The Rare Mechanical Wonder

reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

elves are portrayed incorrectly in fantasy. if they knew about deforestation they'd straight up jack off to it

Can you stop making your ‘elves jacking off’ posts dude I recommended your blog to my aunt

who do you think keeps asking me to post these

I mean.....

And then the search function doesn't work

AND THEN THE SEACH FUNCTION DOESN’T WORK

"I am the library of Alexandria that never burns" screams @theshitpostcalligrapher

lmao on it

So I've been digging through various dialogue things, and I came upon a devnote that is so fucking funny to me.

The idea that during the first romance scene Astarion is trying to portray sexy and confident, but then in his mind he's like "Yesss I'm so good at this." is so infinitely funny to me lol. He's so silly.

Shoutout to the Elder Millennial at the table next to me at the gaming bar, whose barbarian just charged into battle shouting "LEEEEROYYYY JENKINS!!!!"

and then had to stop and sheepishly explain a World of Warcraft meme to his genZ GM.

Happy black cat day!!

Here are some black cats I've drawn through the years

xkcd fans are the only fandom I've had direct experience with where people do the stereotypical nerdy fan thing of referring to installments of the thing they like by their release order numbers instead of their titles

like I've never heard anyone just say "the simpsons season 7 episode 21" without also saying the episode title but I have heard people say "xkcd 2501" without also saying the title of the xkcd

Yeah, we shouldn't expect everyone to know every comic by heart. The average internet user probably only knows 1053 and 936.

and 2501, of course.

Of course!

sigh

hold on

xkcd 1053:

xkcd 936:

and of course, xkcd 2501:

homestuck, for all its insanity, still has the best quotes, my favorite being “the circle of stupidity is complete”

mine might be that one karkat rant like ‘your vehicle is parked squarely in the ‘nobody gives a fuck’ zone’

“Yes sir we are literally under siege by planet fucking Jupiter.”

“shit. let’s be santa”

“i’m 13 u egg”

That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard get said.

Well you see, the explanation is perfectly simple and scientific.  It was because shut up.  Shut up is why.

I’d throw it in the lava but that would be a waste of melting

“How old are you?” “6” “Goddamn”

Kick it barak

TIME TO RENDEZVOUS WITH MY HOMIE KILLA AND DROP THE SPECIAL SCIENCE ON HIM

My personal favorite:

time to fly up away into the sun you fucknig piece of gargbage

KARKAT: THAT SOUNDS SUPER! DOESN’T THAT SOUND SUPER KANAYA? KANAYA: No KARKAT: I THINK I SPEAK FOR KANAYA WHEN I SAY IT SOUNDS Really Fucking Super.

“You have a hat full of bomb, a fist full of penis, and a head full of empty” is my favorite tbh

@pacifriske

“This is exactly why babies shouldn’t be allowed to dual wield flintlock pistols”

God launders in mysterious ways.

today is the only day i regard this post fondly. and i love that just around this time it explodes with notes and my activity is clogged with everyones additions of quotes.

DAVE: well shit

DAVE: thats a hell of a mystery no one thought was a mystery and didnt even really need solving

DAVE: but damn if it didnt just get solved so nice work

I grew up on stories of the Dust Bowl.

My dad’s parents were Okies–environmental refugees, before anyone had a word for it. They left their families, the land they were renting, their animals, took their 1-year-old daughter, and drove to California. My grandpa worked in a peach packing plant. My grandma cleaned houses.

They were so lonely that after a couple years they went back to Oklahoma, with their total savings of $20. Later, they bought land. Built a house. Survived.

My mom’s dad was a kid then, and his family stayed in western Kansas. Stayed because my great-grandpa was too damn stubborn to leave, stayed when their neighbors had all left, stayed because they didn’t have enough money to leave. They slept with wet rags over their faces. My great-grandpa tied a string around his waist, tied the other end to the house, and went to check on the cows, while my great-grandma tried to make soup from a little milk and a little flour. There was so much dust swirling in the air, the soup turned to mud. She cried, begged her husband once more to let them leave, and they went to bed hungry.

My grandpa’s oldest brother was the first one in the county to leave his wheat stubble in the field instead of plowing it under after the harvest. His neighbors made fun of him. His parents scolded him for having messy fields. 70 years later, at his funeral, someone told how people from Japan came to visit the farm, to see what he was doing differently.

More than 80 years after the Dust Bowl, I stood on a mountain in Ecuador watching, horrified, as a man with a tractor plowed a steep field. He would back up the hill, set the disk in the ground at the top of the field, and drive down, breaking up the soil, dragging it downhill. Dust billowed around him.

The man next to me, a rich-for-the-area farmer, sighed happily. “Look at all that dust. Isn’t that great?”

“What? No!” I was shocked.

“Why not? That’s what a modern farm looks like.”

