Two ideas and I don't think I have time today to write either of them

1. Video essayist trying to summarize the career of a local supervillain slowly realizes they're Tumblr mutuals.

2. Polycule that runs on highlander "there can be only one" rules but with collars instead of beheading

In what sense do you mean the second one? Because this can read as both "only one can collar everyone" or "only one can be collared by/for everyone" and the way things are going I'm plummeting towards the second one very fast

No I mean they play The Game that the Highlanders play, but with D/s instead of murder.

It starts with everyone a dominant. Their goal is to be the last dominant standing: this is The Prize.

The way you win is by collaring other dominants. This makes them into a submissive.

Submissives can't collar people, but they add their support to their dominants. So each dominant and their personal set of submissives have to try to collar other dominants, through persuasion or force, until there is only one neck without a collar, ruling over a polycule of their submissives.

(and when you collar a dominant, you swap all their submissive's collars for your collar, as you take their "power" when you defeat them)

I can't believe I wrote all this without saying the key word "highlandercule".

There's this lady in my knitting group - she's maybe 70-ish, and confessed at the first meeting that she hadn't knitted anything since she was in school. In spite of that she chose a pretty ambitious first project (mittens with a fairly complicated two-colour pattern). And just yesterday I saw they're coming along beautifully!

And she's always telling the rest of us about the cool knitting stuff she's found online - and then saying how she loves coming to the group with her knitting problems, because someone always knows a trick or two to fix it. And what I'm saying is I find her enthusiasm very inspiring.

Because it's never too late to learn a new skill just for fun - or to relearn one you thought you had forgotten.

anyway yeah DELETE YOUR FUCKING ADVERTISING IDS

Android:

Settings ➡️ Google ➡️ all services ➡️ Ads ➡️ Delete advertising ID

(may differ slightly depending on android version and manufacturer firmware. you can't just search settings for "advertising ID" of course 🔪)

iOS:

Settings ➡️ privacy ➡️ tracking ➡️ toggle "allow apps to request to track" to OFF

and ALSO settings ➡️ privacy ➡️ Apple advertising ➡️ toggle "personalized ads" to OFF

more details about the process here via the EFF

LEAVE YOUR PHONE HOME.

Use a paper map, pay in cash. Take a burner phone if you really need one and don’t use it for anything but calls.

I’m starting to think older and mid-Millennials need to do Gens Z and Alpha a major favor and teach them how to go analog. It wasn’t that long ago. Some of the tools are gone, but many are still in place.

Saudi Arabia saw their first ever snowfall the other day. Meanwhile Mt Fuji just had its first ever year without snow in October. A few weeks ago there was a devastating hurricane in the Appalachian mountains, 600 miles inland. And a few years ago, the Texas desert was hit by a snowstorm that resulted in hundreds of deaths.

If you have any administrative power over any business, community or organization, anywhere in the world, please make contingency plans for every kind of natural disaster. Yes, even the ones that “don’t happen around here.” Having a plan you never need is far better than needing a plan you never made.

Shop update!

[ID: a photograph of four crocheted chicken plushies, in orange, gold, white and trans pride colors. /end ID]

I'm now keeping my most requested color variants in stock & ready to order !

Chicken plushies are $40 including shipping, made using my original pattern. 100% acrylic yarn & polyfil, approximately 4x3 inches across, safe for small children

You can save by ordering multiple; each additional chicken is $30

I take c.shapp and v.nmo, via dms either here or on instagram @/tlirscreating. Only shipping within the US atm. Any support is greatly appreciated 🙏🙏

I really wish that people had a better grasp on what The Average Person's Life was like pre-industrialization. If you're living in the global North the odds are good that your life is, in fact, better than a medieval king- yes, even with the political stuff- and would make your ancestors cry wild tears of envy.

The things that suck about your life are things that suck about the baseline human condition (at least since the invention of agriculture, but that's 10,000 years of humanity). Yes, including all the political stuff.

The baseline human condition is "being terrified of losing the harvest and starving", compared to that, losing a job is no big deal. (It's bad, it can be life-upendingly bad, but it's still not "you are guaranteed to die if you screw this up" bad for most people.)

The baseline human condition is "getting kicked around by a tin pot dictator", whether that be a king, a baron, a warlord, or a chief; it's taken centuries of social technology to get the world to a point where that's Not Normal.

