he would not say that.

I was there when he said it actually

"oh yeah even if your opponent has an unexpected advantage that completely turns the tides of battle (you thought they were unarmed when they aren't) you shook totally just keep going with your current plan, otherwise you're a coward"

he would not say that.

you're just afraid of a big thick girlcock

Whether Sun Tzu would be into girldick is completely orthogonal to whether he would give bullshit bravado advice that will get you killed. He's the "logistics win wars" guy.

His ladycock advice would be more like "The wise general chooses an adversary who uses familiar techniques."

there is a lot we will forgive for girlcock on this site but misconstruing Sun Tzu is NOT on that list

The Pantheon of Exandria;

No Children by The Mountain Goats // Critical Role: Campaigns 1 and 3, Critical Role's Downfall

I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.

Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:

And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)

There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:

And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:

There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:

No for real:

Absolutely! Also, the Humboldt squid will hunt in packs, sometimes with one flashing brightly to draw attention while the others approach in near unseeable camoflage!

Beautiful footage of the nefarious sea demons also :)

Also because I can't reblog every addition together:

Okay where's the other 1199

Can someone please explain to me what evaporated milk is? Wouldn’t that just be gas by definition? I live in constant fear

no no it’s what left behind after the milk has been evaporated cuz only the water goes, not the other stuff

THERE’S WATER IN MILK?

WHAT DID YOU THINK THE LIQUID WAS?

IDK ISNT MILK ITS OWN LIQUID?

NO

IT’S MILK-STUFF MIXED WITH WATER

MILK STUFF? DOESNT IT JUST COME FROM THE COW’S TIT?

ITS LIKE TIT JUICE, THERE IS WATER IN JUICE AND THERE IS WATER IN MILK

It’s fat droplets suspended in water, with some nutrients and soforth dissolved in it. You know, like ranch dressing.

Evaporated milk is just dehydrated milk.

Obsessed with the user who assumed milk was its own element on the periodic table

As op I felt like I had to make this

Milk, the forbidden 119th element

the only question left is if it’s a metal, non-metal, or metalloid.

OP seems to have classified it as a special case of halfnium, reclassified as a lanthanide. This has fascinating implications for electron orbital geometry.

Anyway it’s a rare earth metal apparently.

Yes I definitely classified it intentionally and knew exactly what I was doing when I put it with the lanthanides because I am never wrong

MILK IS A RARE EARTH METAL

I thought so, I took one look at your classification and immediately thought “this is definitely someone with a deep understanding of how the periodic table works”

I’m glad that we have reached a consensus on the expected elemental properties of milk

I’d really like to know what @derinthescarletpescatarian’s thoughts are on milk’s electron orbital geometry

That would involve writing a crash course in how suborbitals work on a post about whether water (the primary ingredient in milk) is in milk and even for tumblr that’s going a bit far

no, it is absolutely not going too far

You guys always complain that you don’t get to learn stuff in normal ways and then you come asking for this

MILK IS SEVERAL COMPOUNDS PLEASE YALL ARE KILLING ME OVER HERE

We have a container of dry milk because in addition to a little fat and sugars, it contains proteins, which settle into the pores of nitrocellulose membranes, making sure analytical proteins (specific antibodies) don’t get trapped. We could just use casein (one of the proteins in milk), but milk is much cheaper and can also be found at Walmart.

No milk is a lanthanide keep up

lanthanide?

I think you mean lactanide

I will put lego in all of your shoes

A cube of milk with 3 inches of edge length can blow up the galaxy.

Our galaxy is actually the result of such an explosion, that’s why we call it the Milky Way

this is a unique sort of thread in which you’ll find two types of people exclusively: nerds and dumbasses

Enter OCEAN EYES and NOT DEAD YET, two of the king’s most quarrelsome stablehands.

OCEAN May one explain what powdered milk doth be? Is it not gas? I live in constant fear.

NOT DEAD The water flees to air, the rest is left. The dry debris then forms the powdered milk.

OCEAN Thou sayest water doth reside in milk?

NOT DEAD Pray tell what thou believ’st the liquid is?

OCEAN Is milk not one pure substance in itself?

