i found a baby picture of my cat please please look at him i'm begging you

same pose same beautiful little man 12 yrs later

No, Mr. Horse, don’t worry, I certainly don’t have a Plinko down here! What I do have is this lovely cask of wine, specifically for horses, Amontillado in fact! Exquisite vintage.

I know you’re not supposed to be in this hospital, but if you’ll just follow me down this corridor—no, that’s not blood on the floor, it’s color theory, I’ll explain it later—I can bring you to this cask of wine that is certainly NOT a plinko machine—

I'm telling you, Blorbo, I have the finest copy of my shows in the basement, please follow me

we can take the Eeby Deeby - no, no, I promise it's not going to Gay Superhell - look, Eebders Deebeorg was an outlier adn should not have been counted

Where did I get this Eeby Deeby? Well, there was this lovely Middle Eastern gentleman who was selling copper, the finest copper—

hnnnnngg I’m trying to get blorbo into my plinko but the eeby deeby I bought from the copper merchant who as it turns out was EXTREMELY disreputable (who is he, to treat me with such contempt?!) is dummy thicc, thicc enough to block the Suez Canal in fact, and the eebert of the deebert is so scrimblo bimblo it keeps alerting the horse

yoU PLINKO BLORBO?! you plinko blorbo like the HORSE?! Oh, Eeby Deeby for Glup Shitto! Eeby Deeby for Glub Shitto for 1000 YEARS

“Eeby Deeby” is, in this case, putting an orange buttered cat face-first into a trashcan

my name is blorb and when its nite and eeby deeby castiel's flight poe and wine cause discourse

i'm ever given; i plink the horse

Hey you know that post about Tumblr being incomprehensible to outside audiences?

So initially I'm watching without audio, cause "oh cool, some pole dancing". But turn the fucking audio on

Do you know how hard it is to do this while standing still.

Do you know how hard it is to do this while doing something incredibly physically demanding.

Sound on.

So shook that I recognized them! That's Khadija Mbowe, a brilliant video essayist on youtube. Here's a link to their channel. They're brilliant and compassionate. Go check them out!

Do they have seven lungs oh my GOD

Why Wayne got socks in the jacuzzi

those are his hooves you bitch

happy 10 years of those are his hooves you bitch

why the FUCK am i still on here

"Had you said the word..."

Etho is always so mysterious.. he’s been alive for so long , yet there’s still so much we don’t know about him like. his credit card information

100% Disagree

It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.

The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.

But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.

It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.

(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)

It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.

Bluntly: Standards.

Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.

But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.

All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap. 

Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.

(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)

I would like to note my mother got to see Charlie Daniels play this live, and there’s one more reason the Devil lost:

Care.

See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.

The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.

(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)

Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.

But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.

The Devil loses because he doesn’t understand the concept that love will beat out greed every time. Johnny wins because he values and respects what he has.

[Image description: screen shot of a social media post from Brendan Frasier Crane (@bf_crane): "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" is the most American of songs, because it's set up like a cautionary tale about pride leading to a fall but it turns out the fiddler actually is the best and his vanity is justified. 9:23 PM. 05 Jul 23. 137K Views. Description ends.]

Also, the Devil values his fiddle because it's made of gold. But and actual golden fiddle would sound terrible -- not like a handcrafted instrument carved from wood. Like other Capitalists, the only value the Devil can understand is monetary value.

BTW, for those interested, here are the fiddle tunes referenced in Charlie Daniel's song:

Fire on the mountain (some eye contact):

House of the Rising Sun (some eye contact):

Chicken in the bread tray (pan):

Granny, will your dog bite?

@changelingfangs

I love how it's assumed in this thread you've heard this song, but I'm just gonna drop it. It's not only worth a listen, but look, there he is, fiddling away. There is no second fiddle. He done play the devil too.

Congratulations to Marcille DungeonMeshi for achieving Pathetic Little Man status on tumblr, a hard glass ceiling for many female characters to break. I look forward to calling you my sopping wet beast and poor little meow meow for fandom days to come. Keep trucking babygirl, you'll bag Falin one day

i??????? sksjsbzvsvshdhsbdb

update:

He did her right

“he”?

confirmed

One of the hottest controversy of the month

I’ve seen this post a bunch and never once did I consider a scenario where it wasn’t about a woman.

official lesbian post

Something always fascinating to me is the "character who thinks they're in a different genre" phenomenon. The theme of the story you are telling determines what the right and wrong actions to take are; but the characters, reacting in-universe to the situation, don't know what story they're in, and the exact same responses can be what saves you or damns you depending on what kind of story the author is telling and what the story's message is about what life is like.

In Wolf 359, Warren Kepler approaches the mysterious and powerful aliens with threats; he kills their liaison and tries to position himself as a powerful opponent. However, he's shown to be wrong and making things worse: his preemptive aggression is unwarranted and unhelpful and bites him in the ass. The aliens want to communicate and understand humanity and share our music. It's Doug Eiffel, the pacifistic (and kind of scaredy-cat) communications officer who loves to talk and share pop culture, who talks to them and understands that the aliens are scary not because they want to kill us but because they don't understand the concepts of individuals and death. Talking to them, communicating with them, understanding where they're coming from and and bringing them to understand a human point of view, is what succeeds. Openness rather than suspicion, trust rather than aggression. Kepler thinks he's a dramatic space marine protecting the Earth from the alien threat by showing them humans are tough and can take them, but that's not the kind of story this is.

Conversely, in Janus Descending, Chel is in awe of the strange and beautiful alien world around her. She wants to touch it, understand it, get up close to it. When she sees a crystal alien dog, she wants to befriend it, despite Peter's warning. But when she gets close to it, extending her arm in greeting, it attacks her and drags her down into the cave to try to eat her. This sets the inevitable tragedy in motion. Suspicion is warranted; trust will get you killed. Because this is a sci-fi horror, with a major running thematic reading about how racism and sexism will destroy your brain and your society, and how the people who think they're too smart to be prejudiced don't see their own prejudice and will end up ruining the lives of the people they still don't fully see as equals, this kind of trust that Chel shows this strange alien is tragic. However it is also a horror story where there are very real hibernating space snakes ready to wake up and eat the fresh meat that has landed on their planet, and by being too trusting Chel has accidentally introduced herself to one.

Kepler, suspicious and ready to shoot any alien he doesn't understand, would likely have survived Janus Descending; Chel, with her enthusiasm for learning about and meeting aliens, would have been a wonderful and helpful member of the Wolf 359 crew.

In a similar manner, in Alien, Ellen Ripley yells to the rest of her crew not to bring the attacked crewmember with the alien on his face back on the ship and into the medical bay, you don't know what contamination that thing might have; she's ignored. She tells them not to let the crewmember out of quarantine even though he seems fine; she's ignored again. Ripley is the one person protesting this isn't safe, we don't know what's going on, and she is consistently ignored, until an alien bursts out of her crewmate's chest and then eats everyone and Ripley is proven to be right and also the only survivor. (And it turns out that the science officer consistently overriding her protests was an android sent by the company that contracted them, and said android was given orders to bring the alien back so the company could study it and do weapons development with it, try not to let the crew find out about it, and kill them if he had to in order to do so!)

Ripley's paranoia and mistrust of the situation was correct, because Alien is a space horror and the theme is in space no one can hear you scream (also corporations consider you expendable).

Conversely, in All Systems Red, we have a damaged and almost-combat-overridden Murderbot being brought back into the PreservationAux hab medical bay after being attacked by other SecUnits. Gurathin becomes the one person protesting this isn't safe, we don't know what's going on, he doesn't want to let Murderbot out because it's hacked and probably sabotaging them for the company contracted their security and sent it with them. Gurathin thinks he is the Ellen Ripley here! He is trying to warn his teammates not to make a dangerous mistake that will get everyone killed!

However, All Systems Red is a very different story than Alien, and Murderbot is neither a traitor on behalf of the company to sabotage them and steal alien remnants for weapons development, nor a threat to the humans - it's a friend, it's a good person, and it wants to help them against both companies willing to screw them over. Trusting it and helping it is the right thing to do and is what saves their lives. Gurathin is proven to be wrong.

If everyone on the Nostromo crew had listened to Ellen Ripley, they would still be alive (except Kane. RIP Kane), because this is a horror story about being isolated and hunted and going up against this horrifying thing that wants to kill and eat you and just keeps getting stronger. If everyone on the PreservationAux team listened to Gurathin, they would all be dead, because this is a story about friendship and teamwork and trust and overcoming trauma and accepting the personhood of someone very different from you.

Same responses. Different context. And so very different moral conclusions.

Warren Kepler was about how the brash violent over-confident approach to things you don't understand is wrong, and that openness and developing that understanding between people is what's important; Chel was about the tragedy of trust destroying a Black woman who wanted so much to believe in a world that could be kind and beautiful. Ripley was about a woman whose expertise and safety warnings were ignored and brushed aside and everyone who did so died because of it; Gurathin was about how even justified fear shouldn't mean you make someone else a scapegoat and mistrust them because they seem scary.

Sometimes you're in the wrong genre because you need to be, because the author is trying to show how not to react to the situation they set up in order to build the mood and the theme they're trying to convey.

Unmute !

Been thinking about them lately.

Meeting

All dogs go to heaven

Inspired by Gem assuring Pearl that there will be more dogs in the next life (series)

So I want to think Tilly and Millie meet at the end of the series they were part of because it's just cute

Tilly is suspicious until she smells Pearl on Millie, and knows she's a friend :D

i have decided to do a poll for fun because of a video im watching while im eating

for those curious i started playing during 1.6!! i played the demo worlds of the game on the minecraft.net website before my parents bought it for me

part two!!

please 🔁 for a larger sample size!!

POLL PART 3 FOR YOU ALPHA AND BETA BITCHES

REBLOG THIS ONE THIS IS MORE FAIR

You want Cat Creeper? More Dancing Cat Creeper?

we passed a sign in boring that said their sister city is dull, scotland

oh there's a third! bland, new south wales!

I'm sorry but I just have to appreciate the wordplay on that last sign. It's brilliant.