5-25% off is a discount, 30-50% off is a deal, and 60-90% off is clearance. I'm TRUELY SICK of being lured to a clearance section for a measly 20% like please be serious

jillian after listening to dorian defend slavery: i will say. the way this game commits to having characters with deep, distinct, uncomfortable opinions and personalities is an insane difference from the new one where all of them were created to flatter the player from start to finish

thats my mans 😍🥰😘❤️

(on blind date) oh youre from omelas? i heard that was a pretty nice place. always kinda wanted to live there myself. shame the kid thing stopped working before i had the chance to move out there. have they figured out how to get that system up and running again? not to your knowledge? ah well. probably for the best, i feel like people would be super annoying about that. even out here any time you meet someone from omelas theyre like 'yeah i walked away.' like ok? the kids still in there tho like. glad your conscience is clean i guess? people eat that shit up out here tho they buy em drinks and say like 'yeah that was the right decision it mustve been so hard to give up all that to do whats right.' i dont get it man. sorry im rambling. how'd you like living there? what? it sucked? huh i guess it wasnt all its cracked up to be. so when can i see you again?

(on second date) would i have saved the kid? hahaha! oh, no, its just that thats always been a thought experiment around here. yknow, 'would you save the omelas kid, possibly causing harm to everyone in the city, or would you let the kid suffer, sparing the citizens but definitely causing harm to the kid?' kinda like the counterpart to the trolley problem. i bet it would be too awkward to catch on in omelas itself so thats probably why you didnt know. but usually its just a circlejerk of people saying 'yeah i would save the kid, the city can probably run itself, probably nothing would happen, theyre probably all complicit anyway.' kind of a base refusal to engage with the thought experiment. anyway no i wouldnt have. i know things are mostly fine now, it wasnt like catastrophic in retrospect, but there was no way to know before. i wouldnt have risked it for one kid. and frankly i still wouldnt have, knowing what we know now. like its still a nice place but theres more than one kid suffering now. kickstarting that earlier is mathematically cruel. no, i wouldnt change my mind if i knew the kid. its easy to say i would, but ive got tons of friends suffering that i cant do anything for.

(minigolfing (no longer dating because they realised they leaned more masc than im attracted to but the split was amicable)) wait you were the omelas kid? ill be honest i dont know what kind of reaction youre comfortable with here. like i feel like everyone would be so weird about it. what would make you feel most comfortable? ... for real? i see. well that explains why you agreed to a second date after that lol. can i be honest with you though? i think thats bullshit. i get why youd need to hold onto that while you were in there, but like. you need to let yourself grieve, dude. maybe it was for the greater good, but that doesnt mean it wasnt also fucked up and unfair. youre kinda clinging to this idea that it was a noble sacrifice, but theres nothing noble about trauma inflicted on you by others. especially if you couldn't stop it. yeah i know what i said, and i stand by it, but youre allowed to be selfish. youre allowed to say you didnt deserve any of that shit, that someone shouldve helped you, omelas be damned. they cant put you back in there anymore. its over. you can take off the armour. you can learn to live. there, there. let it all out. yeah, sorry, you guys can go ahead of us, they're gonna be a while i think.

reminder to myself that when the queue spits this out if I haven't checked already I need to find out what this was

In art there's this concept of Negative Space, where you learn to understand that it's not just the thing you're looking at that's important, but the emptiness around it, and I wish we valued art more in our society because so much of life is like that.

It's important, when you look at something, to consider what isn't there just as much as what is

The stuff that isn't there is no less impactful

What people don't say is just as loud

Am I making sense?

There's this person I love, who is not a hypothetical figure or a convoluted metaphor but a living, breathing human being that I care for in real life, and I can count on my fingers how many times they've told me anything about their childhood.

But sometimes they give me advice, and this is what they say:

"You can't make anyone love you the way you need them to."

"It's what you don't see coming that kills you."

"Sometimes people only say "yes" because they don't know that "no" is an option."

"Feeling bad is a choice. If you're sad, just turn that off. Choose to feel something else."

