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Depends on whether it’s pre- or post-9/11.

Post-9/11 is mostly jingoistic dreck. Pre-9/11 you got stuff like American Remains and Sixteen Tons and The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia. Bangers, each and every one, and no mistake all of them were about pointing out flaws with how authority is handled.

post 9/11 country by male artists is jingoistic dreck. the female artists are doing songs about fun nights out at the bar, grief, and murdering your abusive husband

Okay, you know what, I’ll give you Girls Lie Too and Before He Cheats.

Many of you may be asking- what is rap? Well, to put it simply, rap is the part of the Gorillaz song that sounds- a little different.

i love when the moon is out and about during the day. hey girl

i hate it when game devs put “fixed several issues” in patch notes 

no. tell me what you fixed. i wanna know what the glitch was.

you know those patch notes that are like “fixed an issue where if the player sat in a bush for too long, they’d become the size of a skyscraper” 

i wanna read those. tell me those. 

Adjusted value of Bees. Now that was a special one… because every item in the game had a minimum value, and a beehive was a container for bees, which each had a minimum value… which meant the moment one of your dwarves picked up a beehive, your entire fortress’ net worth skyrocketed… a value used in determining how powerful the foes that visit and try to murder you are.

Reblogging for the explanation of what “adjusted value of bees” actually means, because I know several folks following this blog have been wondering.

Okay but you’ve all forgotten the best Dwarf Fortress bug of all “Flying creatures give birth in midair, leading to tragedy” 

Actually I lied it’s the one where after a major update werewolves and vampires started climbing the nearest tree and refusing to come down. It turned out that he’d given evil creatures the ability to sense each other, but forgotten to set a maximum range on it, so werewolves were aware Hell was underground and trying to flee by climbing 

This has to be my favorite patch note ever

obsessed with this sign i saw taped up outside the bat room at the zoo yesterday. the enthusiasm, the hand-written note, the bat drawing.

fun funeral facts

For those of you interested, the youtube channel Ask A Mortician does a lot of videos on taboo death subjects, answers questions and is a huge advocate for natural burials and being present during the actual funeral process so you don’t get taken advantage of by the funeral industry. She’s one of my favourite youtubers and I highly recommend her videos.

I’m not OP, but as a fellow Ask a Mortician fan (I’m even on the Patreon, Caitlyn is out here doing G-d’s work), HERE IS AN UPDATE:

—cremation and burial are not your only options. Some states now offer aquamation (basically your body is put in a special brine that breaks it down into nothing in a few hours) and terramation (aka human composting; your body is put into a dedicated pod with plant matter that accelerates the decay process and turns you into nutrient-rich soil in about six weeks). You also have the option to donate your body to a body farm or medical school. Check your state’s or country’s laws, and if you don’t see the option you want, contact the Order of the Good Death to find out who’s advocating in your area. If the answer is nobody, YOU can always be the person who starts the ball rolling.

—“bury your cremains in this fancy urn and you’ll become a tree!” is a scam. Cremains contain no organic matter. If you want to be a tree, go for terramation or natural burial.

—“turn your loved one’s cremains into a diamond!” is a scam. While you can technically turn cremains into a zircon (artificial diamond), the result is likely to be EXTREMELY ugly due to the amount of inclusions. If you want to wear a loved one’s cremains as a memento mori, you’re far better off speaking to an artisan jeweler about getting a modern version of one of the glass rings or pendants that were popular in the Victorian era. There are likeminded people out there who will absolutely do this for you in a beautiful and compassionate way, but the “it’s diamonds!” techbro startup thing is not the way to go.

—what is and is not respectful to the dead will vary based on culture, but the one constant should be consent of the deceased. What do THEY want to happen to their body? Have this conversation with your loved ones while they’re alive, and make sure the answers are written down. I know my sister wants a traditional Jewish burial—“just put me in the dirt and forget about it,” in her words—and she knows I want to be terramated. I know my dad wants to be buried next to my mom, although I need to check in with him if he wants his body buried or if he wants to be cremated first. Destigmatize this talk. It doesn’t have to be uncomfortable—making sure your loved ones know exactly what you want takes a burden off them in the future, and making sure YOU know what THEY want will both help you when the time comes and provide the comfort of knowing you’ve fulfilled their wishes.