NOT DEAD No; ‘tis only milk-stuff mixed with water.

OCEAN Yet milk appears from living cows’ own tits!

NOT DEAD ‘Tis juice from tits, yet water still it holds. If water be in juice, then ‘tis in milk.

Enter DERIN, the scarlet pescatarian.

DERIN ‘Tis drops of fat afloat in water, As if ‘twas dressing for thy greens. With water gone, the powdered milk remains.

A NOTE attached to an arrow, written by BURNING BRAND, flies through the window.

BURNING BRAND’S NOTE Obsessed with he who foolishly believ’d That milk is element of chemistry.

The NOTE crumbles to ash. BURNING BRAND is not seen again.

OCEAN As he who instigated such a fight, I felt that this creation was my duty.

OCEAN unrolls a scroll of parchment with a flourish.

OCEAN Behold, ‘tis milk, one hundred and nineteen.

Enter JASON FUNDER BERKER, a frog.

JASON FUNDER BERKER And yet the burning question still remains: ‘Tis metal, not, or somewhere in between?

JASON FUNDER BERKER does not wait to hear the answer, and exits.

DERIN A lanthinide! A special case, I see. How fascinating, geometrically.  But let us leave atomic musings be. For milk is a rare metal of our Earth.

OCEAN Of course it is, for I am always right. My choices are, of course, deliberate.

DERIN I do not doubt thou speakest truth, my lord Thy brilliant mind is utterly unmatch’d. It seems that an agreement has been reach’d.

OCEAN Of course; however, in sincerity I wish to know thy scholar-driven thoughts.

DERIN I fear ‘twould be beyond thy comprehension. To teach to thee would take this much too far.

Exit OCEAN, in a huff. Enter JESIN, BOOP BOOP, FLIPOCRITE, VELVET, and LOVELY DREAMS, curious onlookers attracted to the scene.

JESIN Do teach us, it would not take this too far!

DERIN Ye all complain of learning strangely, Then ask me baiting questions such as this!

BOOP BOOP Thy gross ineptitude shall be my death! Milk is formed of small component parts. The fat, the sugars, proteins all combine They seep through pores of membranes in this drink Unpleasant compounds all are filter’d out. All this obtained for small amounts of coin.

DERIN No, milk is lanthanide, pray keep the pace.

FLIPOCRITE The word thou mean’st is lactanide, I think.

DERIN May sharpened pain-shaped stones fill up thy shoes So that thou never know’st a moment’s peace.

VELVET A cube of milk, three inches on each side Could blow up the entire galaxy.

DERIN Our galaxy was formed in such a fashion. ‘Tis why we gave it name of “Milky Way.”

LOVELY DREAMS Thus ends our entertainment for the night Here fools and pompous scholars come to fight.

Exuent, pursued by a cow.

(Shakespearean adaptation format inspired by @mortimermcmirestinks​ in this post)

Youpeople have no right to be this funny on my dash so early in the morning

This is one of those threads that would go perfectly as a video set to “in the hall of the mountain king” and we all know it, I’m just not gonna be the one to make it

There are two configurations available: one with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for $599 and another with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $679. The storage of both models can be expanded via microSD, and the phone features a modular design that can be easily disassembled using a standard Phillips #00 screwdriver to replace broken components. It also has an IP54 rating, meaning the device is protected against dust and water sprays.

The Murena Fairphone 4 will ship to US customers with 5G and dual SIM support, a removable 3905mAh battery, a 48-megapixel main camera, a 48-megapixel ultrawide, and a 25-megapixel selfie camera. The phones will be available to order exclusively from Murena’s webstore starting today. 

I've been looking at getting one of these to replace my current phone. It'll break my habit of always passing my old phone to a relative, but I can live with that if it means I can fix the damned thing myself. Comparable price to a mid-range/lower high-end phone. It is, as far as I can see, the only smartphone that has ever achieved a 10/10 score for repairability in iFixit. Most don't get more than a 4 or 5, and only Nokias consistently get more than a 7. You can replace the cameras, the screen, the battery, the motherboard, the USB port, the speakers, the microphone, the case. All of it. If you want to upgrade, or if any one of those parts breaks? You don't have to buy a whole new phone. You just buy a replacement part, grab your little screwdriver, and swap the bits out. All without soldering skills, all without specialist technical knowledge.

