Arsenic has no effect on me

[dontletthishappentoyou]

Hot take on terrorism as art...I'm guessing you never grew out of your edgy phase.

edgy is like the dead dog of phases. It's not going anywher.

[dontletthishappentoyou]

“I have this idea for a new sex where there’s just like forty Y chromosomes and you just walk around bulging all the time, writhing in pain.”

—

[dontletthishappentoyou]

[dontletthishappentoyou]

I feel guilt over the extent to which I dislike mimes. I know they're trying their best and having fun, they're doing art and all, but I just fucking hate them.

[blackwoolncrown]

pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing and making art got turned into skills  instead of being seen as behaviors

so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives’.

[gryffind-o-r-k]

What’s sad to me about this is that I’ve noticed a lot of people saying they “can’t” do art, or dance, or sing. That because it’s turned into a profitable vocation, and thus has some implied heirarchy to it (ie: there are ‘master artists’, and ‘professional singers and dancers’), people feel shame for not “living up to unattainable standards,” when in reality, art for humans is very therapeutic and good for the soul.

[titusmoody]

Someone shared a screenshot of this post on Facebook like 3 months ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. 

[titusmoody]

The Princess Bride

There’s a framing story about some kid home sick from school. When I watch the movie with people, they always comment on the actor who plays the kid, but I’ve never paid attention to what they say about him. His grandpa comes to read him a book. Grandpa has glasses and a kindly mustache. The kid’s a bit of a brat about being read to, but in an endearing way somehow. 

The story starts with some countryside as grandpa narrates the beginning of the story. Buttercup lives on a farm and Wesley works at the farm. They fall in love. Wesley keeps saying “as you wish” which grandpa assures us means “I love you”. They kiss at sunset and the kid worriedly asks if this is “a kissing book” which is exactly the sort of endearing mild brattiness we love as an audience.

Anyway, then Wesley goes away on a boat for no reason instead of continuing to be happy. Grandpa tells us that the ship was attacked by pirates who take no prisoners so Wesley’s dead. Then prince Humperdink (I hardly even know her dink!) decides to marry Buttercup for extremely no reason. Buttercup internally hates this according to grandpa but she doesn’t act like she cares much one way or the other. 

One day, Buttercup is out riding a horse like a princess when some ruffians kidnap her in a remarkably polite scene. We’ve got Vezzini, a pompous, grating, intellectual boss; Fezzig, a gentle giant; and Inigo Montoya, a suave spanish dude. They banter really charmingly as they load Princess Buttercup onto a boat to take her away to a neighboring country that intends to hold her ransom for Humperdink to pay. 

They sail overnight and there are shrieking eels in the water. There’s another boat that they can see and the kidnappers argue charmingly over whether or not its following them. Buttercup tries to swim to the other boat, but–again–there are shrieking eels in the water. Fezzig punches the one that was about to eat her and scoops her back onto the boat.

Instead of arriving at a port, they arrive at “the cliffs of insanity!” which are super visually impressive. Fezzig carries the other three on his back and climbs a rope up the whole thing. The following boat is still there and the kidnappers decide that it must be the very same pirate who killed Wesley: The Dread Pirate Roberts. He climbs the rope in pursuit and we see he’s in some Zorro costume thing. Vezzini whines that Fezzig isn’t fast enough and Fezzig extremely reasonably points out that he has three entire people weighing him down.

They do have enough of a head start to reach the top with enough time to have a whole conversation about what to do next. They leave Inigo to kill the pirate when he reaches the top, since Inigo is a legendarily skilled swordsman who could kill anyone in a duel, to the point where fighting one on one is so boring to him that he decides to fight with his left hand to spice things up. Roberts reaches the top and the two of them have a remarkably relaxed conversation before fighting. Inigo talks about how his father was killed by a man who has six fingers on his right hand, and the reason he’s gotten so good at sword fighting is so that he can live out a scripted conversation he’s had in his head where he gets revenge. This absolutely rules as a side character’s whole deal. What more could you want than a guy who’s fun to watch, has a clear, understandable personal goal, and a sad backstory. Everyone loves Inigo Montoya.

Anyway, they fight. Their dialog contains a lot of fencing jargon, which I once saw a fencer talk about on youtube. Turns out, while the jargon has nothing to do whatsoever with what the actors are doing on screen, it’s all legit terminology used in ways that actually make sense. On top of that, it even fits the characters’ personalities. The fight itself is interesting enough in a simpler way. Turns out, both of them start out the fight on their non-dominant hand and switch to their dominant hand when they’re in danger of losing. Roberts is victorious but he doesn’t actually hurt Inigo, just ties him up or something.

Vezzini and co. see Roberts still pursuing, so Fezzig stays behind to wrestle Roberts into submission. Roberts bests Fezzig in a much less memorable scene than the Inigo one.

Then there’s the iocane powder scene. I kinda feel like skipping over writing out the summary of this since there’s still so much movie left to go over and everyone remembers how the iocane powder scene goes, right? It’s awesome.

