it's a blob

Please note. The orange one is not included because A. He isn’t a billionaire. And B. Calling him obnoxious is too kind for him.

the main problem with this time of year is the irresistible urge to get fully into bed at like 5:34 pm and outside is like yesss, yesss do it, it's what you deserve yesss. like is it depression or is it just november

Idea: a post-apocalyptic novel complete with a young Chosen One where slowly you come to understand that in actuality it’s fourth-century Turkey and the chosen one is Santa Claus.

Seven years later I don’t remember writing this post but I do think it’s still a fantastic idea for a novel.

Including punching bishops?! I'm in.

God, Bluesky is so nice compared to Twitter. You just subscribe to the MAGA block list under moderation settings and you can have conversations in peace without some red-pilled cunt trying to Devil’s advocate your right to existence.

I’m sure the usual leftist in-fighting is happening somewhere too but so far I either haven’t seen it or it hasn’t reached me.

Anyway. Come say hi if you’re on there.

Also don’t forget to block the MAGAs before they even get to breathe in your general direction:

there is on for blocking AI people also.

Oh, yes please.

What's great about the blacklists is if you subscribe, whenever new folks are added to it, they also automatically get blocked.

and with your help it can rack up 700k notes on tumblr in 2024

no tumblr this doesnt need tags im releasing it into the wild as god intended

you! tumblr user!

can you reblog a two-part post in the correct order?

Part of the reason that it's a bad idea to stay at bad jobs is that they can really fuck with your head in a way that makes it difficult to work in more functional workplaces.

I made a stupid mistake but I have no idea what the scale of the mistake is. I feel like any misstep I make is a catastrophic failure. I'm upset so frequently that I'm thinking about quitting because I'm useless and it would be less painful than getting fired and that seems to be very far away from what my new coworkers think of me. I am behind on work and the only thing my brain wants to do is sit at my desk and grind in a marathon for like thirty hours until I'm caught up but because this is a functional business I'm pretty sure they'd be horrified if I did that.

I also feel like I'm being haunted by my old boss which is really putting into context how controlling and shitty he was when I'd basically gotten so used to it that I didn't notice that anymore.

The stupid mistake is this:

It is supposed to be a secret from our clients that there's a new CEO, we're supposed to keep that quiet. I haven't talked about that with any clients, but I've talked about it here where I try to keep my job anonymized and I've talked about it with my spouse and my friends.

Earlier this week I called the other lady - "Jane" - who used to answer phones at the old company. We were in two separate businesses that shared a building and had a history and answered the phone for each other. When my boss sold the company, she went with the other business, which is run by her relative who used to be my old boss's business partner.

So I called to let Jane know that one of her clients, who had purchased a firewall from us seven years ago, might want to apply a firmware update because of a vulnerability that had been announced by the company, and we caught up for a minute. She asked after large bastard and we talked about her niece's wedding. She asked how things were at the new company and I said, "oh, you know that guy you thought was cute during the acquisition? He left the company. And I'm scheduled to meet with the new CEO this week. It's been kind of chaotic," and then I asked how her son was doing and if she had holiday plans and said we should hang out soon.

Today I got an email from my old boss with the subject line "RE: Your conversation with Jane" asking me who had left and what the changes at the new company are.

So now I'm pissed at Jane for telling old boss, pissed at myself because it never even occurred to me that old boss would talk to Jane or her relative who used to be his business partner, pissed at old boss for emailing me about this, and I'm exhausting myself chewing over how I'm going to tell my manager. (I am going to tell the manager, but I'm not going to send a message in the middle of the night and I also don't want to schedule a message to send tomorrow morning while I'm mid-commute to my meeting with the new CEO) and I'm kind of melting down about this because after yesterday's upset customer i was feeling pretty good about implementing some positive changes but now I'm right back down in the sub basement pretty sure I'm going to get fired which doesn't seem like it's actually likely intellectually speaking but feels true because everything feels terrible because I spent a decade working for a guy who yelled at me if i didn't respond to an email in fifteen minutes.

So, like, obviously I'm making mistakes and I'm struggling under my workload because it's a much larger workload and I'm still learning how this company functions, but also old boss used to literally say that he wished he could replace all of us with robots because machines wouldn't fuck up like we did and he wouldn't have to accept a world where mistakes happened.

So, like combine my natural perfectionism/procrastination cocktail with that backdrop and I am walking on eggshells around myself even when everyone else at the company seems Pretty Normal.

So anyway I'm in the "actually I don't deserve a raise I'm sorry I'll just see myself out" part of the cycle AND I also may have helped to resolve a months-long, multi-customer VPN problem today that will reduce our call volume and save time for the techs and identified a prospect that my boss had reviewed and passed on to me as a scammer before they could extract money or information from us.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Don't call that guy he bought a domain to mimic a group he's unaffiliated with! I'm sorry! These licenses will prevent the issue that's popping up with the free solution you're using and also I showed three people on the engineering team how to look up pricing so they don't have to wait on me for a quote before they communicate on their projects! I made a stupid phone call and now the asshole I used to work for is demanding information! I'm sorry, I don't know how the opportunity linking works! I cancelled a customer computer that had its backorder extended until December and replaced it with a computer that will show up tomorrow but I don't know how to link the second quote with the ticket that was set up with the first quote I'm sorry you have to take the time to show me! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I should know better I should have looked it up first I should have been the one to call the vendor I should have checked the URL before I wasted time writing an email I should have known he'd find out! I'm sorry!"

