straight opium in the old days and alcohol and morphine yeah sure and then draining someone who tried this brand new invention called LSD.

[penandinkprincess]

I know there were some vampires who were PISSED when quaaludes were declared illegal after years of multiple options for dinner with a side of sedatives for dessert every single night.

now they have to do the equivalent of trying to find a discontinued flavor of something on ebay. like yeah it's possible, but it's ANNOYING.

[red-garden]

“Do dishes” and “take out trash” both require the use of a spell slot, vs “use phone” is a cantrip, and brother, I am a level one wizard

[lordmeowdemort]

Hello my baby hello my honey hello darkness my old friend

[pianta]

🌈🌈 (stickers)

★ twitter | ko-fi | ig | prints ★

[draconym]

[draconym]

great work everyone hit the bathhouse

[beardedmrbean]

This is good information to know.

I might need to culturally appropriate the Asian greeting just to see how it goes.

[emma-d-klutz]

[batsandboba]

when i say “girl” randomly as an interjection i’m speaking to the omnipresent all knowing being of Girl. asking her for mercy. taking girl’s name in vain

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[klappersacks]

(via File Photo)

[mudwerks]

WTF are those obelisks on the right?…

[pricklylegs-deactivated20250727]

Tasty obelisk fries..

[memewhore]

“It’s digestible” has got to be the laziest goal I’ve ever seen achieved by a food product.

[gingerhaze]

“It’s digestible”

[rhea314]

“It’s digestible” is pertinent!! Okay, for those of you who haven’t researched Crisco for writing fic about gay sex in the mid-late 60s:

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html

The more you know! :D

[nianeyna]

I have learned a new thing today.

[soupwife]

Love this post for so many reasons but most especially because this is from all the way back in 2012 and and yet not a single blog in this thread is deactivated

[nianeyna]

I enjoy that not only does this have a link to an actual source, but the link still fucking works.

[dancinbutterfly]

but @rhea314 you didnt include a picture of the crisco disco! AND MY GOD THE DJ BOOTH WAS A GIANT CRISCO CAN!

Go dance and get fisted. Fucking iconic.

[mr-elementle]

Love the gay history, but i just wanna correct that the “it’s digestible” in the gay stuff was a reference to crisco’s tagline it had been using since 1911, the actual meaning of its digestible is because it’s main competition came from “enhanced” lards which were rendered pig fat mixed with non food thickeners that literally did not digest and caused people to basically just shit out pig cream, since crisco was veggie based the body digested it along with the food

[papapastoral]

And in case you were still wondering, @mudwerks.. Tuna Croquettes

[elf7knight]

This post is the opposite of net zero information. Not only did I learn several new facts about gay history but also we rounded our way back to the original question of the tag line and the mini obelisks.

It’s a net profit of information. 12/10 post

[animepopheart]

★ Emmm | FMA Major Arcana collection ☆ ✔ republished w/permission

[insomniac-arrest]

this is literally one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen

the detail…

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.

[syn4k]

[sashagreys-juul]

*walking into the morgue to find body parts scattered across the floor* oh my god who closed last night