The baseline human condition is "losing multiple siblings and/or children at a young age to diseases that are entirely preventable". That's a shocking tragedy now. The baseline human condition is "being in the pathway of said tinpot dictator's wars of conquest" and having to deal with soldiers' pillage, looting, and worse (even if they're nominally on your side). That is, again, a shocking tragedy-- it still happens, and happens in way too much of the world, but no one is going to tell you that it's normal.

I'm not saying that we can sit back and rest on our laurels. We can't. I've been calling the pre-industrial world the "baseline human condition" for a reason- unless you're very, very careful, that's what your society eventually reverts to. It takes a lot of people working very hard to make sure you don't have to live at the baseline human condition, and if you start slacking on that, you start backsliding into it.

How we treat each other- and how we use the technology, material and social, that we've developed to make things easier- matters. We can make the world even better than it is now. We can also make it significantly worse. The choice is ours.

...But if you know that you can reliably have food regardless of the season, you don't live in fear of a random attack killing you tomorrow, and you can listen to music on command whenever you want? You do actually live a better life than a medieval king. Because even kings and emperors were much closer to the baseline human condition than a random farm worker in Bumfuck, Iowa is today.

OP forgot a really big one:

For most of history, WE DIDN’T HAVE CLEAN WATER.

The number one cause of death for much of history was diarrhea. And no, I’m not kidding. You have typhoid? Cholera? Dysentery? You’d better hope the people around you have a supply of gruel and ashes to feed you until you can get on the other side of it…if you ever do. (You probably won’t.) Because otherwise, you’re literally going to shit yourself to death. You’ll lose too many fluids and electrolytes and that’ll be the end.

…or, today, if you somehow contracted one of these now rare-by-comparison diseases, we can just give you antibiotics and an IV drip until the worst of it passes. You’ll have a gross few days and then you’ll be fine.

So, how common was this, once-upon-a? Common enough I’ve found multiple sources referring to male menstruation in ancient Egypt—and no, they weren’t just super-progressive about trans rights. Reading further makes it clear they’re actually talking about anal bleeding from parasites they picked up by drinking Nile water. (No, I do not have these references to hand. It was several years ago.) If you’re remembering reading about some medieval doctors thinking menstruation was actually some kind of illness, and going “holy shit, they weren’t stupid, they were basing this on actual evidence,” yeah, that was me too when I first learned this. It’s no wonder it was seen as suspicious. How has this random woman contracted a disease that would lay waste to even the strongest man, and yet she’s healthy and hale? She complains of pain in her bowels, and yet her black bile remains normal. She bleeds freely, but she’s not feverish or shaking. And after a few days it’s all over and she’s none the worse for wear? When you realize all medicine at the time was based only on what your eyes could see, and that what their eyes could see mimicked the end stages of a common and terrible disease, yeah, that’s sus as fuck. They were extremely wrong, but suddenly it’s understandable how they came to those conclusions.

Even if you live in a place with not-great water, you have access to bottled, or to filters that our ancestors might literally consider some kind of holy relic. You don’t wake up every day wondering if this is it and you’ll be shitting yourself to death by sundown. You don’t drink water from the same river everyone uses as a sewer. Even if you’re like “I have lead pipes, no filter, and no bottled,” while that is not a great situation, it’s still better than baseline.

We are doing so much better than we were even 150 years ago just because we have clean water.

the Cain plot was actually crazy bc wdym the writers said yes here’s Cain but Abel’s not important. What IS important is Cain had a wife and she was the only person who could stop Cain from becoming a monster (flashbacks provided). Now here’s a parallel of Dean and his “best friend” Cas that follows the exact play by play of Cain and his wife. Oh but it’s strictly platonic we’d never make Destiel happen. HELLO??????

the solution for taking care of "unsightly" homeless people is to house us. that is the only solution. if you can't stand the look of someone living on the sidewalk, you shouldn't stand for them being put into that situation to begin with. housing us is the only answer.

A yarn snob is someone who is very particular about their yarn selections, usually leaning towards high quality wools and handspuns. You're unlikely to find a Redheart Supersaver skein in their stash doing anything but collecting dust

Image descriptions and captions are the like are accessibility tools that many disabled people depend on to engage with the world. They are not for jokes or pranks, much in the same way that wheelchair ramps are not skateboard tricks or to put up more Halloween decorations.

Can I say it's truly bonkers how people will be like scared of rap. Cause it's racism obviously but the level of exaggeration yknow like the extent of it all is Crazy. People will talk about it like This is some heavy stuff... & dude has like an obviously-for-show supervillain shtick. He's like sampling space ghost. What are you talking about

You see a black guy cosplaying doctor doom & think he's being fucking fr about taking over the world

Maybe I'm media literate georg maybe I know how this works cause I'm into dark wave goth shit but like. Hey ? I'm gonna start explaining this to white people like ok so you know how johnny cash wasn't actually an old west outlaw

I’m having a “holy shit, Lore is hot” moment and it’s hysterical because I’m ace like ??????

