Everything

Americans will measure in anything except the metric system

So apparently this is just this guy's thing

Average american unwilling to measure using metric system factoid actually a statistical error. Measurements Georg who refuses to use metric system on 10,000 posts a month is an outlier and should not have been counted.

A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one

Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.

“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”

At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.

Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.

One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”

Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”

She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”

You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.

Govenor Hot Wheels Is in fine form this week.

The breadsticks thing to me is hilarious I think it must be another Europe/America thing bc my whole life ‘breadsticks’ have been these hard crunchy thin stick things you buy them at the supermarket and it says breadsticks on the box Never in my life has anyone around me referred to an actual stick of bread as a breadstick lmao But then we don’t have Olive Garden either

wait, that’s not what they’re talking about?

Are you telling me this meme is not about grissini? My life is a lie!

WHAT

I… did wonder why there would be such a focus on going to somewhere with unlimited dry wheat twigs.  Googling ‘olive garden breadsticks’ does seem to suggest a tastier thing.

Huh.

this changes everything

I mean, I thought it was odd that they everyone was so excited about breadsticks… but then I thought, well, it’s America…

Wait they’re talking about actual bread???

grissini:

breadsticks:

… I want American breadsticks. ;_;

@goodbyecassiel - this is the Great Breadstick Misunderstanding, companion to the Epic Lemonade Confusion post

@charlottedabookworm my life is a lie

Omfg same

wtaf why did nobody ever tell us they were talking about actual bread?!?!

We literally did tell you. We. We used the word BREAD.

but………… those aren’t breadsticks!

They are sticks.

Of bread.

🤷‍♂️

We didn’t know you had breadtwigs instead.

OH the joke is funnier than previously thought because those are bigger and therefore it would be harder and more socially awkward to shove them into your purse! Lol

I feel like this is explaining a joke to Vulcans who are totally game to try humor, and I’m loving it.

For the Europeans:

I haven’t actually tried this (it was seeing this post that inspired me to look), so I don’t know how close it is, but it should get you within spitting distance. You’ll need to convert from imperial to metric (although it does look like a lot of metric measurements are given in the recipe itself instead of in the ingredients list, weirdly), and you can stop grumbling because these could bring world peace if they were widespread enough.

I don’t know why it says “popcorn salt.” I’ve always known “the salt that goes on popcorn” as kosher salt and that is indeed what the salt on the genuine article looks like.

I’ve also been told by a French friend that “bread flour” isn’t really a thing in at least parts of Europe. While this is, technically, a specific kind of flour, you can literally substitute whatever kind of flour would be used in your area to make bread, no matter what it’s called or what other applications it may have. Likewise “all-purpose flour” is whatever you keep in your pantry because you needed a bit to thicken a gravy or wanted to make brownies at 3am or whatever. It literally serves all purposes, hence the American name.

And finally: I would assume chickens the world over would lay eggs, but I’ve been told our apples are frighteningly large, so just in case:

This is a large egg next to a British teabag, yes, I’m bougie about my teabags, shut up and don’t tease me I’m teaching you to make the food of the gods here.

If you have significantly smaller eggs, you’ll want a second one. Don’t forget to throw them in the fridge for an hour first, we refrigerate our eggs because of how they’re processed and that temperature difference will absolutely have been taken into account when accounting for the yeast.

And finally, I can’t imagine there’s anywhere in the western world that only has salted butter, but if you do have only salted butter, cut the salt amount in half.

Eat them warm, they’re far better that way.

I found the thing to dunk on Elon for regarding the rocket launch.

A lot of experts in the rocket community were questioning Elon's decision not to create a flame diverter.

For those unaware, huge rockets like this usually have giant trenches underneath to channel the flames, exhaust, and debris safely.

NASA's Kennedy Space Center has a flame trench that is 571 feet long, 58 feet wide, and 42 feet high and is built with concrete and refractory brick and bisects the pad at ground level.

But giant trenches are costly and can make working on the rocket on the launch pad inconvenient. So Elon wanted to try forgoing the flame diverter even though he was launching the largest rocket ever built with the most exhaust ever output.

And now he covered an entire town with a layer of rocket dust.

Exploding the rocket was normal and expected.

Not giving a shit about the town around the launch site... fucking infuriating.

Man, remember when Free The Nipple was a thing and there was an actual substantial amount of feminists who believed even public nudity wasn't inherently sexual and now if you date a short person hundreds of anonymous idiots online will call you a pedophile.

we made it yall you are speaking to tumblr user uncredited author of unconfirmed viral post

I think a big reason why "children are an oppressed group" gets (wrongly!) read as a "pedophile talking point" is that everyone treats children so terribly that actual child molesters can speedrun winning a kid's trust by like, actually respecting their needs and perspective, at least at first. Which means that the only way out of this mess is for all of us adults to treat children with respect, so that abusers can't use the rareness of that respect as a weapon.

Yeah I've been thinking a lot about how cults will prey on marginalized people and how it's so much easier to push an "us versus them" mentality on a person who already (legitimately, accurately) perceives the world as hostile to them

🙋🏻‍♀️ I was groomed by a predator this way and I also got dragged into cults this way. More than one.