They also make over-ear headphones that are similarly modular. Any one piece in it breaks, you can just fix it yourself. They used to do earbuds, but due to the size they're not self-repairable. But they still sell single earbuds for the folks who bought them, so they don't have to buy a whole new set to replace one lost or broken bud. They support the outdated hardware for quite a while. They're still selling replacement cables for the wired earbuds they stopped making years ago.

The operating system it uses for the US is /e/OS - it's a fork of Android, it just has all the Google stuff removed by default. Meaning you can download those apps if you want, or stay out of the Google ecosystem. (If you want a totally open-source free app library, look into F-Droid).

And if you need a laptop, there's the Framework. Same philosophy as the Fairphone. 10/10 repairability score on iFixit. You want to upgrade the CPU? Just replace one part of the modular mainboard unit. WiFi busted? Replace the card. RAM too low? Buy a new stick. Hinge busted? Grab a new one. Just about every individual component you might want to replace, whether for repair or upgrade, is replaceable using standard, easily available T5 and PH0 screwdrivers.

Sometimes I see some variety of North American Little Guy (opossum, raccoon, etc. ) and I’m like “okay”

BUT THEN I start thinking about how excited somebody from not-North-America would be to see this Guy. Like, would an Australian be excited to see the only marsupial not from their country? Are there raccoons in zoos on the other side of the world that are regarded as unique and exotic creatures? Idk but it’s made me more excited to see Guys in my area.

it's me, i'm the person described in the tumbl

I went to a zoo in England this past summer, and there were crowds around the skunks, raccoons, and coyotes.

So, as an Australian, going to the zoo in China with a USAmerican and a Jamacian was an experience.

The first thing you should know about this experiences is I'm a fairly bush-raised child. Not entirely, but the vast majority of my school holidays were spent camping or on a property or otherwise out in the bush. (Not the Outback, although sometimes, but definitely the Bush. The great south-west forests, to be specific.)

I have seen more than my fair share of actually wild Australian wildlife. I am severely immune to snakes, spiders, frogs, kangaroos and wild foxes, rabbits and pigs (those shouldn't be in Australia, but they are. Also, if you ever see evidence of pigs in the bush, you leave immediately.)

So here we encounter jarring moment of dissonance the first.

We were walking past the kangaroo paddock and I'll admit I didn't even give it a second glance - it was a case of "Oh, kangaroos, how normal," And moving on. Didn't even register that they would be something to get excited about. It was literally like seeing a bird or the neighbour's cat.

Anyway, after awhile I noticed that I was no longer with my fellows because they were amazed by the kangaroos. They were staring, they were laughing, they were paying money to feed the fucking kangaroos like they were some sort of weird, special, exotic animal.

"Oh for fuck's sake, guys, they're just kangaroos!"

And then I realised I was with non-Australians and felt properly shamed.

We spent some (far too long of a) time with the kangaroos and moved on.

Anyway, as we were leaving we were walking through the American animals section and I've stopped dead in my tracks and squealed with excitement and raced over to an enclosure to coo and generally be a weird, animal-obsessed little moron. I'd never seen this animal in real life before but it was adorable and lovely and the cutest thing ever. And my Americas friends were looking at me like I'd grown another head because the animal that I was enamoured with and had never seen in person before, the animal that I was most excited about out of any that was there (including the baby tiger that I actually got to hold, guys)

The animal was a raccoon.

Your trash creature is someone else’s treasured encounter

When my father visited a Zoo in Germany, he was amazed to find people eagerly watching what appeared to be a large patch of dirt with holes in it. It took him a minute to realize that the exhibit was for prairie dogs and everyone was waiting to hopefully see one pop it's head out. Dad, who went to school in Eastern Oregon and regularly harassed the local prairie dog population there, had long known how to call them. So to amuse himself, he gave the high whistle he used to use at school and, sure enough, about 15 little heads popped up to see what was happening. What was happening was the local German patrons all losing their god damn minds

Imagine being so braindead that you think the UK being one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world is a good thing 🤡

wtf are you talking about, they didn't "deplete" the nature of their country, they cultivated their wilderness over centuries into some of the most idyllic pastoral landscapes in the entire world. And they did such a good job of it that the phrase "English countryside" is now synonymous with beauty and serenity and peacefulness. They didn't destroy their country's nature, they became its caretaker, they're right to be proud of it. All you're doing is pretending that the only kind of nature that should count is whatever is completely untouched by human hands.

