Sometimes I can still hear their voice

Breaking: TikTok is better bc it’s more hostile towards humanity

The lack of video content is what kept us here... I thought we all agree that the best feature of this hellhole was and always will be anonymity.

Tumblr's not asking for my phone number. It's not going through my contacts to try and connect me with my fucking colleagues. I can come here and talk about whatever I want without anyone ever seeing my face or hearing my voice. I don't have to censor myself and hide my interests or enthusiasm out of fear of consequences it might have in my real life.

I think the biggest misunderstanding they have of Tumblr is that they think of it as a social media platform when in actuality it's a blogging platform with social features.

This is the only day you can RT this

reblog if you hate the current interior design trend of painting everything white with hints of grey or black. ignore if you have no taste

Story time:

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

So whenever I see crap like Elizabeth Holmes’s blood test scam or pharmaceutical trials which are unable to be replicated or industry-funded research that reaches wildly unscientific conclusions, I just remember those fucking sweet potatoes. I remember that curiosity dies when people are just trying to give their superiors the “right” answers, so they can get the grade, get the job, get the paycheck. It’s not about truth when it’s about paying rent. There’s no scientific integrity if you can’t control for human desperation.

bro oh my god … vanilla extract

vanilla extract smells wonderful but tastes horrific on its own. but mixed with sugar and flour and cream it tastes just like it smells. we need the support of others to reach our full potential

no man is an island everyone is vanilla extract

i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”

it was in awe lmao

then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like

oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and

story time

okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.

to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.

i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.

i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.

all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.

so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?

however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”

LITERALLY the words that he said

which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.

my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.

so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”

This sounds like an X-files episode

Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.

I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.

Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.

So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.

………………..yeah, you guys caught me

i grew up in tracy

also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true

Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.

Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.

holy shit

JESUS

omg

wh

it’s back

wat

I have yet to witness something as fucked up as this

WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST READ

wow

Holy shit

This is an ace attorney trial

“Now comes the exquisite twist”

Quebec was just completely deleted.

Quebec isn’t real.

What happened to Greenland?

god I love maps designed to piss off literally everyone

They turned Brazil in our most hated enemy: Portugal

i figured this was some sort of flex about the driver’s precision to not hit the cup, and it was that i guess? but also so much more

orange tones in oxford

the impulse to hide what I'm doing at my computer still sits so deep even tho I'm literally never looking at anything objectionable , the door will open and I'll hurry to close the page like oh fuck no one can know I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for the Balkans

If you think evil thoughts and concentrate real hard you can manifest them as purple orbs. You can throw them at enemies, to inflict a poison damage over time effect.

here comes THE HUGGER

Beautiful

Precious! 🥰🥰🥰

🥰❤️🥰❤️🥰

YOU GET A HUG AND YOU GET A HUG AND YOU AND YOU

Respectfully, Ireland is the best country on the planet

I made a fool of myself today and I will make a fool of myself tomorrow. Good night

i’ll turn on a 2 hour movie just to eat my food in 2 minutes and 17 seconds idc

my neighbor thought i fucking DIED because he heard a loud crash (easel & canvas fell over while i was asleep) and had been trying to contact me for like an hour anyway artistic rendition of when i opened my door

The tags!

Just let him adopt you already

adulthood is just a constant struggle of, “man, i want cookies for breakfast, but I also recognize this is a bad nutritional decision.  On the other hand, the only one who can stop me is me.  i know that fucker’s weaknesses.  i could totally take me in a fight.”

frog and toad are my two remaining brain cells struggling to keep my horrible body alive

2021 be like: I'm thriving. I'm miserable. I am revisiting old hobbies. None of my hobbies are fun. I'm walking a lot. I have a vitamin D deficiency. The pandemic has lasted one month. The pandemic is over. The pandemic has lasted for 10 years. I am completely isolated. I talk to my friends constantly. I love working from home. Fourteen months have vanished from existence. I have a repetitive stress injury from working from home. I'm sick to death of working from home. Everyone is getting vaccinated. There's three new variants that no-one is vaccinated from. Stay indoors. Start going out. Outdoor dining. Restart the economy. Don't touch. Isn't it great that we're finally going back to normal?

I have become known at my library as the dude who knows how to deal with computers.  I’m not in IT, and I don’t know shit about hardware, but I’m pretty good at figuring out what is causing an error, or how to perform a task in a specific program.  

I have also joked repeatedly that all I really need to do is stand near one of the student computers in the library and it’ll start working again.  I’ve no idea why, but for some reason errors that happen repeatedly just go away whenever I come to look at the computer.

Last week, I helped a student who was having issues with his laptop.  Multiple programs had frozen, but he hadn’t saved his paper, and luckily I was able to get it working long enough for him to save three straight days of work that he otherwise would’ve lost.  It’s worth noting that I spent most of the time I was trying to fix it whispering, “C’mon, baby, work with me” at his computer, because… just because, okay.  It’s what I do, it works, don’t question it.

Anyway, I was around late at work last night, waiting for my ride, when the student worker came back to my office and said there was a small group of students looking for me, and could I give them a hand even though I was off the clock?

Sure, why not.

I came out to find a group of six students, including the guy I helped last week, at a table clustered around one laptop.  I rolled up, said, “Hey, what can I help you with?”, and the guy said, “Can you just hang out here for a second?”

Sure, my dude.  I’m off the clock, I’m listening to a podcast, I can chill at a table with your group until my ride shows up, if you want.

So I spend some time flipping through my phone, only half paying attention, figuring they’re finishing something up and they’ll ask their question as soon as they’re done.  But after a minute, the guy says, “It worked!” and there was a chorus of excitement from the rest of the group. They all thanked me, and excused themselves to go back to class.

Turns out they had a group presentation, and the laptop they were trying to present from had froze up on them.  Not knowing what to do, this guy apparently told his group there was a computer wizard in the library, and that merely being in my presence might be enough to fix it.  To be fair, he… was not wrong.

I just find it delightful that this has become such A Thing that students are now seeking me out.  Not to ask a question, or get some help, but just to stand near their device and share my mythical computer-fixing aura. It’s like being a terribly benign cryptid.

You’re the Installation Wizard’s cousin