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Not my posts but an interesting thought.

THIS! READ THIS!

Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.

and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.

well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?

Saving on the off-chance that I get to run that campaign that has the terrible cyberpunk robots trying to steal ancient cryptocurrency.

sorry but Ea-Nasir as a crypto tycoon is just impossibly perfect

Oh gods, Ea-Nasir would totally get in on making ICOs. Buy into NasirCoin™ for all your secure metallurgic transfer needs, what do you mean pyramid scheme, is that an Egyptian thing?

Stable store of value! Keep your money out of the taxman’s hands! All transactions are recorded on an immutable clay tablet ledger, stored in Ea-Nasir’s back room!

do you ever use a pen and you’re just blown away by how smoothly it glides across the page and how the ink flows out so beautifully like tears of jesus or something

Some people must experience the world in a more exciting way than I do

Oh I’m a slut for good pen

My office literally has ongoing debates about which of the swag pens we end up with is the best. It’s nice to have found my people.

That’s why fountain pens still exist.

thoughts!

to be honest since I was a child I’ve just very much had a talent for story-telling. i got bullied a lot and I got terrible grades in everything but the one good note I’d get on report cards and the ONLY nice things my classmates would say when prompted would be something like “she’s so funny” or “she really paints a picture when she tells a story”

So I placed all of my self-worth in my ability to entertain people, which is the story for a LOT of kids! But I was really good at it.  I always took (and still take) ordinary events and made them funny and entertaining. If I went to the store and a cashier said something odd to me, I could retell it in a way that made people laugh.

People would call me over to tell their friends “that one story” they’d heard before. I got invited to lunch tables and parties and homework groups for it. It was how I connected to people and made friends after years of being bullied.

And when you meet a lot of people, and you have a conversation with everyone you meet, something funny starts to happen: you get into a lot of weird situations and encounters that just make for more stories.

So I kept sharing, and it NEVER occurred to me that anyone would think I was lying until in 11th grade a boy said to my younger sister, who was seen as quiet, cool, and I guess thereby trustworthy “why does your sister make shit up all the time?”

And she told him “she doesn’t. I’ve been with her in half the stories she tells.”

He believed her and apologized, but when I heard about it, it really hurt me. I realized suddenly that maybe everyone I talked to, shared with, was laughing behind my back. That they thought I was a liar, desperate for friends and approval.

I had to decide not to care, but it seeded a deep insecurity in me. Sometimes I still catch myself worried my friends are secretly thinking “yeah right” when I tell them about a strange girl I talked to at the library.

I know they believe me, and I trust them, but it’s an old worry, and old worries linger!

So when my posts first started getting a lot of attention, and people started commenting “and everyone clapped,” “that man, was albert einstein,” “this is literally peak fake tumblr,” it hurt my feelings! I felt silly to have my feelings hurt by a meme. Like, I’m an adult, but it still did!

But then I started getting into watching standup comedians, and they tell the most bonkers off-the-wall stories I’ve ever heard. And people dissected them and tried to prove them fake, and then instead they’d find proof the stories were real. And in fact they’d realize, the stories weren’t really that unbelievable in the first place.

They were often about normal life with one strange element tossed in, that anyone else would have summarized in two sentences or less, and no one would have blinked.

But the comedians had made a career out of making an event funny. Making life bigger and better and more entertaining than it ever is while it’s happening.

And I realized I have that same skill.

At the end of the day, I’m just really funny, and really talented, and you can take it or leave it, that’s your choice, and that’s that on that!

There’s something quite key in this, and that’s the story shape. Finding things that are story-material, isolating them from the stream of everyday occurrences, FINDING THE STORY SHAPE, crafting a satisfying story from the shape, packaging it for easy consumption, and presenting it to others so that they get the intended effect? That is a long series of interlinked skills, which genuinely takes years to learn. Done correctly, the packaging becomes invisible, and people focus on the narrative, generating the reaction you wanted. But because people are increasingly fiction-oriented, they sometimes become suspicious when the job is done “too” well: “This packaging is crafted to a professional standard! It is similar to that used in fiction, to make stories for money!! Therefore, I don’t believe the event! You must be a fiction storyteller! Fiction is the only important story. I refuse to believe that story-shapes occur in nature, and that story-telling is a deliberately cultivated skill.”

Etc. etc.

Most of my own stories are actually incredibly mundane, and frequently happen to anyone who puts themselves in the right situations. The only difference between my stories and everyone’s constant stream of everyday life: the fact that I like to spot story shapes, cut them out of the rest of the fabric, and show them off to people.

