Every time this post comes around it’s funnier

Today I learned that you can set up https://www.govtrack.us/ to email you whenever your congressperson votes on anything.

For a while now, I’ve felt like I wasn’t a very informed voter - in particular, I can’t even answer “what has my rep been up to lately” most of the time. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered in other contexts that having a live update firehose works quite well for me. So I’ve subscribed to my reps to see how this goes.

I am being 100% serious btw, BP coined the term "carbon footprint" and the shift from corporations to individuals as the cause of climate change was backed by fossil fuel companies. This is not a conspiracy theory, it's a well recorded fact that you can easily confirm with a quick google search.

"Carbon footprints" are corporate propaganda. Taking shorter showers and planting flowers will not save our planet as long as these companies are allowed to mow down forests, turn grasslands into monoculture farms, turn wetlands into dust bowl housing developments, fill our oceans with oil and trash, and dump their toxic shit wherever they want.

Many years ago, I was wandering around downtown Ottawa with my best friend. We ran into a friend of his who offered us some hash (it sucked), then said there was a really good house party nearby if we wanted to go. We were like, yeah, sure. So that's how we ended up at some completely fucking random person's house.

I look around to ask if my friend knows anyone here and he's simply gone, as is his friend. And this isn't some red solo cup hangout; this is a party. There's people counting out pills on the kitchen counter. I am clearly neither as cool nor as drug-savvy as the kitchen people, so I back away and instead wander aimlessly into the living room, which seems to give off more of a chill vibe.

A bunch of people are seated in a circle on the floor. One of them is fiddling with a big wad of newspaper or something. A really cute grunge girl with piercings and tattoos scoots aside to make room for me, so I sit down.

"What's that," I ask her, gesturing at the newspaper wad.

She gets a really big smile on her face. You know the smile. It's the I'm About To Watch This Innocent Soul Get High As Fuck smile. "You've never smoked a tulip?"

"What's a tulip?" I ask.

"It's like if a joint was also a bong," she replies. "You gotta try it."

"Alright," I reply, a little uncertainly. This will not be my first encounter with weed. I am more comfortable with the janky newspaper bong than I am with whatever the fuck is going on in the kitchen. Besides, this girl is really cute and I would like to have a friend here now that my existing friend has turned into vapor or been transported to the Upside-Down or whatever the hell happened to him.

I watch as one person holds the newspaper joint-bong upright and holds a lighter over the top while another gets beneath it, tilting their head back to take a puff. Apparently smoking this Cheech & Chong monstrosity is a two-person job.

"Oh," I say, looking at the fist-sized knob at the top of the wonky newspaper joint. "Yeah, it does kinda look like a tulip." Grunge girl smiles at me.

I watch as the tulip is passed around the circle, along with the lighter, and hits are cooperatively taken. It reaches grunge girl, who takes a huge puff and holds it for an extended moment before exhaling an impressive blast of smoke. She smiles expectantly and holds the tulip up for me, preparing to spark the gigantic meteor of dank that makes up its tip. By this point I have completely forgotten about my missing friend. I only care about making a good impression on grunge girl. I tilt my head back and hit the tulip like a smokestack.

It is the following morning. I am sleeping between a couch and a wall. I'm not positive that this is the same house I was just in. My memories are gone. Someone is yelling at me: "dude! Dude! Wake up, dude!"

I sit up. My mouth tastes like cigarettes. I do not smoke cigarettes. "Wha," I ask the yelling man, who I am quite confident I have never met before in my life.

"We're going on a quest," he tells me, gravely. "You have to come with us."

I look around. Neither my friend nor his friend are anywhere in sight. I also do not see grunge girl anywhere. I shrug helplessly. "Okay."

We embark from this house. I learn that the destination of this quest is Tim Horton's. This is a relief to me, as coffee and a donut sounds really fucking good right now. Somehow, the route to Tim Horton's takes us past the Governor-General's residence, which everyone else in the group loudly heckles on the way past. I do not know what the Governor-General has done to raise their ire, nor do I particularly care. I trudge along with my hands in my pockets, pleased to note that I still have my wallet, phone, and keys. I fervently wish that I could remember anything about last night. Maybe I talked to grunge girl. Maybe she's why my mouth tastes like cigarettes. The tulip tasted nothing like cigarettes.

I am asked about my politics. I voice my frustrations with corporate corruption, the pay-to-win electoral system, the lack of transparency and accountability. This is met with great approval. The guy who was yelling at me claps me on the back. I get the impression that we became friends last night. I don't recognize his face. I do not know his name and he definitely does not know mine. I behave as though we're friends anyway. We are comrades on a quest.

By the time we make it to Tim Hortons, the gaggle of stoners I'm walking with have all run out of energy and/or attention span. People order snacks and break away in pairs or solo, to call for rides or plan the day's events or just vegetate and wait for the drugs to leave their systems. I look around and find that my nameless friend has also gone to the Upside-Down. As I wash the cigarette taste out of my mouth with coffee, I unsuccessfully try to remember whether I saw grunge girl smoking tobacco at any point. I remember nothing. That tulip was so fucking powerful that it instantly sent me a whole day forward in time.