The UK is literally ranked in the bottom 10% of most nature-depleted countries in the world. The 2023 State of Nature report shows just how dire the situation is. A third of UK bird species have declined since the 1990s, 97% of the UK's wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s, raw sewage is constantly being pumped into our rivers and seas with agricultural slurry also causing massive damage to rivers, three quarters of Britain's hedgehogs have been lost in the past 20 years and UK butterfly numbers are at their lowest ever, a sign of impending ecosystem collapse. Plus people in Britain are the most disconnected from nature in Europe.

Not to mention over populated deer destroying what little is left due to a lack of predators, 60 million non-native birds released for sport shooting every year, plus huge amounts of wildlife crime, including large numbers of birds of prey being shot/poisoned.

There is nothing beautiful about a sterile, ecologically damaged landscape that contains nothing but sheep and deer. Don't comment on something you clearly know nothing about. I live in England. I can see first hand just how dire the situation is.

...We know what a landscape maintained and kept healthy by humans looks like and not only is it not like this, it was literally unrecognizable as such to white people, and the people who took care of it were labeled as savages and driven off the very land they cared for, leading to shit like forest fires. My God.

remembering the scene in arrival when our linguist protagonist talks about how language is what separates humans from animals. and then a scientist she's talking to says hmm personally I think it's science that separates humans from animals. and I really wanted that scene to just keep going with experts from more fields weighing in on how their field of study is the most fundamental thing about humanity. just showing all their perspectives

linguist: language is what separates humans from animals

physicist: i think it's science which separates humans from animals

linguist: but lots of people don't do science. and anyway, how would people publish their research without language? language is a necessary precursor to science

physicist: i don't mean the specific ways that we do formal science and research, i mean more like how humans analyze their environment to learn, rather than relying on instinct

zoologist: well lots of animals are capable of curiosity and learning. some species are even known to make and use tools. and as for language, while no animal aside from humans has been known to be capable of the narrow linguistic definition of 'language', many of them are capable of quite advanced forms of communication, and really, it's pretty unfair to say that the communication methods that other animals use are 'lesser' just because they don't fit the human standard. if you tried to teach a human to use bee communication, they would probably struggle as well. in the end, i don't think that humans should be considered separate from animals

linguist: you make some interesting points, but i still think that human language is superior for communication compared to other forms of animal communication because human languages allow for infinite regresses of embedded metalanguages, which makes it possible to talk about any aspect of consensus reality, at least theoretically

physicist: your comparison with other animals lacks nuance. sure, there are animals aside from humans who are capable of reasoning and tool use, but humans are far cleverer and can create for more advanced tools than any other animal-

linguist (under her breath): because language allowed humans to pass on increasingly complicated information for how to create increasingly complex tools

physicist: -if you could show me an animal that was capable of advanced metallurgy or something of that ilk, then maybe i can believe that they're not so different from humans, but i don't think there is anything like that native to earth

zoologist: you're both biased because you're humans, and you want to have a rational reason to justify your instinctual feeling of kinship with other humans over other, non-human animals. yes, humans do have particularly good reasoning, tool use, and communication abilities, but even if humans are especially good at them, they're still all things that other animals do in a more general sense, so i still don't think that they should be sufficient for considering humans as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom

theologian: you're all talking around each other here. you all have different standards for what is and is not significant, so even if you can agree on the facts, you will never agree on the conclusions. but there is one thing that sets humans apart that none of you have considered: humans are separate because humans --unlike animals-- were given a higher purpose by god

physicist: wait, why did they bring a theologian on our mission to try to communicate with aliens? no offense, but i don't see how your field of knowledge will be relevant at all