People laugh and clap at my standup routines, they reblog my tumblr stories, and they persist in coming to dinner at my house despite the danger that I might talk to them. I have evidence that they appear to enjoy the stories. They do that because of the packaging, not because I am a person to whom weird events happen. The weird events are not interesting or enjoyable: Things Just Happen and Keep Happening to everyone, constantly, anyway. But people laugh because they like being shown a funny thing in an obviously funny light, and being invited to laugh. Not because of the series of improbable circumstances (which are actually quite mundane and highly probable - part of the packaging of a story-shaped occurrence is obscuring this.) You titer out the dramatic tension for maximum effect, and everyone goes “woo!!” at the right moment, because the buildup and release of dramatic tension is officially Enjoyable to Humans. For example, the actual story that I relate in the Salmon Transportation Story series is an entire Tumblr post spun out of nothing in particular. A man dropped a fish in an unexpected way. It is simply presented in a format that my followers on Tumblr were prepared to appreciate in November 2017. You can tell it in such a way that it is called a “wild ride,” or you can stumble and stammer over it in a confusing manner, or you can write it up for a scientific paper, or you can just ignore it. Every discrete event that subverts expectations can be turned into this exact kind of story, and there are three standard off-the-shelf packages that you can wrap around it to make people laugh. To make the exact same kind of story as this one, just look for an event that subverted your initial expectations for how it was going to go, and try fitting it into the same narrative arc.

It’s a good skill to identify things that are story-shaped and how storytellers construct and deploy them. It’s an even better skill to admire the craft and mechanism of the construction, seeing how an event can be spun up into a Story. This will be absolutely key for your survival as a citizen, in a time when nations are entirely directed by stories, many of them fictional, and power is awarded to the person who is best at story-construction, and news travels - not because of its importance - but because of its packaging. This is called rhetoric, and it is the art of the discourse; it is a genuine field of study, and the reason it is so powerful and insidious is partly because it is practically invisible.

Eyyy, I finally put a header photograph on my Tumblr after… how many years? It’s the image on top, from water color artist Stanislaw Zoladz.

Yep, they’re all painted. A-freaking-mazing, I’ve seen them exhibited in real life and you’d think you could literally walk into the painting.

OH my sweet summer child, sleep ignorant of what awaits you

Give her a smooch on the noggin before applying Hat

if you lift off the Hat, you’ll find the smooch underneath

There are very few things I love more than Pangur, one of them is Pangur wearing cute hats

i wanna watch a wizard rugby throwdown now

@mnemmy

New Yorkers aren’t unfriendly or unhelpful. What folks who think that miss is that we’re always jammed into a too small subway car or a too narrow sidewalk or a too cramped elevator. We don’t have enough physical space, so we give each other psychological space by minding our business. But if someone needs help, we’re there.

Tonight I was riding the 7 train out to Citi Field. At Grand Central, a guy who seemed to be somewhere on the eccentric/addled scale got on and yelled “my man’s going to Kennedy – JFK airport. Y'all got this?” He was intense enough that I looked up and saw he was pointing to a puzzled-looking Asian man who’d gotten on in front of him. He said it again – “JFK airport, y'all got this” and stepped back onto the platform.

The folks in the subway car started talking, verified the route, talked to the man to make sure he understood, found someone in the car who was getting off at the right stop, and deputized him to go with the man to the E train. Y'all got this? Yeah, we got this. We’re New Yorkers.

(via meanboysclub)

The last one

Also good on these people for taking the aggressively petty route instead of falsely registering their pets as service animals

I love how everyone intentionally interpreted this not as “your dog must be small” but “your dog must be in a bag”

Deinonychus bust made with chicken feathers

I found this Youtube channel run by a Japanese chef and it’s actually better than porn? First all all his cinematography is off the charts. Youtube videos have no business looking that good. Second of all, everything he makes looks SO TASTY, and he explains the recipes in such a simple, soothing, manner. Third off all, he does this all while his two adorable kitties watch??? Like… they are so intent on what hes doing but they never run around or hop on the counter???? He has a stool for them to sit on as he makes his recipes Im gunna die

Look at this and tell me it isnt the best thing on youtube

he and his (American) wife have a youtube vlogging channel all about being an international couple and they have thREE CATS THAT HE COOKS WITH

You should see the video where he restores a knife…

Incorrect, he has two cats he cooks with, Haku and Nagi. If Poki were permitted into the kitchen when Jun cooked, he would immediately throw himself into the pan, determined to eat whatever was in it.

Poki is my favorite cat. uwu

poki sounds like my cat jasper

how did he film such a lovely video by candlelight? i’m impressed! also it’s so restful, and he has beautiful hands, and the kitties are so cute. it made my morning. thank you for sharing.

Poki is actually in his newest video:

My terrible trash cat finally graduates to being in cooking videos <3 Im so proud of him <3

Aaaaand he’s banned again.

Today I found out that yarners think crocheting socks is subversive and controversial and I just…on one hand, why the fuck not, I guess yarners are allowed to have their controversies, but on the other, how much time do you have in your FUCKIN DAY??