"The law doesn't do shit when people just ignore it. Some people just dig their heels on and let the world spin around them, and that's how they get away with it."

And I don't agree with all the advice they give, but it paints the white around a black silhouette, doesn't it?

Every piece is like the shadow cast by something that isn't there.

Therre's a lot they'll probably never tell me, but the more they don't explain, the clearer the outline becomes.

If you only paint around a thing, and really get the details in, you might as well just blurt it out

I've been let down by those I love.

I'm always watching for danger, especially where there seems to be none.

My life has revolved around putting other's desires above my own.

I don't know how to be sad and alive at the same time.

I've been hurt by people who never faced justice.

If you only hear what's spoken, and only read the words on the page, and only appreciate an image for what's drawn, you miss out on half of everything you encounter.

And I feel like that's something we're losing our grip on

You know?

Art challenge where you have to finish what you're making

Obssesed with this comment

Me: I don't really believe in gatekeeping a field where anyone can learn with enough work. The training we get in academia isn't impossible to self-teach.

Also me: The number of people calling themselves "historians" or pretending to educate about history on social media when they're just reading Wiki or telling you fun facts is way too high. The job title has meaning. You wouldn't call yourself a mathematician for knowing how to make your graphing calculator make graphs.

Do I want to add tags to this? No, it will reach my intended audience of "people who are tired of history fun fact Tik Tok videos" anyway

Thanks for the advice, Mr FB of I! That's the same thing my very good friend the Nigerian prince told me, too, so our MUST be true!

I did take a look at the article, and that vpn bit is like any good bullshit stew: you have to start with a marrow of truth:

So the takeaway here isn't "never use a VPN" - it's use a useful and reputable VPN. Go research their reputations, especially in forums that talk about things that end in *arr. Look at the countries they're situated in.

It's very FBI to say that you should never try because you might fail.

Remember kids! NEVER save left-over antibiotics! You should never have leftover antibiotics, because you have to finish the whole course! Not doing so, or giving your antibiotics to someone else who hasn’t been prescribed them is how we got superbugs, that are resistant to antibiotics! 

ALWAYS finish your antibiotics, even if you don’t think you’re sick anymore! NEVER give your antibiotics to other people, there is no guaruntee they will have any effect, or the same effect, and without a full course, will not help them even if it is the right medicine for the job. 

BOTH cases result in resistant superbugs, which are dangerous to everyone, and hurt everyone. You might think you’re helping your poorer friends who cannot afford an antibiotic/to be seen by a doctor, but you’re not. You’re just hurting everyone. 

Medicine that treats symptoms and painkillers are not antibiotics! Please stop bringing these up! 

I am talking ONLY ABOUT ANTIBIOTICS ON THIS POST, please, please stop adding in about drugs that are not antibiotics on a post about specifically antibiotics! ONLY antibiotics cause super-bugs when taken incorrectly, medicine that alleviates symptoms, pain, or other things do not create super bugs, and I am not talking about them! Thanks!

Take antibiotics until they’re gone or your doctor tells you to stop.

for me internet friendships are “we don’t talk all the time but I see you’re online and it makes me happy” and I really hope it’s like that for everyone

(via @freenarnian )

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that's true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn't happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He's also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that's better than presents you open--failing to see that there's a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You've got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with "trilogies" that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You've got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they're unwilling to form their own expectations of what's coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what's in front of them! The media they've been consuming has trained them well.

ok idk if people on here are talking abt this idk if I’ve seen it but one of the funniest/most awkward things about the immediate aftermath of the queen’s death was audiences that night going to see musicals on the west end, specifically Wicked. apparently before the show some official came out and called for a minute or two of silence in honor of the queen. makes sense. silence concludes, lights come down, show begins. the overture begins very loudly with dramatic and fast-moving music, moves to a slower section, and at around the minute mark, becomes a very brassy, loud, cantankerous kind of aggressive melody. and then, after a minute of silence and a minute of overture, the audience is greeted with the first words of this musical, the words that have started the musical every night since 2003, now being sung loud and proud in london on September 8th, 2022:

“Good news! She’s dead!”