Not-So-Blank Space

THIS IS THE HARDEST I HAVE LAUGHED IN SO LONG YOU HAVE CURED MY DEPRESSION

This is one of the greatest posts I’ve ever witnessed. The payoff was amazing.

I had this scheduled because it’s May 18th but it has an entirely new meaning this year

a graph based on my observations

I would like to apply a Dolly Parton quote to this most excellent graph.

YES.

Broke: Imma kick your ass

Woke: You are invited to join me on the

I didn't go all the way to Yorkshire for 72 notes

So there was a Trump Boat parade today on Lake Travis on the side of Austin, I’ve lived here 6 years and never heard of a boat sinking. Ever.

There was also one that caught on fire.

Posiedon, welcome to the Rebelion.

(For everyone asking, no one was hurt or injured)

I hear people started calling this "Dumbkirk"

There’s got to be a term to describe that like. Extremely specific era of children’s literature where all the books were novellas printed on low quality paper, pumped out on a near monthly basis, and made for series that sometimes stretched into hundreds of books

Animorphs. Goosebumps. Bailey School Kids. Babysitter’s Club. Magic Treehouse. Series that plague public libraries and second hand book stores to this day. A genre that was nearly wiped out overnight by the success of Harry Potter, and the newfound desire for kids to read long form literature

It was like pulp fiction for kids

The Scholastic Age

i wrote my MS in book publishing thesis on this, so like for anyone actually interested i have the real answer. it actually wasnt wiped out by harry potter. this era is referred to in the publishing world as the near death of ya/childrens lit. that’s WHY it was on such low quality paper and why they had series with so many freaking books every single month. it was the final stage of cash grabbing before publishers p much accepted the genre was dead. that also contributed to why hp was rejected so many times, not bc jk is some underdog, but because literally no houses were picking up ya books. and it wasnt a newfound desire for long form. kids/teens had been yelling for years for more long form literature that actually reflected their struggles but the old assholes didnt wanna listen as always. arthur lavine, that old fuck who edited hp, wasnt gonna pick hp up either but his daughter or granddaughter literally begged him. 

ps. it also was literally pulp fiction bc pulp fiction it gets its name FROM that low quality paper you were talking about. its got more wood bits and other less desirable stuff in it so its processed less which saves money and less desirable which also saves money. thats also why it has the best smell bc its the most tree and the least bleach

thinking about that WoW epidemic

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

I am currently dying from Not Enough Pillows

waiting for millennials to get blamed for killing black friday

i love how bugs bunny is totally calm as long as everyone leaves him alone but as soon as someone bothers him he’s like “ok. now i have to kill him”

Bugs Bunny’s defining trait is that he never starts shit but ALWAYS finishes it

Someone: *messes with Bugs Bunny*

Bugs Bunny:

I see no difference in energy here

i’m sorry but there is no way you could have stopped me from standing on my chair and screeching like a banshee if i saw this live…

What

how

HOW

“ballet isn’t a sport”

The thing about this is, you can barely see their muscles straining from effort. The effort to keep each other and themselves balanced, definitely, but that guy’s hand is barely shaking. The amount of training and strength and balance to go into this is fucking insane.

Ballet is raw AF

doctor: you only have 4 minutes and 43 seconds to live. How will you spend them?

me: