*grabbing mlm shippers by the shoulders* guys nobody needs to be the twink. nobody needs to be the sub. nobody needs to be the femboy. they can both be big fat hairy men who bask in each others masculinity or they can both be unspeakable monstrous creatures with inhuman genitalia it’s okay I’m holding your hand. Let me show you the way
it’s been four years since I last watched through all of Hannibal & I still think about the episode set in West Virginia where they’re literally at the beach. The beach in Grafton WV. A town notably 1,000 feet above sea level & roughly 200 miles from the nearest seawater
Like….was it supposed to be a lake….
is this perhaps what someone at NBC thinks a lake in the Appalachian mountains looks like
ABSOLUTELY YES!!
Similar vibes to The Last of Us showing what is clearly a forest west of the Continental Divide & labelling it "10 miles west of Boston"
Like, ma'am, 10 miles west of Boston is Waltham and it looks like this
PLEEASSE. I tried watching The Devil in Ohio but it was filmed in the BC!!! And I was like ah yes. Ohio’s famous old growth coastal Douglas firs….
fun fact that's about what the commute was like for my first job. your first job out of college, you know - you take what you can get. I'm like, ok, this sucks, but I'll get some experience under my belt and then figure something else out. I found a vanpool of a few people doing the same commute. cool, I won't have to drive myself every day then, this'll be doable. here's the thing I didn't fully grasp.
those four people
had been doing that commute
for
twenty
five
years.
And friends. I can confirm. those people were not mentally well. oh my god! what kind of mindset does it take to commute 3+ hours a day for 25 years and not think, hey, maybe I should consider other options of some kind?? ANY OTHER OPTIONS WHATSOEVER?
anyway.
i just found out tumblr was storing over three GIGABYTES of cookies on my device without me knowing and that's why it's been running so fucking slow recently... incredible. anyways everyone go clear your fucking cookies. don't let this website run a goddamn video game's worth of disc space in the background for no good reason.
on firefox: settings → search "cookies" → scroll down → "manage cookies" → tumblr should be at the very top because of how much space it's taking → select it → clear cookies → save changes. done
i've had a problem for a week or two where tumblr would just hang for like 20 seconds on load and profiles looked like it was reading a database. went and checked. 2.4GB of cookies. you are correct. good job. holy shit what is wrong with this website.
When I was a kid, maybe 14 or so (which is, you know, 20+ years ago), I belonged to a Yahoo! mailing list for an anime called Gundam Wing. It was mostly populated by other teens, of varying ages, as it was started by a teen and her friends. Eventually it migrated, when Yahoo! groups started as forums, and even branched off into non-GW related stuff in a second forum.
One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.
I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.
I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.
I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered. When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.
She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.
I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.
And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.
So I guess, like, if you’re here and you’re 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or whatever, I want you here in fandom with me, still. Your presence here is a comfort. It is hope. It is a reminder that life will continue to be fun, even as I get older, myself. And if you’re younger and you have this sort of elder in your groups, I hope that they are like Steel. I hope they are kind and patient and supportive, and that knowing them gives you hope for your own future. I hope in twenty years you look back and remember them fondly.
As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.
That’s… not how class works
OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She's from a prominent family, practically royalty where we're from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare... she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be "adopted out of poverty" at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.
She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).
He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).
And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is "raised rich" and then suddenly he's not One of Them because "well teeeeechncially :^) you're from the oppressing class...". Like.... shit, man!
Social rules don't mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.
Probably especially rich ones.
people are totally on board with the concept of "sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad" but refuse to connect that to the concept of "this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation"
like we understand "the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful" and we can't wrap our heads around "a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn't predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that's totally under your control."
like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it's an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don't give a shit about saving the enemy's children too, i don't think very highly of your motivation or your methods.
A fun fact: my mom was in the upper middle class as a teen/child. She moved out the day she turned eighteen bc her father was horribly abusive. she had NO ACCESS to the income her parents had.