Though hey what are the chances that the elevated mood, high productivity, lack of appetite, and general capabilities at 3pm and the extreme self-loathing, exhaustion, headaches, and mood swings at 11pm are perhaps related to my shiny new vyvanse prescription.

Being as upset as I am right now feels abnormal. This is probably something worthwhile to communicate to my doctor.

Good news! Nobody cared and they told me to ignore old boss!

How'd the power point presentation go?

putting this under the cut so you all have the same emotional experience i just did

@ms-demeanor

Boss is asleep, cannot stop me from frogposting

First like and this has already found its intended audience

uh oh

Frog

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

False! “Sightly” is a positive word, so the default way for things to work is good as well.

The true most ordinary object is beautiful, horrible sounding, very smelly, intangible, and delicious.

I still don’t think it matches anything in existence but to truly understand a thing one must know its true nature.

"touchy" is also a word! however it's mostly used for things that aren't objects, like subjects of conversation. it either means "oversensitive and irritable" or "requires careful handling/wording, delicate"

i think the second one works well for our hypothetical object. so we can use that.

therefore, the Default Object is:

and i still cannot think of anything that matches this

behold, the default object!

I love when a city has a Big Dumb Thing in it.

The quintessential Big Dumb Thing is the St. Louis Arch, which was built to commemorate westward expansion and is almost exclusively there for tourists, but also gives an otherwise kind of mid city a little bit of identity. I have to imagine that as soon as it was built, people started talking about it, which is one of the things I like. When practical considerations dominate how cities are built, it's great to have someone's creative vision writ large on the horizon, even if it's not the most beautiful thing ever constructed.

To qualify as a Big Dumb Thing, the structure in question needs to have no practical purpose for being built how it was, or at least minimal purpose. Most of its shape should be aesthetic, though as buildings involve engineering, I'm willing to give a lot of leeway. Most often, they'll be towers, because those stick out, and you get more bang for your buck with a tower.

Not all landmarks are Big Dumb Things. There are plenty of bridges and buildings that are pretty but functional, and the functionality comes first, because they were built with that function in mind. So the Golden Gate Bridge? Not, in my parlance, a Big Dumb Thing, even if it's nice to go up and look at, and dominates the popular understanding of San Francisco's identity.

But San Francisco also has Coit Tower, which was built because someone wanted it to exist and had the money to make that happen. This very much gets at the heart of why most Big Dumb Things are built, and if not for the Golden Gate Bridge, I think it would have found a more prominent place in the city's cultural identity.

I would like to hear about your local Big Dumb Thing. Something that someone built mostly because they thought that it would be cool to have around, either built by a benefactor or commissioned or just a building made into art. Might be a monument, might be a tower, might be a building, it just needs to be Big and also Dumb (affectionate).

And also include a picture, if you can.

nasa: we're going to shoot three rockets directly at the sun during the total eclipse. for study and research purposes.

me: oh cool

nasa: we have named the rockets apep. this stands for atmospheric perturbations [in the] eclipse path.

me: oh cool

nasa: apep is also the ancient egyptian deity of chaos and darkness, who ceaselessly seeks to extinguish the sun. we launch these rockets directly at the sun in the name of apep.

me: oh... cool?

if gods are kept alive by their followers then NASA is single-handedly the caretaker of SO MANY GODS

i am thinking abt this sooo muchh

old friends senior god sanctuary

Dun Manifestin’

Meet the Mona Lisa of the Prado, the earliest known copy of Da Vinci’s best portrait. Similarity in the undersketch of the painting indicates that this was very likely painted concurrently with the original Mona Lisa, by a student of Da Vinci.

There is much controversy in the art world over the question of whether or not to clean the fragile Mona Lisa, but her sister has been restored and some fairly odd later alterations removed to show the original vibrant colors and lighting. Some details, such as the sheerness of her shawl and the pattern on the neckline of her dress, have become utterly obscured in the original, but in the restored copy they’re perfectly clear.

It blows my mind a little bit to look at these two sisters side-by-side and imagine how much vivid detail could be hiding in the Mona Lisa under 500 years of rotten varnish. 

THE COPY HAS EYEBROWS

Your response to a beautiful piece of artwork done by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is “SHES GOT EYEBROWS”. Alright. All intelligent life has been lost.

Yo Snooty McSnotwhine, the Mona Lisa’s vanished eyebrows have been the subject of debate and analysis in the art expert community for hundreds of years, long before your parents squirted water at each other from across the clown car and then honked their bicycle horns to indicate they really wanted to make a smug, insufferable little clown baby together. 

this continues to be the best reply to a criticizing comment on this site