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【ℕ𝕠𝕩𝕚𝕠𝕦𝕤 ℕ𝕪𝕩】

@bugbastard

i will never care about the met gala beacuse i know in my heart if you gave a drag queen 45$ and three days they could make something completely out of this world that out every single celeb to shame

i can answer this! the met gala is the main source of funding for the metropolitan museum’s costume institute, which houses something like 30k pieces of surviving historical clothing, shoes, accessories, etc. dating all the way back to the 15th century. the costume institute is the only department of the met that has to fund itself; ticket sales and donations are the institute’s only other sources of funding. the met gala brings in millions of dollars to the institute

i know it seems like just a bunch of rich people flaunting their wealth, but it’s actually what’s paying for the upkeep of all of these pieces of fashion history and keeping them available for public view, instead of in private collections. plus we get to laugh at rich people who don’t know how themes work

Just saw a Barbie ad here for the first time. It is starting, folks. They must already be desperate if they're buying ad space on TUMBLR.

Do not reblog official marketing or ads from struck works

including (but not remotely limited to) Barbie. They are advertising here because their actors are on strike and will not promote their products.

Barbie is not a struck work. It is okay to reblog barbie content. It's done and finished. Going to premiers for it is crossing the line. But going to the regular ass movie is not.

Read me and read me good: not seeing Barbie is a great way to show execs that we don't care about writers and actors.

Let me say that again: going to see Barbie is GOOD for the strike. Many people who WORKED on barbie are striking. They probably have not been paid yet.

The unions HAVE NOT asked us to picket the movie. Just the premier.

The original post is disinformation.

I believe it to be coming from a good place but avoiding works that are NOT being struck is genuinely harmful to the cause.

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Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.

I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.

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i've been reading through your mortasheen monster backlog and one thing i like is how a lot of the monsters can both look incredibly cute and incredibly monstrous under certain circumstances, like gobblegeist and braek. On a different note, what inspired you to make the boomen?

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The Boo Men are actually a pre-Mortasheen concept I had in my teens and they were first inspired by the Gun-Ho Guns from Trigun, which I was only familiar with at the time for its anime dub!

It was the first time I saw a series suddenly introduce an elite team of weird villains with all different gimmicks as a story arc and I just thought it was so fun I started coming up with my own, which included a squad of "mercenary bogeymen," horror monsters for hire, who I name after the prologue of "Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones"

The "Boo Men" I originally came up with were each themed around a different way to die, basically, so they were like horror movie villain bounty hunters and ranged from simple ones like a slasher ghoul who's very very good with weapons to a sentient tombstone creature that already has your epitaph on it, and bends probability to try and push you towards that death. When I worked them into Mortasheen they changed a whole lot, especially because the setting is already full of odd monsters with odd powers, so I imagined them more like monsters who tried to "become human," which is why they're all strictly humanoid. They are all still named after their main offensive power however and they're still like mercenary bounty hunters.

The first one I designed, Stingg, is also based loosely on a dream I had in which the Pokemon Scrafty got a new evolution that was more like an insect punk girl. The design in the dream was literally just Scrafty with thin claw-like spikes for its mohawk but I elaborated on it a little. I do have some concern that "boo men" sounds too goofy to people who don't know it's an actual archaic way of saying boogieman. Boogieman is a silly word, but everyone's used to it and knows what it means. More than half the Boo Men in Mortasheen are ladies but it's officially a gender neutral designation. Three of the existing ones are slated for the TTRPG's first book, plus a fourth brand new one by another artist! The only reason I don't answer more asks I get about Mortasheen is that every single one has an explanation at least this long

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I'm sure I've already asked this before, but is there a place where all your mortasheen monsters are lik, collected?

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That's meant to be the archive on bogleech.com, but I haven't updated it much since I started final work on the TTRPG. That's only because a lot of new monsters are going to debut in the book instead of online!

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Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

Just like baby cats are kittens and baby dogs are puppies, baby mosquitoes are wrigglers! Mosquito larvae are aquatic, and spend most of their time wriggling through the water, hence the term ‘wriggler’. Likewise, mosquito pupae are called tumblers for the way they tumble near the water’s surface.

(Image: Southern house mosquito pupae, or tumblers (Culex quinquefasciatus) by James Gathany)

If you like what I do, consider leaving a tip or buying me a ko-fi!

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You can see the mosquito’s whole upper body developing in the tumbler! Those pupa are one of my favorite real life creature designs ever. It’s such a cool appealing shape.

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This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:

"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"

Yeah, I remember. And I'm sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.

No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that's a very good thing.

see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles

International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.

Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.

We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.

We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.

On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.

Now it's time to do that thing again and make sure that we don't kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.

you want to help stop tumblr from murdering itself? here's how!

  • click this link and go to the support page, then click "contact support"
  • click on the category list and click on feedback
  • now you need to tell staff WHY putting in an algorithm will cause the site to fucking die, and be sure to be detailed and not a dick in it. theyre not gonna listen to feedback calling them assholes
  • viola, if @staff listens, we'll be fine

i encourage you to reblog this so we can get as many people leaving feedback as humanly possible. we need to let staff know this is an utterly terrible idea

by the way, tumblr has turned off asks on all of their staff blogs, so this is the only way to tell tumblr how you feel

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here it is again because uh. seems relevant.

I honestly think that the lack of non-sexual nudity in public spaces has done horrific damage to American society.

We deeply struggle to understand the natural diversity of bodies because we only see naked bodies in a sexual context. We are taught that seeing nudity is somehow inherently harmful, especially to children. We struggle to differentiate between sexually suggestive and sexually explicit material.

It fucks up the way people think about and talk about sex ed. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about breast feeding. It fucks up the way people think about and talk about queer folks. It feeds into fatphobia and ableism and is all rooted in this deeply harmful puritanism.

Like, I need people to understand that seeing a bare titty in public is not going to hurt a child. Seeing a man in a banana hammock isn't inherently traumatizing. I would argue, in fact, that adults treating those things as dangerous and gross and scary is going to do way more damage to a kid's psychology than seeing the nudity in the first place.

here at the sandwich shop, we’ve started to notice some people who are new to sandwiches aren’t used to meat and cheese between two slices of bread. they find this practice strange and confusing. that’s why we’ve decided to cut the bread out all together. from now on, we’ll just serve slices of meat and cheese on a plate.

we know that many of our loyal sandwich shop customers have been coming here for years to buy our delicious sandwiches. but some people don’t “get” sandwiches, and we need to try and appeal to them with an easier-to-understand meal format. we will no longer be serving sandwiches. all of our food will just be cold cuts on a paper plate. we love our customers and appreciate your understanding <3

Hey. Gentiles. Listen up for a sec.

When September and October are nearing and you’re planning an event: google “Rosh Hashanah *year*” and *Yom Kippur *year*” and then, and I cannot stress this enough, don’t plan your event on those days. In fact, don’t plan any events starting sundown the night before. Those are the three most important days of the Jewish calendar, and, once again, I cannot stress enough how much this little bit of forethought and kindness will make every Jew you know cry tears of joy.

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in 2023, the night before Rosh Hashanah is Thursday evening, September 14.

Rosh Hashanah ends Sunday evening, September 17.

in 2023, the night before Yom Kippur is Saturday evening, September 23.

Yom Kippur ends Monday evening, September 25.