gastronome: the answer is cooking, by the way. we're the only species that prepares our food

zoologist: we are certainly not the only species that prepares our food. famously, a certain group of macaque monkeys have been observed to clean their food and season it with saltwater. as for more cooking-like preparations, big headed ants marinate their food in the spit of their larvae to make it easier to digest. it's not exactly the same method, but it has a similar result of making the food quicker to eat and easier to digest. cooking in particular as a method of preparing food is unique to humans for now, but i have little doubt that you could teach a macaque how to make fire and they would be inventing new culinary traditions within a generation

gastronome: fine, other animals prepare their food, but cooking still makes us special. preparing food by cleaning is it so much more basic, and monkeys being capable of learning to cook is just speculation. and that whole thing with ants is specifically because ant's waists are too small for large bits of food to pass through; it's resulting from a completely different type of evolutionary pressure

zoologist: we don't really know the evolution of ant digestive tracts that well, and it's best not to assume that they started using larvae spit because they had narrow waists; maybe they were able to evolve narrow waists because they could rely on larvae spit. after all, humans would have a difficult time eating raw meat with how our teeth and jaws currently are, but we're pretty certain that we only became like that after we started cooking

linguist: cooking may be somewhat unique as a form of food preparation, but language is unique as a form of communication, and i still feel that language is the more important thing to our identity as a species and our moral considerations. if an animal started cooking, they would be a curiosity, but if an animal started talking, we would have to accept them as an equal

physicist: cooking is only possible because of fire, which i would argue is just another example of technology borne of humanity's unique ingenuity.

gastronome: cooking was pivotal in human evolution though: it allowed people to extract more energy from their food, and coincided with increased brain size. the language and ingenuity which humans demonstrate is only possible because of cooking

major league baseball pitcher: ya know, i've never seen an animal pitch a fastball

[all look to zoologist]

zoologist: yeah, no, you're right. throwing is pretty unique to humans. no other animal specializes in it

physicist: oh come on! after all this, you can't seriously be saying that throwing is what sets humans apart from animals!

baseball heritage post

Actually, what makes us human is "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies. Never seen a gerbil make that banger

Sometimes you've gotta take received wisdom in tabletop RPG design and do the exact opposite on purpose, just to see what happens. I've got a vaguely superhero-adjacent RPG I'm working on right now that flips the whole "the player characters' actions should never result in an NPC's death unless that was their explicit intention" thing turnways and makes it literally impossible to engage in physical coercion of any kind toward another person without some non-zero likelihood of accidentally killing the target in the process, and let me tell you, it's resulted in some fun "okay, how are we going to do this" conversations.

(To be clear, I don't mean this in a world-of-cardboard sense; I mean any physically coercive act, even shoving a dude with merely human strength, has a non-zero chance of accidentally killing its target, though that chance may be very small for low-end stuff, so the risk can be mitigated – albeit never entirely eliminated – through self-restraint. There is literally no level of force that's 100% safe!)

Honestly this is a great way to raise the stakes and force your players to get creative, particularly if there are mechanical incentives to complete a session or campaign without killing any non-enemy NPCs.

"but I said I attacked him non-lethally!" "Yeah so what you did was you allowed him to roll his death saves in peace. he failed." "They have death saves?" "Only when you say that you attack non-lethally."

I like this rule! There's no way to knock somebody unconscious without risking killing them. Even asphyxiation is extremely risky!

#the shoving thing sounds silly to me though. #maybe in a “the npc will react hostily to your coercion and trigger combat” way. sure

Being shoved absolutely can kill people, especially if they fall over. Head injuries are no joke, and a shove is a great way to make them.

In my experience, a lot of folks aren't aware that "person gets shoved, trips, falls, hits their head on a hard surface, and dies of a traumatic brain injury" is literally the most common form of manslaughter.