My main concern is how they would feel but Maggie u know yarn fandom gotta think about something while knitting five miles of stockingnette for a sweater

Look, you can’t just leave it at that, why is it subversive and controversial? *gets popcorn*

I mean, I’m taking this on good faith, and I’m not saying this is my own personal belief.  I believe in all crafts. 

But…the structure of the stitches and the resulting fabric is pretty different between crochet and knitting.  You get different effects between them, which lends themselves to different crafts.  And none of the effects of (most) crochet stitches lend themselves naturally to socks.  You’re (usually) going to end up with something either stiff and bulky, or full of holes that will Not Feel Good to walk on. Whereas knitted socks will just…BE elastic and comfortable.

Sure you CAN do it.  And there are people and patterns that do it well!!

But MOST crochet socks are a bit like calling this a bicycle

I mean… Okay?  But people are going to Talk.

But this is BABY controversy, this is nothing.  You haven’t even touched on the good shit like RHSS or that time the Olympic Committee dissed us.

Iiiinteresting. So one of those “just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD” things.

Also I know very little about the yarn fandom except for that bit where a woman had to fake her death and had a nervous breakdown over selling homespun/dyed yarn so like, I already have big expectations.

Was that the one that “died” of leukemia or the one that “died” of lupus, or the one that overdosed?

From what I know of the narrative as it was described to me, I want to say the one that overdosed, but I am intrigued and vaguely concerned that there are multiple distinct individuals the above situation could apply to.

hey umm, what the fuck

the fake deaths thing: indie yarn dyer gets popular, gets overwhelmed by orders, can’t refund money because of shitty bookkeeping, decides faking online death is the only way out.

i’m sure some of them are unintentional rather than premeditated scammers but they’re all still thieving assholes who shouldn’t be running businesses and need to give all the money back.

the olympics commitee: ravelry, well-known knitting (fiber arts in general) site, held a contest they called the ‘ravelympics’ to drum up olympic support then get a cease-and-desist letter for copyright infringement, and the letter said that calling it that ‘denigrates the true nature of the Olympic Games’ and was ‘disrespectful to our country’s finest athletes’

except, you know, ravelry had like 2 million users who all, by nature of ravelry being a website, have basic tech literacy. the social media backlash was so bad that the olympics board had to make 2 official apologies because the first wasn’t good enough.

RHSS: Red Heart Super Saver is cheap Walmart-level yarn. some people hate it because it used to be just really fucking awful and they haven’t bothered updating their opinions. some people hate it because they hate non-natural yarns. some people hate it because they’re yarn snobs(which, btw, comes in two flavors: the disdainful assholes and the people who just don’t see the point if you have the money and don’t indulge yourself). a lot of people defend it because it’s cheap and widely locally available and honestly not that bad after a wash and some fabric softener.

crocheted socks: exactly what kaitoukitty said. people who crochet socks tend to either be new crocheters who are not aware crochet is not the best medium for socks or experienced crocheters who are pushing the boundaries of the medium.

babies on fire: i can’t believe we’re talking about yarncraft controversies and no one mentioned babies on fire. that’s my favorite controversy.

so when deciding what material to make baby blankets out of, in addition to considerations like softness, ease of washing, and allergy concerns quite a lot of people like to consider what would happen to the baby if the blanket was set on fire. yes, really.

wool has the problem of hand-wash only blankets for a new mother (superwash wool exists but that’s a whole ‘nother paragraph), allergy concerns, and also real fucking expensive if you want quality not-itchy-on-baby-skin wool. but pro-wool-blanket people insist that because wool actually resists being set on fire pretty well and also can self-extinguish, it’s the only sensible choice.

acrylic on the other hand is cheap and you can throw it in the washing machine, and while bad quality acrylics might be stiff and plastic-y they’re not itchy, but if it gets set on fire it will melt onto the baby’s skin. pro-acrylic people insist that if your blanket is on fire, you probably have bigger problems than what the blanket is made of.

wow I didn’t expect such a detailed response. thank you!

Fiber Arts Just Be Fucking Like That.

@avashnea @raptorkin pretty sure it’s you two who are into this yarn business?