A while back my pharmacist saw my deadname on my profile and accidentially called it out, he corrected and deleted my deadname from the system so only my preferred name shows up now. There was a crowd of people behind me, so as he hands over the pills he apologized, in equal tone and volume as when he called my deadname and lied saying it's been a long day and he didn't mean to call out -his own- name. I quietly told him it was fine and he didn't need to do that for my sake.

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

Bro literally deadnamed me once, and has committed to flat out stealing my deadname. It's his now. Legally. Officially. I over heard his co-workers call him by the name.

"It is worth trying to dissect how certain root causes and social dynamics lead some groups of people to become radicalised" and "We are not obligated to centre or coddle the feelings of extremists" are two statements that can and should co-exist, actually.

I'll add, "We won't make progress until people stop thinking it's okay/right/justified to punish an entire demographic for the [real or perceived] failings or transgressions of individual members."

my family is fucking addicted to macgyvering and it's becoming a problem. every time something in this house breaks, instead of doing the sensible thing of replacing it or calling someone qualified to fix it, we all group around the offending object with a manic look in our eyes and everyone gets a try at fixing it while being cheered on or ridiculed by the rest.

it's a beautiful bonding activity, but the "creative" fixes have turned our house into a quasihaunted escape room like contraption where everything works, but only in the wonkiest of ways. you need a huge block of iron to turn on the stove. the oven only works if a specific clock is plugged in. the bread machine has a huge wood block just stapled to it that has become foundational to its function. sometimes when you use the toaster the doorbell rings. and that's just the kitchen.

it's all fun and games until you have guests over and you have to lay out the rules of the house like it's a fucking board game. welcome to the beautiful guest room. don't pull out the couch yourself you need a screwdriver for that, and that metal rod makes the lamp work so don't move it. it also made me a terrifying roommate in college, because it makes me think i can fix anything with enough hubris and a drill. you want to call the landlord about a leaky faucet? as if. one time my dad made me install a new power socket because we ran our of extension cords

Just thought I'd mention that this is what life as a professional software "engineer" is like. Everyone's addicted to the quick hack, the supposedly clever solution that requires minimal effort but can't stand the test of time, ignoring decades of accumulated knowledge about how to actually produce functional and reliable software. The whole industry. And the results have been just what you'd expect.

P.S. Ironically, when I went to post this Tumblr went into some sort of nasty loop that even a full refresh wouldn't fix. Had to close the tab and open a new one to see whether it had actually gone through. It does something like this every couple of days. Point made, I think.

being very online but not Mainstream Online is so perplexing. wake up one day. timeline blowing up because allegedly popular streamer Dingleberry Dan was revealed to be blending small woodland creatures into his daily protein shakes every day for 7 years. you look him up. Dingleberry Dan is the all time most popular Bejeweled Deluxe and Snhebbles Return streamer in the world. he has 67 million subscribers on youtube and 41 million followers on twitter. there are countless friends on your timeline going "i'm absolutely mortified about Dingleberry Dan's horrible critter emulsification atrocities" and "i'm really not at all surprised about Dingleberry Dan's behavior but still disappointed" in 50/50 equal measure. and in 3 days people with the 🆖 emoji in their handle will defend him like their life depends on it by saying he's integral to internet culture and he's being unfairly cancelled. and then in like 4-5 years people will occasionally bring up "hey remember when Dingleberry Dan straight up admitted to turning bunnies and squirrls into slurry every day and people still kept supporting him and he's still a multi-millionaire" but nothing really happens other than that

Project 2025 ain't gonna roll out all at once. So what we're gonna wanna do is make passing each individual part of it as difficult as possible, so there's less to undo once we finally get this country back on the rails.

Resist every step and do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Distracting people with stupid bullshit is one of Trump's favorite political techniques. We saw it all over the place in the first term.

Trump will say something like "You know the Hispanics actually punch kittens, it's what they do."

And the news will be like "TRUMP SAID HISPANIC PEOPLE PUNCH KITTENS" for three weeks.

And while they're doing that the Republicans in Congress have quietly deleted healthcare.

Do not get distracted by stupid bullshit. Trump is a dancing monkey whose greatest asset is the ability to yank the spotlight off of everyone else. Keep your eyes on Congress.