#this comes across to me as the kind of idea that a DM will read and think 'wow! that adds so much realism to my game!' #without really considering how fun it would be to engage with #or how it will affect the way players engage with the game #why would I play a character who is physically aggressive or temperamental #if every single physical interaction has a chance to murder someone without recourse #it's just adding player-unfriendly rules for the sake of realism From "nevermore117" (Not replying to the tags I'm not copying, since I agree with them.) People, Proko says his motivation for the mechanics in the post, it was not for the sake of realism.* And sure it would discourage you from playing aggressive or temperamental characters and change the way the characters engage with the game. Yes! That's explicitly the point! He did it because he wanted to make a ttrpg with this mechanic to see how it changed the way the game was played. And it's not like it's an unusual thing for a ttrpg to discourage or encourage certain playstyles. For example Dnd 5e discourages having a character who refuses to engage in combat. Earlier editions of Dnd instead themselves discouraged combat by making it very lethal. *He admittedly did make a bit realistic in that he limited it to physical coercion, he absolutely could have made it any die roll no matter what.

I run into this brand of well-actuallyism quite a lot, and as near as I can determine, it typically stems from correctly recognising that game rules are opinionated about what kinds of stories your game ought to be telling, but, like, thinking that this is a bad thing? There seems to be an underlying sentiment that game rules shouldn't have opinions about how your game's story ought to go; that it's the GM's responsibility to insulate their players from having to think about or engage with the game's mechanical incentive structures as much as possible; and that the failure to do so is necessarily the product of malice or stupidity on the part of the GM, the game's designer, or both.

It doesn't matter how thoroughly or thoughtfully you explain the player-facing incentives baked into the rules if the person you're talking to is taking "the rules should not have opinions about how the game ought to be played, period" as their starting point.

I’ve told this story ten thousand times and I will tell it for the ten thousandth and first: whenever I think about wearing a costume to work on Halloween, I remember the time I saw a doctor breaking what must have been devastating news to a sobbing patient while the doc was dressed as a ketchup bottle.

There’s a lot of good responses to this but I obviously very partial to the healthcare ones

The Swan

It’s time for another Installment of Family Lore from my wierd-ass childhood!

Story contains: poor childhood decisions, profanity, extremely poor animal handling practices, and a semi-graphic description of an injury.  Mind the content warnings, your health comes first. As usual, all names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy.  rest of the story under the cut to avoid a five-mile post.

This is the story of the first time I said the word “Fuck” In front of my mother.

When I was a kid, my parents would drive to Ohio from California every other summer of so to visit my Mom’s family, who never figured out that they can escape. Four days is a long ass time to be a small child in the back of an unairconditioned van with a bunch of rotting bananas but it was worth it for being able to more or less run wild through the Ohio woods.

My mother’s family consisted of my grandparents Polly and Bobby, and her younger brother, Bobby.  Bobby has a saint of a wife named Stephanie, and three children.  My sister was very fond of cousins Samantha and Amanda.  

Due to a combination of Ye Olde Misogyny and post-delivery drugs, for about five generations there, the men had been naming all the children, so literally every AMAB person born into the family was named “Robert” and immediately shortened to “Bobby”.  Uncle Bobby very nearly did this to his firstborn, wich would have brought the total number of Bobbies to 8 between the miscellaneous cousins and uncles, when Stephanie put her foot down and named him Jonathan Jackson the second she found out what sex he was.

Cousin JonJack is still my favorite cousin- he has a heart big enough to house every creeping and crawling thing on this planet, and a quiet determination to make things right with the world, even if that means doing something completely batshit insane.

We were camping at a place near West Branch State Park, at what is advertised as a “Luxury Campground next to a Private Lake” but is really an RV collection next to a glorified sump.  It has the extremely redeeming feature of being smack in the middle of Northeast Ohio’s dense hardwood forest, and since we had parents that grew up in the area and had passed a reasonable amount of scouting knowledge onto us, we were turned lose after breakfast and told to return by dark or if anyone got hurt.  This was splendid, as the woods were full of interesting things like nests of day-old rabbits, their hearts visible as they beat against their delicate rib cages, shimmering black rat snakes longer than we were tall, hives of wild bees, intricate in their geometric structure and remarkably patient as long as you didn’t poke them.

The Sump was even better- it had dozens of baby snapping turtles for the catch-and-releasing, catfish twice the size of any cat, a plethora of bugs and worms and crawdads and families of duck and best of all, Arthur, The Swan.