I thought of the old black-and-white photos, dust clouds like black walls rolling in across the prairie. That’s what a modern farm looked like, too.

The next field down, four people and four oxen–well, dairy cows used as oxen–were planting. They used plows, too, but instead of a disk pulverizing the soil, their plow was a straight piece of wood, metal from an old leaf spring bolted to the end. One team of oxen used that plow to open a furrow, the women walking behind dropped maize seeds into the soil, and the second team of oxen dragged the same kind of plow just above the first, closing the furrow and burying the seeds. They walked along the hill–side to side, furrows running along the contour of the hill. If they were raising any dust, it wasn’t enough for me to see from across the valley.

The man with the tractor probably finished in an hour or two. The whole group, people and oxen and all, probably spent the whole day planting the same size field.

As the maize grew tall, you could see the difference: In the tractored field, the top rows were yellow, spindly, trying to root in the yellow-brown clay the topsoil had once covered. Down below, in dark, rich earth, the maize was tall, green, strong.

In Mali, years later, a farmer explained to a group of visiting scientists why, despite having made erosion control bunds, his rows of maize still went up and down the slope, instead of along the contour, parallel with the bunds. “Because of the wind,” he said, like it was obvious–because it was. In the rainy season, the wind comes from the south, and when storms come it blows hard enough to send dust and dishes and clothes left on the line flying and tumbling with it.

The rows of maize have to be parallel to that wind, or they’ll blow over. So sure, you can put the scientists’ earthen ridges in to block the downhill flow of water, but your rows can’t follow that meandering contour. Your rows have to face into the wind. 

For thousands of years we’ve been coaxing, wrestling, dragging our food from the soil. If we’re careful, and lucky, we can make our peace with it. If we charge into places unknown–the high plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, the steep slopes of the Andes, the storm-swept fields of West Africa–if we plow, and plant, and harvest without thinking? Without learning from the place? Dust clouds blackening the horizon, stunted maize on worn-out soil, crops blown down in  thunderstorms–the earth is forgiving, but only so far. We have time to learn, to make mistakes, to do what is easy even when it does harm, but only so much. Beyond that, we destroy the very literal foundations of our lives.

tractors and cattle and new-plowed fields

@copperbadge because I remember you using this as a plot point in Six Harvests

Oh yes – one of the reasons Lea survives as well as it does is that Wild comes home just ahead of the worst part of the Dust Bowl with a brain full of Aggie School, and gets his fellow farmers to terrace and rotate crops.

When I was researching the book, I encountered story after story like the ones above; if folks think they’re unbelievable I’m here to tell you they’re shockingly common. There are families in the midwest now who still put their plates and bowls away face-down because grandma learned as a kid that if you put them away face-up, they catch the dust. After the storms you’d have to sweep off the roof and the internal support beams because the dust would eventually collapse your house otherwise.

I will say – not to argue with but to augment the above – the farmers in the dust bowl weren’t stupid, and by-and-large they weren’t greedy or malicious. The reason we destroyed the heart of the country in the way we did is that they were fucked with. Land speculators, most of whom were greedy or stupid or both, worked on the thesis that “rain follows the plow” – that if you plant a prairie with crops and trees, rain will magically appear. Some of them based this on studies that themselves had been….let’s call it “hopefully falsified”…to support the theories of people who wanted the midwest settled; manifest destiny played a part for sure, but “rain follows the plow” was the curse of the dust bowl.

The farmers didn’t know better; how could they? They did what they’d always done, and had to do it harder and more after the economic collapse post-WWI, and the prairie simply wouldn’t forgive them for it. The indigenous people did know better, but the military genocide had already mostly swept through by the time the land was sold to farmers and stripped bare.

The fact that the midwest today isn’t a barren desert is a miracle of science and good governance, correcting what greed destroyed and poverty perpetuated. The good news is, the Earth is remarkably resilient and wants to grow things. The bad news is that it’s also indifferent to what humanity wants, and if we keep choking it, it chokes right back.

Particularly when the fragility of our topsoil is mentioned, but even these days just with discussions of climate change in general, I think often of the anecdotal story of the sign posted on an abandoned dust bowl homestead:

One hundred miles to water, twenty miles to wood, six inches to hell.

Reblog if you can hear this image I'm trying to see something

This may be the best book I have ever purchased. It is definitely in the top 10

whAT BOOK IS THIS

To Be or Not to Be by Ryan North.  Hamlet as a choose-your-own-adventure book.

I own this book and it’s about 600 pages and it’s ALL this good. You can play as hamlet, Ophelia, or hamlet sr, who is a ghost. You can murder everyone in the play. You can fire yourself out of a cannon and use your uncle as a skateboard. There are dozens of endings and places where you can diverge from canon and do something wacky instead. 10/10 would recommend

I don’t know why this is my only question right now, but is “fire yourself out of a cannon and use your uncle as a skateboard” one choice or two separate choices?

Branch manager