And finally:

The reason I’m such a staunch Caitlyn evangelist is because there is a nonzero chance one of her videos saved my life. My mom died sometime in the night between the first and second of January, 2021. Because travel for large amounts of people was off the table, my dad opted for two small funerals—one here with a funeral home that refused to handle her body without a showing (unfortunately this was part of Covid price gouging—there was literally nowhere else capable of taking her), and one with our proper family funeral home in our hometown. Because of Covid, this meant it took A FUCKING MONTH for my mother to be buried, and that shit is absolutely scarring. I’d recently watched Caitlyn’s “what does a full embalming look like” video, and her partner for that video said she likes to bring the family in to assist in helping with the deceased person’s hair, makeup, clothing, any part of the process they’re willing to do, because she feels it helps with the grieving process. I was ready to grasp at anything that would let me feel like my mother wasn’t stuck in an episode of American Horror Story, especially after the shitshow that was the funeral home here in Arizona. With this in mind I called the family funeral home and asked to do my mom’s makeup; while I personally shudder at the thought of a traditional American burial, it’s what she wanted. Nancy—our family’s mortician for the last 40 years—readily agreed.

And so I went in, put on some of my mom’s favorite old country singers, and did her makeup exactly the way she taught me when I was sixteen, with her own cosmetics instead of what the funeral home had on hand. Her hair was thin and fragile from her last illness and I couldn’t curl it, but I fixed it up as well as I could, and painted her nails.

And let me tell you something.

The other mortician lady was right.

It was a massive comfort to me when Nancy took one look at my mom and said “oh, when you said she did her makeup differently you were right. I never would have guessed to do this.” (I don’t know where my mom learned to put on blusher, but she did basically the exact opposite of every makeup tutorial I’ve ever seen, and her method of doing eyeshadow was extremely 1940s.) Every single person at the service kept saying she looked exactly like they remembered from so-and-so’s wedding, such-and-such’s graduation, this-and-that’s honorary party. It wasn’t a vague “oh she looks so good”—she looked LIKE HER to those who remembered her. People who knew I’d done her makeup said they could tell it had to be someone who’d known her well. I remembered her horror at seeing unfamiliar makeup on her own mother’s face, and it was a massive comfort to me to know she was turned out exactly as she would have liked. And my dad? My dad hadn’t even cried yet. But he cried when he saw her in the same makeup style she’d worn at their wedding. He was finally able to cry and connect to my mom, his wife and beloved, and begin to find closure, seeing the woman he knew instead of a tired, worn body that bore little resemblance to her. It mattered. To him, to me, to my mom’s friends. It mattered a lot.

I don’t know that I would have ended up suicidal if not for that hour alone with my mom and Charley Pride and a stack of Bare Minerals compacts. But her death hit me hard and the month that followed was a special circle of hell, and I think I might have. Every time I think of her death and her burial, I think of that video and I’m insanely grateful it exists. (Incidentally, Nancy agreed. She said she thought she might make it an option for other families, after seeing both my response and the response of others in our family circle.)

Caitlyn knows her stuff. Watch, learn your rights, teach others to be death-positive. Life is the only occupation with a 100% mortality rate, so we might as well do it the way we want.

Foiled!

Today I got to go on one of our runs to more rural shelters to help relieve overcrowding there. We ended up bringing back 21 kittens and 10 dogs. So fun day. But this morning, while I was getting stuff together in preparation for the 90 minute drive…. This happened.

Excuse you Tiniest Opossum, but you are NOT allowed to escape through the front bars of the cat carrier we were housing you in. I’m going to put you back.

“NO!”

I am going to catch you and put you back and you have no say in this matter.

“NO!”

Catching you and putting you back now.

“NOOOOOO!”

Aaaand back you go. Let go of the purple towel and go in the cardboard box.

“Noooooooooooo!”

Happy (slightly belated) 7th tiniest opossumerversary!

May you always defy those who would attempt to contain you, even in the face of the fuzzy purple towel and cardboard box.

Diver convince octopus to trade his plastic cup for a seashell

imagine if a fuckin……. giant alien just showed up and stuck a huge hand in front of your face and then proceeded to offer you three different houses and wouldn’t stop until you moved out of your old shitty apartment and then helped you fuckin move

and then just left

I first saw this on twitter and COULD NOT get over these comments:

Twitter link

I don't know what that person was interviewing for but I hope they got it, because bullseye.