Keep reading

I think often if the time I was working for a state forest overwinter and my roommate and I were the only people living in a 12-bedroom bunkhouse in the forest so one day her friend asked of she could do some sort of volunteer work in and live there for the winter. the friend was a wildland firefighter and it’s a travesty that the most people fighting wildfires in this country are only seasonally employed, unhoused most of the year, and don’t even get health insurance. Genuinely it’ll give me an ulcer if I think too much about it.

We contacted our supervisor who told us there was no volunteer work that qualified for housing but when he found out she fights fires in the forest we were managing, I guess he reasoned that she sort of worked there anyway, so he said, “just don’t make it obvious.”

So she lived there all winter & one day one of the forest rangers in charge of our housing came to do her annual inspection and she walked in, saw three bedrooms occupied when there should have only been two, and as she stood there looking at the bedrooms, my coworker confidently said, “I have a lot of stuff.”

The ranger raised her eyebrows at the two bedrooms located beside each other, and said, “I can see that.”

She left after the inspection and we assumed she was vaguely in-the-know and chose not to bust us, but the next month I was out for drinks with another ranger and he said, “Does [coworker] really have so much stuff she took up two rooms?? How did she fit all that in her car?”

Apparently, the first ranger took us at face value.

I said, “Yeah, she must be really good at packing.”

He said, “[Ranger 1] told me two beds were made. She’s sleeping in two beds?”

I said, “Yeah, she likes switching beds to shake it up. It got really quiet over the winter.”

He sipped his beer very thoughtfully and said, “Huh. Not a bad idea.”

In a way that sounded like he probably went home and tried that out.

Hypothetical scenario: someone is on Ao3, looking for fanfiction to read. This person only speaks/reads English, and they set the language filter to only show fics written in English.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

begging the poll anon to tell us about the argument that led to this question

Tags from prev:

#The kind of wank the poll anon must have seen#like wtf#Anyway I'm literally French and sometimes set my search to English only if the tag is big/there's a lot of fics I can't read#when Chinese authors migrated en masse to ao3 a couple years ago I filtered to English for a while bc it saved me time#and you can't allow two languages at once in your results so

Something I have on my wish list for AO3 features is that it would show how many fics were in each language when I went to the tag page to do a search.

@terresdebrume You actually can allow two languages at once in your results on AO3! You can't do it with the drop-down menu, but you can do it with language IDs, either in the "Search within results" bar while filtering, or in the "Any field" section while searching. This is detailed in the last section on the Hidden Search Operators Cheat sheet. For English and French, you would type "language_id: en OR language_id: fr" in the appropriate search bar. You can also do this more permanently by setting a site skin (one guide to this is at Neat Site Skin Features For Filtering Works) or by using a browser tool like AO3 Saved Filters (more on browser tools at AO3's "Unofficial Browser Tools FAQ").

For more information on hidden/advanced tools for curating your experience on AO3, I have an AO3 collection where I've assembled quite a few guides on for filters, searching, and blocking.

I also have no clue what the original poll was talking about, although I'll admit I am morbidly curious enough to want to know. I do agree with other commenters that this might either be intentional bait or a misunderstanding how AO3 works. They mention "traffic" as if that offers any benefit to authors, and the wording of "other ways to reach their audience" implies that people who can't read the works somehow are a way to reach their audience. Not to mention the implication that simply scrolling past the work listing is better than filtering them out, when the action is functionally identical.

Just… go forth with the multiple language filtering knowledge. It's at least something good to come out of whatever horrors the poll submitter may have seen.

Sword and sorcery tabletop RPG which includes a long, rambling list of magic spells with weirdly specific affects and annoyingly particular casting requirements, kind of like if Dungeons & Dragons decided to be about 40% more precious about its magic system, except it's a group worldbuilding game, and one of the first steps is for the group to collectively choose exactly seven of those spells to be the only ones anyone still knows how to cast. All of the spells that didn't get picked might be spoken of in legend, but the knowledge of them has been lost over time. The remainder of the group worldbuilding phase consists principally of brainstorming what a society built around these seven annoyingly specific spells would look like; for example, perhaps the knowledge of their working is jealously guarded, with each of the setting's great nations constructing their entire cultural identity around Their Spell, or perhaps the setting's industrial base is dependent on combining these spells in increasingly unintended ways to form a sort of sorcerous Rube Goldberg machine of production.

