X-SOLDIER's Digital Neural Repository

Backing up my miscellaneous thoughts & random interests since December 2010

[depsidase]

[gondorrevealparty]

baseball interviewers will ask "how do you throw the ball so good" and Mariners players will casually drop that they have a headmate who plays the game for them

[jadeharleyinc]

all my alters become walters when i pitch the baseball of success

[punkitt-is-here]

[inbabylontheywept]

I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.

If you don't run, I'll just tell you, most people's bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It's like how you can't train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that's fine, but it would've been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.

Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn't all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn't really get that 5-6k a day doesn't generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn't have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.

I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they're often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.

[inbabylontheywept]

@creamsoda-slut no, this was a thing on our team too. The 20k guy had a cast iron stomach and he loved hotdogs. I eat hotdogs as a like, a nostalgia thing, but he just truly genuinely loved them. So some runs, he'd duck into a gas station and buy some. Pair it with the fact that this guy also had a major league pot belly, and it was a sort of accidental psychological warfare tactic. I'd be running along, panting, sweating, dying of heastroke by the AZ canals, and then Mr. 20k would blitz past, potbelly jutting 3 inches past his nose, a greasy gas station hotdog in both hands, and then he'd yell HEY BABS YER DOINGF FERFIFIC and I'd realize in the kind of sluggish way you realize everything when it's over 100 degrees that he had a third hotdog in his mouth and wasn't even out of breath. And then he'd slap my ass and chortle through his hotdog in this sort of huffy HEUHEUHEUHEUHEU and just rocket over the horizon. It was incredible. Like running with Dionysus.

Another time, we had a girl who wore a tankini on a run to the pool. Some of the other girls were Scandalized, so the coach made a thing about it and she was super embarrassed to be called out and then for the next pool run he showed up in a yellow speedo, gave himself a wedgie up to his nips and just slow jogged in front of the complainers the whole way to the pool. There was nothing they could do. If they tried to go fast, he could just pick up speed indefinitely, he was impossibly fast, and if they went slow, he, he had no issue just taking a mozy with his buns out.

Nobody complained about the tankini after that.

At another race, him and a few other varsity were having a contest to see who could pee up a tree the highest. He won when he ran up to the tree, still pissing, and did a sort of half-backflip that resulted in him falling straight on his head while also whipping piss like 12 feet up the tree. Everyone cheered him on so fucking hard, and he was ecstatic, I distinctly remember doing one of thus chest bump things with him and getting pushed back like 8 feet, but immediately afterwards he had his race and he kept getting lost because it turned out that the whole landing directly on his head thing gave him a concussion. And despite going on like, 3 wrong turns, he still won that race.

I was never friends with him personally, I just kind of watched him in awe from a distance. An incredible human being. One of my favorite people of all time. Only flaw that he had is that he casually would tell new guys to join him for workouts, and then the rest of us poor saps who had actually tried it once would go over and have to tell the new guy to Actually Please Don't Do That.

[conkreetmonkey]

Dude, that was fucking Wario. You met Wario.

[inbabylontheywept]

[topatoco]

🎪🍔 HAPPY BIGTOP DAY!!!🍔🎪

Happy anniversary to Bigtop Burger! Make sure you give your Bigtop and Zomburger prints a big smooch and put a hamburger under your pillow tonight for Steve ❤️

🤡 Topa.to/Worthikids | @worthikids 🧟‍♂️

[noartnowritingsorry]

Oh no…

[autistic-speedbump]

[zelda-heritage-posts]

Zelda Heritage Post

[cutesign]

Knives produced by Japanese blacksmith Akira Yamashita in the shapes of Sperm Whale, Minke Whale, Fin Whale, and Bryde Whale (from top to bottom)

❥cutesign

[depsidase]

[throwbackblr]

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[xsoldier]

This also applies to “cringe” because 98% of the time that just means, “I am experiencing a revulsion reflex response because I would personally be uncomfortable doing this, but I do not know if that's a personal insecurity or something that should be avoided for a legitimate reason because I haven't given it sufficient thought” and you need to spend time to understand the WHY before projecting that as a judgement at anything.

[jusjuiceboxbox]

Welcome to being an adult! Featuring such injury causing events as

- sneezed wrong

- turned your neck a little too fast

- slept weird

- took the trash out to the curb and stepped at a slightly different angle than usual

- breathed

- failed to breathe properly

- breathed in the wrong stuff. Allergy time

- looked too hard at something too far away

- knees

[xsoldier]

I had a case of the, "turned your neck a little too fast" in late January… and am still dealing with the results of that… in June.

[dailycatsblog]

[only-cat-memes]

[avasdemon]

My webcomic turned 14-years-old this weekend. Happy Birthday Ava's Demon 😊❤️‍🔥

[dogpuppy]

[catchyvideos]

OP theaverycottage on TikTok ♡

[whereifindsanity]

[dndprofessor]

[natalieironside]

One time I was DMing a campaign where the players walked into that tavern every campaign has and one of the patrons was a Mindflayer wearing a very bad human disguise who insisted his name was Johnald Humanman. And they were just like "Oh, okay. Well, that's his business" and didn't interact with Johnald Humanman at all.

[natalieironside]

I planned for a lot of eventualities but I never planned for a D&D party being polite

[dwarf-scum]

I once had a DM tell us that we completed a quest line about 3 sessions earlier than he expected because we got told by a group of lizardfolk that “nobody goes to that part of the swamp” and all went “huh, ok! Thanks for the warning” and just didn’t go

[arkhamarchitecture]

Our DM once told us that we'd managed to completely skip a massive, complex dungeon full of enemies because we were sent by a town to figure out what was up with the lizardfolk and my black dragonborn criminal character just walked up to their hideout, knocked politely on the door, and asked what was up in Draconic.

[thekasimkage]

The Dungeon Master had planned for the final stretch of our campaign to be fighting our way up a tower to reach the corrupted god at the top, having levelled up from all the encounters.

He did not expect that we’d force the abusive (demi-?)god that had been stalking, kidnapped and (almost?) married one of our player characters to tell us a shortcut to the top after defeating and decapitating him, nor that when he used all of his magic to preserve his life in his head, that we would also let the player who suffered his attentions take her revenge by using the head a golf ball and the barbarian’s warhammer as a golf club as we walked the seemingly endless corridors (but the latter half is beside the point).

[angstandhappiness]

LMAO YES