Alone in the city, I try to call my best friend and get no answer. I walk to the nearest bus stop, catch a bus most of the way home, and call up my parents to ask for a ride back. They ask where my friend is. I tell them that I have no idea; we went to a house party and I don't remember anything else.

When they pick me up from the bus station, they ask me some very safe, nonspecific questions, and seem to relax when I describe what little I can remember. It isn't until years later that I realize they were probably terrified I'd gotten rufied or something, and were so relieved to learn otherwise that they didn't even bother chiding me for smoking myself unconscious in an effort to impress a strange woman. In any case, they were probably happy to find out that I did, in fact, like girls; I suspect they had been privately wondering whether I was gay.

After getting home, I finally manage to get my best friend to answer his phone. I discover that he tried the kitchen pills, spent most of the night crossing the entire city on foot, and crashed at his cousin's house. He sounds like shit. I tell him that he should have tried the tulip, instead. He fervently agrees with me.

I never see grunge girl again.

That's okay, though. She got to see a clueless stranger get fucked the entire way up on some ungodly strain of giga-weed, and I got smiled at by a cute girl, and then I got to go on a quest. Wherever grunge girl is, I hope she's happy. I hope she's smoking the fattest fucking blunt and smiling as some kid passes out behind a couch.

Anyway, my parents were right about me not being straight. A couple of years later, while walking out of the bank, I passed a tired-looking grimy young construction worker with dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes as he went in, and I actually stumbled and turned to stare after him over my shoulder because my heart had straight up skipped a beat. Guy was hauntingly, harrowingly cute. I didn't even have time for denial. It was just "????? I guess? I'm bisexual??"

Like, right in that moment, I knew without question that I absolutely would have let that guy rail me bareback. I went from straight to queer as hell in the blink of an eye. Cannot stress enough how gorgeous this dude was, grime and exhaustion notwithstanding.

Anyway that experience fucked up my sexual wiring and that's why I get funny feelings when I watch Tom Hardy play Max in Mad Max: Fury Road because he's a) cute, b) tired, and c) dirty.

The bean jar

[My Chemical Romance voice]: When I was…. a young boy… my Father… had what he called the bean jar…

have i mentioned recently @allieinarden is the best

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

Saint Paul Public Library, I am begging you to make this real

my dad sent me this today and I'm so jealous

does it indicate anything about me that I immediately recognized what paper this figure is from

so I had to immediately go and pull this other amazing figure from the paper, which is "THE HEXAGON" a device with six rooms for fruit flies to have sex in and a central room for a fruit fly to observe six couples having sex at once

Continue Reading.

“NOOOOOO!!!!”

(via)

Caves are weirder and more varied than you think

my followers can have some cave pics, as a treat

icelandic lava tunnel

This is Maggie's worm collection

She loves her worms more than any other toy. She plays with them loads and carries them around the house

At night the worms have to go in a box so that she doesn't wake me up playing with them. So every evening before bed I gather up the worms, put them in their box and have Maggie say goodnight to them.

Night night worms!

the beautiful original post by @garaks-padded-bra can be found here, with additions from @acrowbyanyothername, @starfleetshrimps, @imhaley, @ronzyponyo, @funnywormz, @deepestturtlepielover, @willowandthesagaofgayyearning, @summer-azure, and @spacetronomyfan

(as always, omagpies stuff drops on Patreon @/magpiecrown one month in advance, and there’s already a hefty backlog awaiting everyone 💗)

can we stop promoting the idea that nature has to look beautiful to be good?

stereotypes about people “really interested in WWI” are wildly different than stereotypes about people “really interested in WWII”

What to do when cornered by a WWII buff: Brace yourself and take stock of your surroundings. Your first course of action should be to assess the sort of person you are speaking to. Notice any tattoos or personal decorations they might be displaying—hopefully you are already familiar with common Neo-Nazi symbols. If you see swastikas, the numbers 88, 14, or 18, or the letters SS shapes like lightning bolts, then run and/or fire at will. Be very wary of skulls, eagles, German words, and runes; they may be innocent tattoos, but they may also be red flags. Proceed with caution and listen to how they talk about Hitler. If you can determine that the buff is not an overtly far-right Nazi sympathizer, they may have a weird obsession with the idea of a Just and Noble War and have some fucked up ideas about what is good for humanity and/or the natural order. Make a quick escape if they start referring to Japanese people with a single syllable or talk about how Americans were “better” back then. If none of these, you can probably relax—you may be talking to someone whose family fled the Holocaust or were forced into Japanese internment camps and took an interest in the period out of necessity and frustration and the immediate relevance to their lives. Look for bags under their eyes or corny science joke T-shirts; you might be talking to a physicist interested in nuclear history. Maybe they’re fascinated by modern world politics or planes or weaponry.

What to do when cornered by a WWI buff:

Point over their shoulder and say, “Hey, look! A collection of depressing poetry by dead gay soldiers!” and run while they’re distracted. If this doesn’t work, brace yourself for a long, dreary explanation of the mechanics of trench warfare or early planes.

Levi’s

I'm curious. Reblog this if you know how to cook

I don’t even care if it’s macaroni, ramen or those little bowls you stick in the microwave. Please, I need reassurance that most of the population on tumblr WOULDN’T STARVE TO DEATH if their parents couldn’t fix them food or they couldn’t go out to eat.