(One of the default campaign premises for this hypothetical game would, of course, cast the player characters as a gang of mercenary scholars on a quest to rediscover an eighth spell. Depending on what sort of setting the group initially brainstormed, keeping their intentions under wraps may be strongly advisable.)

Now I'm going to be spending an unhealthy amount of time thinking about a rich guy who just REALLY wants to cast like Barkskin because he's just really into the idea of being a fucked up tree and hiring a bunch of fuckos to figure out how to do it because he's read about it in some old books or some shit

That's the spirit.

A world where one of the Seven Spells is Stone to Flesh. It's said this was once used to break a terrible curse, but nobody now remembers if there was ever truly a way to turn the living into statues; scholars confidently assert that this is a just-so story invented by the credulous to explain the origins of a staple part of society, since the spell's purpose is so obviously to provide food in abundance.

Still, nobody quite trusts a sculptor whose work seems too lifelike.

mithrun makes me insane in many senses but one that's particularly depressing to me is how he is stripped of his agency, not only in the narrative, but by the audience as well. he shows time and time again how strong, capable, and independent he can be with just a little support from others, and yet his family, the canaries, and the fandom treat him as if he can't even chew food by himself. on one hand, it's impressive work by kui, she can tell which biases surround her characters and she weaves them into the narrative to have us think more deeply about them; on the other hand its sad that it kinda flies over people's heads and people fall exactly into the very same things she criticises. Though it honestly makes it even more powerful when characters go against all that to truly, deeply respect him and his independence, and I also love seeing how Mithrun interacts with the other dungeon lords with the compassion he was never given in his situation--

op, did you actually read the manga? he can't even eat by himself. needing support is not something to be ashamed of, many people live like this in real life. mithrun has no desire to do anything at all, he would very much rot alone. i know that at the end of the manga he has a slight change and may have taken the first difficult step in dealing with his own situation, but isn't a magical change and suddenly hes all healed. he is strong, intelligent and very capable, and yes, he needs support. these things can coexist and do not make him any less than anybody.

but at the end i think fictional charas can have different interpretations and one is free to think whatever one wants so

I.. did say he needs support in my original post. I'm not saying Mithrun is completely capable of doing everything completely by himself, I'm saying that people vastly underestimate the things he can do.

Including eating by himself, multiple times.

And even more importantly, Mithrun himself is resistant to being fed by hand.

Now. Would it have been shameful if Mithrun did need to be fed and bathed by someone else? Of course not. Would it have made him less worthy of respect? No. In fact, that's exactly the state he was in right after the canaries rescued him from his dungeon!

However, the Mithrun from that time and the Mithrun we meet in the story are at completely different steps of his recovery. He can eat by himself, if reminded to. He can bathe, when reminded to. Really, the only thing that necessitates more than a reminder is sleeping! There's no need for it to be forced on him!

The important thing, to me, is that being fed, bathed, and clothed by hand is something that, while often necessary, can feel extremely violating- like your boundaries are being stepped over completely, like you have no say what happens with your body. The original post was just me feeling sad that the present Mithrun, while not needing any of that support, still has his bodily autonomy and boundaries completely overlooked simply because people assume he's completely helpless.

But no I guess I didn't read the manga 🤷

Op I think you put it really well with

Might be difficult to realize how far along his recovery Mithrun actually is, I know I myself didn't realize right away but even tho Mithrun needs some help he doesn't need the same amount of help he needed when he first got his desires eaten. His profile even says he can survive by himself due to the fact he follows a routine. He just happens to need more support when exploring dungeons.

"Even though he has no desires, he still has routine habits, so he can handle everyday life on his own."

So yeah he wouldn't just "rot" by himself at the point he is in recovery. The ending when he gives up on everything I think it's rather a reflection of how "live to get revenge" was an imperfect temporary solution to motivate him, he needed to be pushed into a healthier path to recovery but it doesn't negate all the progress he had made up to that point.