After that, Roberts has Buttercup and she pushes him down a big hill and he says “as you wish” which means he’s not Roberts but Wesley, so Buttercup pushes herself down the big hill too. They reunite and decide to get out of there or something. I guess they’re still being pursued maybe, so they go into the big bad forest that has a better name I don’t remember. No one has ever come out of that forest.

In it, there are random fires that spurt out of the ground and quicksand. While navigating these dangers, Wesley goes into the story about how Dread Pirate Roberts isn’t a name but a title that gets passed down every time one of them wants to retire with all the money they stole. After nearly being swallowed by quicksand, a rodent of unusual size jumps on Wesley and attacks. Pretty sure at least some of the time it’s just a large stuffed rat that can’t even move so Wesley has to act like it’s trying to get at him. The face is genuinely a bit gruesome though. After besting a master swordsman and a literal, real life giant there’s no way a mere rat’s gonna get Wesley, though. 

They get through the forest to find some dudes on horses. Maybe one of them is Humperdink himself, I’m not sure. One of them definitely has six fingers on his right hand, which Wesley remarks about out loud. Buttercup gets taken back to Humperdink’s castle, and Wesley goes to get tortured in the trunk of a tree for no reason.

Buttercup is real sad now. I don’t know if she learns that the kidnapping was staged by Humperdink so that he had an excuse to go to war with the neighboring kingdom, but the audience definitely learns that. Maybe we learned it a while ago, but we definitely know it by now. Meanwhile, Inigo Montoya is real sad because he was beaten in a fair fight so maybe he isn’t good enough to get revenge like he wants. He gets very drunk about it. Meanwhile again, Wesley is in the pit of despair getting the life sucked out of him through the nipples by a big water powered wooden machine operated by an albino. It makes him mostly dead. 

Fezzig shows up to dump water on Inigo to get the sad/drunk off and they go to rescue Wesley. Inigo finds the right tree trunk using the power of his sword and jesus. In despair that his sword lead him to a tree, Inigo cries on it which opens the secret door. They carry Wesley away to a truly unrecognizable Billy Crystal who heals him with chocolate. Wesley is now awake but can’t really move his body for almost the rest of the whole movie.

I guess it’s important for Humperdink to actually marry Buttercup now, unlike when she was initially kidnapped. Also, at some point before now, Buttercup had a dream where she was in a big public square and some nasty old lady kept yelling “filth! Rubbish!” and such at her. It was freaky. Actually, it makes sense to put that dream around here since the reason she’s rubbish is because “her true love lives but she marries another!” so yeah. 

Now, there’s a wedding in the castle that Wesley and co. have to prevent. They build a big scary dread pirate roberts thing which scares the guards away when it (accidentally?) catches on fire. Inside the castle, Inigo finds the six fingered man and gets revenge in exactly the way he imagined. It absolutely rules. 

The “mawwage. And wuvv…twuu wuvv” bit happens and I can imagine it would likely be accused of ableism today, but I personally don’t care much when I’m honest with myself. Humperdink hears the dread pirate roberts commotion at the wedding and gets nervous that Wesley’s gonna prevent the wedding so he rushes the priest through the ceremony to the point where the actual official wedding part gets skipped through entirely. Buttercup doesn’t know that, though, so she goes to kill herself with a knife, but Wesley is in the bed and stops her. Then Humperdink shows up and Wesley bluffs his way into telling him to go away. It’s pretty cool. Then Buttercup jumps out of the window and Fezzig catches her and all of them ride away. And now the kid doesn’t mind that it’s a kissing book.

[titusmoody]

The Terry Pratchett type of nerd is possibly the best gen x subculture. Those guys know which mushrooms you can eat. They have a top 5 Sidney Poitier movies. They had to use a soldering iron to assemble their first computer.

[titusmoody]

0451 is the Wilhelm scream of video games

[titusmoody]

There's a chance that future historians will call this war World War 3 despite the fact that only two countries are fighting simply because it's what people are calling it right now.

[titusmoody]

Today, I had the opportunity to be impressed with a type of nerd I've never interacted with before.

I was worried that some ancient Roman coins I bought on a whim because they were cheap were modern forgeries, so I uploaded the following two images to a coin collecting forum:

Within an hour, someone had replied with precisely what ancient Roman mint this was produced at, and the two-year window when this exact coin could have been made.

[dontletthishappentoyou]

“Refined Beans”

—

[titusmoody]

Tumblr greatly improved this post

[titusmoody]

Neat used bookstore finds

[shiftythrifting]

Ancient memes brought to life. Spotted in Santa Barbara,CA

[titusmoody]

You're a beta male, Sonic.

[titusmoody]

You can always tell someone is a bad person if they pronounce “Jesus” with an “s” instead of a “z” and an “uh” sound instead of a short “i”

[titusmoody]

Just finished my list of every camera shot in Titanic and I'm surprised at how much it feels like I actually accomplished something.

[titusmoody]

I think I just experienced the inverse of "horny on main". I would've guessed this was a bot, but they're replying to a youtube comment thread about great cooking shows on youtube. I checked both the profile, which is very clearly trying to drag me to a porn site, and the recommendation, which is exactly as pleasant of a channel as it sounds.