Me, just learning to crochet:

It’s BEEN like this for a few thousand years, though, and it’s incredibly stable and sustainable. Like, the history of uproar in the Fiber Fandom is several thousand years old and intersects with many major developments in human progress, so even though it may seem like a Trash Fire Always, it is actually all very stable and quite safe. THEREFORE. Regarding the original sock debate, let’s add some salt to this fuckin soup: Nålbinding. The ancestor of BOTH knitting and crochet, practiced around the world. It’s said to be still practiced today by indigenous people in South America, and is, apparently, the go-to cloth of choice for Viking and medieval re-enactors to make their socks and hats. It really does resemble both knitting and crochet, and when you watch it being done, it is like watching someone stab a string several times with a single small sliver of bone, and eventually they hold up a series of knots that - when you look again they have materialized into the heel of a sock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding

SATAN’S BALLOON ANIMALS

guess what, it’s time for another episode of Weird Biology! today we’re going to learn about a creature that looks like a stained-glass window, but stalks the oceans with toxic might powered only by the wind like a sailing ship of old. 

that’s right, it’s the devil’s own shopping bag-

the name is almost longer than the animal.

The Portuguese Man o’ War is a floating jellyfish relative called a Hydrozoan. it was named after the 18th century sailing ship, apparently by a blind person. “oh, it looks like a sailing ship under full sail” no it doesn’t, shut up. it looks like a rogue walmart shopping bag that blew into the Atlantic and makes a living by strangling innocent sea turtles.

but like the aforementioned plastic bag, the Man o’ War uses its lovely blue-purple air sac to catch the breeze. it wanders in groups through the warm waters of the Atlantic, driven along by the wind and tides. kind of poetic, really. 

as long as you don’t look underwater, anyway.

I’m about to ruin it for everybody, hang on.

like so many other things in life, it’s not what you see on the surface that’s important but what is underneath that counts.

in this case, what’s underneath is up to 165 feet of venomous tentacles. it’s like that thing they say about icebergs, where you only see the top 10% and the rest is an invisible ship-killing nightmare? it’s exactly like that.

except with poison tentacles.

the Man o’ War is basically a biological fishing trawler, trailing these stupidly long tentacles like a fine mesh net through the water. and when an innocent fish who probably has a family at home comes into contact with this “net”, specialized cells called Nematocysts are triggered to fire tiny poison harpoons into the victim, causing instant death or paralysis. 

the tentacle then reels itself upward into the body of the Man o’ War like a fishing line, dragging its helpless victim upward to be digested. 

so, uh, actually not like a fishing trawler then, not like a fishing trawler at all.

unless the fishing trawler was designed by Junji Ito. 

though the Man o’ War may look like a jellyfish, it’s definitely not. in fact, it’s not even a single animal! it’s actually four separate organisms jammed into a venomous trenchcoat like three best friends trying to sneak into an R rated movie. 

“how the fuck even”, I hear you say. and that’s a valid question! it’s not everyday that we discover that what we thought was a single animal is actually four smaller animals living communally to form a larger, more dangerous animal. it would be like discovering that opossums are actually comprised of 17 rats each.

no word on if they do a silly dance and tap their fingers together to fuse or what though.

in the Man o’ War’s case, these four individual kinds of “polyps” that comprise the complete final form are the air sac polyp (gets the gang around), the digestive polyp (converts murdered fish into energy for the whole gang), the reproductive polyp (makes small clones of each individual gang member), and the tentacle polyp (murders things indiscriminately for the sheer joy of it). 

that’s right, the tentacles are a separate animal! you might be wondering if they sometimes come loose, wander off, and just sting people/animals randomly when they drift into populated areas. what a silly question! 

yeah, happens all the time.

SHIT.

while rarely fatal, Man o’ Wars stings can seriously injure humans. this is a big problem in areas where Man o’ Wars are common, because storms and predators can knock the tentacles right the fuck off. the tentacles drift away, only to wash ashore and sting a hapless beachgoer weeks later. that’s right, rogue tentacles can still sting for days or weeks after separation! even if the Man ‘o War is beached! isn’t that neat! fuck!

the discovery of a beached Man o’ War usually closes the entire fucking beach, for this reason. would YOU want to go fuck around in the sand if it might be full of over a hundred feet of poison spaghetti too fine to notice with the naked eye?

if the answer is yes, I have great news about a bridge I’d like to sell you.

if all this information upset you, I’d like to offer my deepest condolences. but buckle up for one last upsetting fact, and here it is: Man o’ War are spreading. 

usually restricted to warm waters, climate change has driven the Man o’ War as far north as Great Britain. that’s awful awful awful news for any country that touches the Atlantic ocean, which is lots of them. 

luckily, we have dependable allies in this fight: sea turtles and the Mola Mola! (which I’ve written about before) unfortunately just about all we can do at this point is to cheer these awesome devil-balloon-munchers on from the safety of shore, while trying to invent a Man o’ War-proof barrier net.

for now, watch out for anything that looks like a floating plastic bag.

and for god’s sake, watch where you step.

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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee or check out my Patreon to see extra content and support Weird Biology.

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- National Geographic img2- The Garden of Eadon img3- Sean Nash img4- Enrico Villa img5- livescience.com img6- diply.com img7- Daily Mail img8- Sun Sentinel

the only man i trust tbh