But her parents' income was still counted when she tried to get help from the government for her college classes.
Financial abuse is a thing. Financial abuse is a thing people use against their KIDS TOO. like, someone can be the spouse of a rich person and not have ANY real access to that money bc their name isn't on anything and they're not given a card or money.
When I was in college, I lost count of how many people I knew on campus who had to drop out because their parents found out they were queer and withdrew financial support.
RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE 2023 | dir. Matthew López
In a post with more than 7 million views, Johnie Lee shared a screenshot of his machine's data usage, which showed around 3.6GB of daily data usage. For context, 3GB of data is the rough equivalent of streaming high-definition video for an hour on a device. A spokesperson for LG told Newsweek: "LG has connected with the customer regarding the high-traffic data concern and is actively investigating to understand the root of this unusual occurrence.
There is little reason to connect wirelessly with your appliances, and zero reason to make them visible on the greater internet, outside your home network. That is extremely dangerous.
The good news is that even "smart" appliances can be configured to go dark. I did this with our LG washer and Samsung electric range; it's just a few secret button presses in buried, unlabelled 'diagnostics' menus. Thank you, Reddit.
Note that LG touted the washer's wireless abilities ("get alerts when your cycle is done!" "start your wash remotely!!") as part of its features list, but the electric range... did not.
We didn't know the thing had wifi capabilities until it was installed and I took a deep dive into the manual. That's how we learned it could do 'marvelous' things like call my phone when the preheat was done. Yippee.
Same deal there: dug into the menus and disabled wifi completely. Again, thank you Reddit. The user manual only identified the wifi switch, but did not explain what the settings meant.
Because they don't want you to turn it off.
@mackensen where's that post about the two things people who work in tech own
He found it:
Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised. Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”
regardless of a myriad of other AI discourse talking points i'm not touching with a 10 ft pole, i think it should always be disclosed when i'm looking at something AI generated. like that's a basic level of societal courtesy, right. AI images more than any new technology that has changed the course of humanity seem to be inseparable from a purposeful obfuscation of their origin. the gimmick is to deceive human perception, their entire purpose is to make you believe you are looking at something created by sentience. AI is at its core a tool for deception and i mean that as a neutral statement. it's a mimic, a pantomime. impersonation. and that is, ethics aside, annoying as all fuck
hey good news
there's a specifically designated role in the naked mole rat ecology for "guy who runs off into the wilderness and fucks their way into a stranger's house"
Y'all have no idea how absurdly strange naked mole rats are as creatures They're cold-blooded mammals that live in a eusocial structure with a queen and drones, similar to ants, bees, termites and no other mammal on the planet. They barely need to breathe, with a respiration rate low enough to let them thrive in burrows with 2% oxygen, and survive with 0 oxygen whatsoever for about 20 minutes with zero lasting effects.
They live for over 30 years, which is absurdly long for a rodent, don't grow frail with age, and are basically immune to cancer because their telomeres just never shorten.
Naked Mole Rats are rodents that attempted to evolve into bugs, failed, and unlocked the secret to immortality in the process.
Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.
For your consideration: cornfields
Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields.
Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods.
I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.
Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.
Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.
TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.
Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.
However.
Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.
“monocultures attract people-eating monsters” is not the take I expected to see today but I’m glad I saw it
The anthropological analysis and discussion on folklore is spot on. 10/10
Corn lore
You can tell Shuro can’t actually handle Falin bc the moment he heard about the black magic he threw a fit. Like oh, you wouldn’t throw away your soul to bring her back? You wouldn’t commit unspeakable atrocities for her? Grow up.
Meanwhile, as soon as Falin is revived and hears they’ve been eating monsters, she wants to join. And Marcille is like, so unsurprised. You think Shuro could handle that? No. Leave the heavy lifting to the lesbians 🙄 you don’t have what it takes.
This is the most satisfying story I've read in a long time
