The irony of this is so loud it’s almost deafening.

one of my coworkers has this sticker on his water bottle and it sends me into hysterics every time i see it

oh I would 100% be lured by a vampire entirely too easy

Not even for sexy reasons for me, I’d just be too polite and assume good will. No goth person has ever done me wrong.

rolling badly is something that can be so good for developing your character, actually 

like I say this wholeheartedly, just absolutely fucking up and beefing it and having to roleplay with that is really good for forcing your character to grow from the image you had of them in your head to an actual living, breathing, fully realized creation that you can really inhabit. 

I played a campaign once as a Druid character who I’d fleshed out as extremely connected to animals, especially predators. Except every single time we encountered a beast of ANY sort and I rolled to communicate or reason with them or tame them etc. etc., I rolled so low they immediately attacked me. But I PERSONALLY didn’t want to give up. I wanted my Druid to be One With Nature so badly that I tried every single time.

In the end it became the hallmark of my character that while I was good at everything else Druids should be good at, for some reason wildlife universally Hated me So So Much. I couldn’t so much as look at a raccoon without starting a fight. But I was also in denial, so my party would see me approaching an animal and get into position to rescue me immediately when it went south, which it always did.

A Druid in absolute denial over the fact that All Birds wanted her dead and the party who doesn’t know how to convince her of that ended up being way more fun than “talks to lions” or whatever I had in mind.

this needs more detail but Pratchett’s strength as an author wasn’t that he was revolutionary. Everything he wrote had been invented before and circulated through academia and discussed and dissected. Raw genius is only a small part of what makes a work of fiction good. The other pillar on which every book stands is how it communicates. You can read the same sentiment or have the same thought over and over again and not truly understand it, because it was never put in a way that you can relate to or feel intrinsically. Terry Pratchett’s main talent was putting old, worn ideas into words that really Connect

Going Postal is a great example of this because the thesis of the book is ‘Nationalising communication networks adds a tremendous value to people’s lives that far outweighs the cost to taxpayers of running them’.

who cares about that? Your average rando doesn’t have the educational background to do the math and won’t be able to see past corporate lobbyists talking about tax rises. They’ll vote to carve up and sell off health care, transportation, and communication to people hell-bent on taking their money.

But Going Postal reframes the problem from the bottom up. It’s so stealthy that you don’t even notice that it’s about the pitfalls of privatisation and the role government investment plays in the tech sector. It doesn’t talk about time value or discount factors or cost-benefit ratios, it talks about communications networks as a highway for human emotion, it talks about the desperation of unsaid words, it talks about what freedom means to people VS what it means to capitalists, it talks about the blood that greases palms and the way that capitalism and finance eat actual innovators and researchers alive.

The messages of Going Postal come out of the push for liberalisation in the UK in the 1980s. They’re old, they’re debated, they are worn and they are tired But it is the way they are communicated that makes the book so electrifying.

whatever...im outta here

I'm bored so I think Tumblr should bring back the ability to edit other people's posts. Just need a little ruckus

Comic made by PetFoolery.

I thunk they just stumbled on an amazing plot for Zootopia 2!

Here’s something cute

When lockdown happened in the UK it happened very suddenly. At the law firm I work at, our office building emptied overnight when everyone was told to work from home. No time to clear our desks, no time to bring office plants home.

Fast forward three and a half months - everyone assumes that their plants are dead.

But then! An email goes round! It’s turns out that one of our security guards is a florist, and -

-the security team has moved EVERY SINGLE PLANT from all 12 FLOORS of our office building into the cafeteria. It’s been turned into a temporary greenhouse. Cacti and succulents and spider plants and terrariums and potted ferns

AND! Each plant has been INDIVIDUALLY LABELLED by hand with post-it notes with name and desk location so the plants can go home after lockdown ends

To give some indication of the scale of the endeavour:

If you zoom into the centre right photo you can see one of our security team happily waving

The plants are being taken care of tenderly. They get sun and water and are spending happy times with other plant friends

your last words before you die are the 3rd line of the last song you listened to. what are we saying ladies?

XD this is hilarious but it’s actually a compliment to Dr. Gotian and she’s probably very excited about this!

A lot of peer reviews are double-blind, which means the reviewer doesn’t know whose work they’re reading in order to prevent bias. (Especially in STEM, where the Good Old Boys tend to dismiss the expertise of women.)

Other fields are starting to employ double-blind methods as well, such as auditions for prestigious orchestras, where bias also leans toward white men.

In any case, what this means to Dr. Gotian is that the peer reviewer had read her work extensively enough to be like “HOLY SHIT SOMEONE IS PLAGIARIZING MY FAVE!!!! HOW DARE THEY!!!!” and told the “writer” (who happened to be the reviewer’s fave :D) that they really ought to properly credit their research.

It also means that the reviewer refused to let someone benefit from Dr. Gotian’s research without crediting her, which is huge. I think some reviewers would have let this slide.

So good on the mystery reviewer for catching this and ensuring proper credit… Even if the result is a bit embarrassing.

remember when my little pony had an actual brony character on the show, ‘broni friendzoni’, whos cutie mark was grumpy cat

if i didn’t know about either of these characters and u asked me to pick which one is the vampire and which one is the rich playboy i don’t think i would answer correctly