I finished this cross stitch today!

we owe literally no one more on this planet than the woman behind fantasy name generator

her name is emily and and she runs it all by herself

everyone say thanks emily!!!

I would die for you, emily

hey Emily I know we haven’t talked in 5 or 6 years, how’s it going? kids doing good? pregnancy going okay for you? anyway I sent you this because some rando on the Internet thought you might be happier knowing you inadvertently reposted MLP fetish art. wait what’s MLP? well okay let me start off with saying I am a completely normal individual caught in the crosshairs of a violently loud subculture on the internet I am not actually a part of but I constantly bear witness to. secondly does your kid watch cartoons? well you might have seen

a work in progress

@shitpostsampler

I’m pretty happy with how this has turned out tbh

A few mistakes but 🤷‍♀️

What do you think @shitpostsampler ?

me, to my housemates, one of whom is a thermal engineer: if someone had hypothermia, is the best way to warm them up ‘spoon them’, or ‘cuddle chest to chest’? I feel like it could be either – spooning is the classic warming position, and you warm up the colder part, but spoon the front and you insulate the skin with the largest temperature delta

housemates: [fervent, serious debate]

me, after a couple of minutes: to be clear, this is for a final fantasy 7 fanfiction scene where my character got really cold, the stakes aren’t high in getting this completely right.

housemate: does the hypothermia exist sheerly as an excuse for the cuddling?

me: that is the only reason hypothermia exists in fanfiction.

so i asked my mom’s boyfriend, who is a paramedic, and he recommended that for hypothermia, you cuddle chest-to-chest, BUT if you are digging in to survive a blizzard, spooning is preferable

okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation. 

what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.

like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it

okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.

i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.

It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.

The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y'all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,

It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.

(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)

one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees 

this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.

the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.

they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do. 

and it works. 

install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.

I just wanna say, not only was I extremely correct in my paranoid regarding these posts, but it’s actually gotten way fucking worse already

I’m just going to be blunt about it; America’s depression epidemic is a direct result of the all-encompassing alienation we experience under late stage capitalism, and now private interests are attempting to recuperate the general public’s feelings of hopelessness and despair into marketing material, the spectacle in effect recuperating our despair and making it appear that the powers that be are on our side. That we are being watched over by boardrooms with loving grace, despite the fact that they are part and parcel with the forces of economy that has driven so many people to not see any hope in their lives. By recuperating the public discourse about the root of endemic depression, the status quo is able to trivialize it and sterilize it before before safely incorporating it back into mainstream society. Not only are we unable to strike against our enemy, most of us can’t even see them for what they are, and the rest of us can’t even speak to the truth of what they are capable of.

Pay attention to little bizarre happenings like these, they betray the rest of the iceberg

fanfic titles be like “we have not touched the stars (nor are we forgiven)” and then you look at the tags & the first one is “anal fisting”

this is so fucking funny to me (credit @havocs)

Level 1: Porn with plot

Level 2: Porn with social commentary

Level 3: Porn with troubling philosophical implications

Level 4: Porn with maddening revelations of humanity’s place in the cosmos

Level 5: Porn with math

Some Fun Asks:

You, a time traveler, accidentally introduced twenty-first century slang to Shakespeare.

For never was a story of more woe O bard Alexa, play us despacito.

had to explain to my therapist who seth everman was today