mermaid peach 🐚✨

Well as long as we’re talking about the ancient internet, who remembers this.

A happy colorful monster

Have you heard of My Pet Monster? It's a cartoon from 1986, which had one season (also apparently there's a live movie). You can stream it if you like. But for the purposes of this story, the most important fact is that the star was a very colorful smily, monster. And in January of last year, one of the cuddly plush versions was discovered in the back of a closet (so I guess he was a moonlighting as a closet monster?).

In any case, his original person found him, and wanted to gift him to his own daughters, but this monster had clearly had a rough time in the closet. Here is one of his diagnosis photos:

You can see the wound on his chest, and that his teeth are coming out. His feet and hands were vinyl, and had gotten that sticky feel that old vinyl sometimes gets.... and he needed a bath!

It took almost a year, but in December, the monster's family wrote again. Could we schedule treatment and an appointment for him?

Of course! The hospital was pretty full at the beginning of the year (not uncommon) so we scheduled his appointment for early March.

He arrived and the first step was a spa. He's quite large, so he got the large pink tub. :-)

Next he got restuffed, with a heart of original stuffing included ... who knows where his magic is stored, so it's important to keep at least a bit of original stuffing!

For his feet and hands, I can't replicate the printed nails on vinyl, but we didn't really want to do vinyl again anyway for the feel. So his person and I agreed to recover his feet and hands in new black velvet and then give him new nails from felt in the same teal as the originals. Here he is showing off his manicure and pedicure:

And here he is all better... even his fabric surrounding his tusks has been reglued:

and so he flew home to Colorado!

Rock of Ages - Def Leppard (Pyromania, 1983)

Man recording a cassette tape at a music festival in Poland, 1980s

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear boom boxes

Love the inclusion of hate, referencing the role racism plays in the uneven distribution of pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction around the world. Also love the inclusion of super radiation, which is like radiation but bad.

the yellow guy (duke nukem) could already shoot radiation from his fists they had to one-up that somehow

Please reblog to increase sample size, I am trying to find out how much normal people know about this because I am Not Normal and my assumed baseline of knowledge cannot be trusted

You guys gotta reblog come on

YOU HAVE ACTIVATED MY SPECIAL INTEREST TRAP CARD.

The Challenger disaster specifically happened because NASA put pressure on the engineers to okay the launch, when the engineers knew that there was a strong likelihood that the launch would catastrophically fail.

The reason for this was that NASA faced pressure themselves: the president at the time was due to give a State of the Union speech in a few days and wanted to highlight the Challenger launch as a positive of his term in office. If the launch was delayed for safety reasons, he couldn’t do so.

Would you all like to guess who that president was?

Go on. Guess.

You’ll never guess.

I feel like people these days don't really have a handle on how crazy the Satanic Panic was. A lot of cops wholeheartedly believed they were gonna have to arrest evil wizards.

"magic is real and evil wizards are a legitimate, immediate threat to public saftey." Was something that occasionally had to be debated at a policy level among government officials.

Archive.org deliver a windfall of lost music.

If you’re looking for a good way to spend the rest of your week, Archive.org have unearthed a gigantic collection of cassettes from the mid-eighties into the mid-nineties. According to their notes, the collection was saved from the archives of noise-arch.net and donated by former CKLN-FM radio host Myke Dyer in August of 2009. Due to the size and obscurity, the collection hasn’t been properly notated but is said to include cassettes ranging from “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials”. Head to Archive now to download the free collection.

I know that some of you will lose your minds over this. 

9 episodes into the first season of Murder She Wrote and you bet your ass I have noted the population of Cabot Cove shown on one of the signs shown in an opening sequence.

OMG you all.

this old lady just outsmarted Russian security and like the KGB in the 1980s holy shit this is wild

update: Mrs. Jessica Fletcher, famous mystery author from Cabot Cove, Maine (population 3,560 people at the start of the series), has been appointed by the Governor to fill in an open* federal Congressional seat

She was convinced by the words: "Say yes. Your state needs you. If only for a few weeks."

People underestimate how fucking wild that show is.

Murder She Wrote is quality television <3

I love this show so much, especially clocking repeat offender guest stars.

just in case you wanted to see Blanche and Rose tango on your dash today

The 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s seem to have all separate, unique personalities, but these last 17 years seem to just be one big chunk of time that has no significant meaning.

FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT

These last 17 years have an “oh no” feel that just gets bigger and louder with each consecutive year

I was watching Hasan Minaj’s episode on fast fashion and he talked about how fast fashion companies put out new collections each week instead of having a major release 4 times a year for each season. And then drew the comparison to Netflix putting out new content every week unlike traditional tv channels that also used to introduce new shows seasonally.

Dissolution of unions and rise of gig economy means working class people don’t take regular holidays and vacations anymore they just work continuously until they have a nervous breakdown or have random short term gigs interspersed with random intervals of under/un-employment.

And these are just two ways in which late stage capitalism is eroding our sense of time.

Buzzfeed did an article on the effect of non-linear social media on our sense of time: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/the-2010s-have-broken-our-sense-of-time

Speaking of seasons. Climate change is literally changing how seasons work. Plants are blooming at the wrong time. Animals are coming out of hibernation at the wrong time.

it could also just be that it hasn’t been enough time since the 2010s for us to invent a culturally salient idea of what that decade was ‘like.’ the past doesn’t have any one existence & no entire decade was ‘really’ any one thing or even any set of things—the ‘separate, unique personalities’ that we’re discussing are more a product of the nostalgia industry, marketing, design, & other post-hoc processes than they are something that describes the ‘real’ essence or coherent ‘feeling’ of a decade, because that’s just not something that organically exists. if we have a clear idea or set of ideas about what we associate with each decade, that says more about how we think now & why, and the kinds of associations that have accreted (or been designed) around that decade and why, than it does about the actual historical existence of anything in that decade. & of course a decade is itself an ultimately arbitrary span of time.