You actually need HEALTH to "eat healthy". Ill or disabled people are not famously great at preparing three flawlessly nutritionally-curated meals a day. I haven't cooked anything more complicated than rice or an egg in...several years.

And you can use their reality to keep them calm if they are panicking! We had a husband who was always panicking trying to find his wife. Telling him she had passed away was not an option, but through the family we figured out their routine and could tell him not to worry, that she was at the salon or getting coffee with MaryAnne and would be home soon. It calmed him down, stopped him from trying to climb out of windows looking for her, and kept him in his own reality.

If you are working with dementia patients and they aren't your family, try to get small details from the family that can help!

We had an older gent who was always wanting to get in his car and drive off so we would tell him his car was in the workshop. Eventually someone came up with a car of a make and model he’d owned that was non-working so we parked it up in the garden and he used to get in and sit happily behind the wheel and go for ‘drives’ - he even used to give other residents lifts to wherever they thought they were going.

Trying to orient someone with dementia is cruel in the short term and ultimately pointless. You’ll only upset them by trying to tell them the truth and they’ll have forgotten in an hour and be asking after the same long dead people again. My mother has worked in dementia care for over 25 years and will often tell families “So-and-so is happy in their dementia world”

[ image id: a screenshot of an answer to a question regarding dementia. the question asks “how do i answer my dad with dementia when he talks about his mom and dad being alive? do i go along with it or tell him they have passed away?” the answer, written by david mcphee (ph.d. psychologist, therapist) is as follows:  “enter into his reality and enjoy it. he doesn’t need to be ‘oriented’. thank god the days are gone when people with advanced dementia were tortured by huge calendars and reminders signs and loved ones were urged to ‘orient’ them to bring them to some boring reality. if dad spends most of his time in 1959, sit with him. ask him questions he didn’t have time for before. ask about people long dead, but alive to him, learn, celebrate heritage. his parents are alive to him. learn more about your grandparents. if he tells the same story over and over, appreciate it as if it’s music, and you come back to the beautiful refrain. this isn’t ‘playing along to pacify the old guy’, this is an opportunity to communicate and treasure memories real but out of time.”  / end id ]

[“Ultimately, anti-fatness isn’t based in science or health, concern or choice. Anti-fatness is a way for thinner people to remind themselves of their perceived virtue. Seeing a fatter person allows them to remind themselves that at least I’m not that fat. They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character. We don’t just look different, the thinking goes; we are different. Thinner people outwit their bodies. Fatter people succumb to them. Encounters with fatter people offer a welcome opportunity to retell that narrative and remind themselves of their superiority.

Over time, I have come to learn that these moments—the threats, the concern, the constant well-intentioned bullying—run even deeper than a simple assumption of superiority. It is a reminder so many thin people seem to desperately need. They don’t seem to be talking to me at all. They seem to be talking to themselves.

Thin people don’t need me to know about a diet or a surgeon. They don’t need me to hear them expound on the evils of the obesity epidemic or the war on obesity. They need to remind themselves to stay vigilant and virtuous. The ways that thin people talk to fat people are, in a heartless kind of way, self-soothing. They are warnings to themselves from themselves. I am the future they are terrified of becoming, so they speak to me as the ghost of fatness future. They remove food from my cart as if it is their own. They offer diet advice forcefully, insisting that I take it. If I say that I have, they insist I must have done it wrong, must not have been vigilant enough, must not have had enough willpower. They beat me up the way most of us only talk to ourselves. As if in a trance, they plead with me, some terrifying future self.

Sometimes, the trance breaks. Maybe it breaks because they realize, with great discomfort, that they have made extraordinary judgments, issued intrusive mandates like some petulant prince. Maybe it breaks because a fat person asks them to stop. But whatever breaks the trance, the thinner person seems to return to themself, recognizing that they may have overstepped. And without fail, they will offer the same rote caveat, a hasty waiver, unsigned, disclaiming any injury caused: I’m just concerned for your health. And just like that, all that judgment, all those assumptions, all that cruelty suddenly becomes a humanitarian mission.”]

aubrey gordon, what we don’t talk about when we talk about fat

the Two Trees, who shared with us their ancient light before the stars were brought down to light our scrolls from behind

there's a lot to hate but i think my least favourite thing about AI generated images is that now every time i see a really cool artwork on the internet, instead of childlike wonder i experience suspicion