Realizing that the validation was fake and that they didn't respect me any more than the other people in my life was more painful than the abuse I went through in some ways. So, like, maybe don't make people vulnerable to the whole situation. Treat kids like people.

When I was thirteen, my English teacher(???) had us do reports on various groups throughout American history. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea what made her think this was on-topic. ANYWAY, I was assigned the KKK. My mother had just finished college a couple years before and something she’d hammered into me while she was writing essays was that you should always present both sides of an argument.

If you think this is ending with “Nina did you actually try to interview the KKK,” you are…wrong.

It is ending with “Nina DID interview the KKK.” It’s ending with “some KKK secretary or whatever saw an earnest, gullible teenager say ‘my mom says I should present both sides so I thought I’d ask if I can talk to someone’ AND HAD THE GRAND FUCKING DRAGON ANSWER ME.”

It is ending with “when I was thirteen I came dangerously, BLISTERINGLY close to being recruited by the KKK.” Because let me tell you about this Grand Dragon. He was nice. He was kind, and patient. He answered all of my questions about his chapter’s history and what various KKK symbols meant. He sent me supplemental links on various bits of Klan history (Google didn’t exist yet, so this was both a treasure trove and, you can imagine, a way to tip the scales in the KKK’s favor). He encouraged me to let him know how my presentation went and praised me for doing in-depth research. Most of the adults in my life thought my research rabbitholes were weird or even dangerous, so “good job looking for your own answers instead of stopping at your first three sources” was a really big deal. “I’m so glad you reached out, what questions do you have?” was a really big deal.

What stopped me from falling all the way down that rabbit hole?

I was deeply Christian at the time and uncomfortable with the idea of burning (or, as they call it, “lighting”) crosses.

That’s it. That’s all that stood between me and “yes, I would like to talk to a local leader, I had no idea how much I knew about the Klan was wrong.”

That should scare the shit out of you. It scares the shit out of me, and I know the story turns out okay. How many of our young alt-righters do you think got caught EXACTLY THIS WAY?

People are community-focused beings FIRST and rational beings SECOND. If you won't respect them as members of your community, somebody else will.

And contrary to popular belief, children are people.

This is the thing.

Right now, the reactionaries are the ones positioning themselves as "you question this thing you were told? good for you!"

It's DANGEROUS to cede that ground.

"Don't learn what the TERFs have to say" leads to the TERFs telling you "they're just worried you might start considering how your sexed body impacts your life. They want to take away your capability to discuss that entirely."

This is not, actually, what "they" want, but if your next move isn't immediately to ask "them," it's not all that hard for the TERFs to make it look like it is. "They won't even say woman!"

Where if you say, "Sure! Go find out what TERFs are saying. But promise me that you will spend the same amount of time researching what trans people are saying, and consider who is responding to who with what," then the person feels that you've trusted them to be able to think for themselves.

Any time you make something forbidden fruit, you make it sexy.

I don't know how the left ever forgot this, but some of us did, and now we're reaping the whirlwind.

for people that hate the theater kids, antis would fit right in with their intense theatrics

Reminder that neil gaiman once told a story about how his aunt risked her life for a book, during a time and place where getting caught reading would have gotten her and her family killed.

Yeah, I think maybe there's possibly a reason why the guy is so staunchly anti-censorship, even of fiction that is disgusting to you personally. And no by the way, lolicon is not connected to real predators. It's actually more correlated to victims of real child exploitation, which really puts this unhinged rant at the end into perspective, doesn't it?

If antis put half their energy into the right place, we could have an entire group of Ashton Kutchers saving thousands of real people from human trafficking!! Doesn't that sound like a fucking utopia?? Instead we have them threatening an established fiction author because he doesn't want fiction banned due to personal distaste. Ugh.

Anyway, go support neil. His sense of humor created this website in the first place, and he's good at writing fiction too. 👍

I went back to find the quote, and I misremembered, it was his cousin not his aunt, but it’s on the importance of storytelling;

“My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.”

Stories, including the ones you don’t like, have their place. You cannot ban media on the basis of offense. We’ve all seen where that leads. Neil has seen where that leads.

We’re not eager to see a repeat, thanks.

People arguing for fascististic censorship don't get to call themselves antifa. What the fuck.

Not Anti as in Antifa but anti as in Anti (Against) ____ Fandom Thing; usually anti Anything They Personally Dislike and Make Liking (or simply interacting with) 'Thing' a Moral Failing and Supporting "____ Illegal Thing" Happening to Real People. In this case, not calling for complete censorship of all media they deem 'problematic' is "Pedo Supporting" behaviour.

Some of the anti greatest hits being; age gaps at ALL is pedo supporting, being short and dating a tall person is pedo supporting, being childhood friends before dating is pedo supporting, etc etc.

From my unfortunate dealings with Anti Culture, and relatedness to Antifa is coincidentally and not a core part of their believes nor any part of their goals, they are predominantly pro censorship and pro christofacism with a huge sprinkling of 'Woke' performative talk and very little irl activism.

The often will share REAL CSEM around their groups while harassing CSA survivors. Often the are more interested in reporting people for writing fanfiction they find distasteful about their Blorbos (this includes anything from underage shit to writing them with the "wrong" fictional age appropriate/gendered partner) than doing what they can to help irl victims.

Do some antis actually try and do good for victims of CSA, CSE, abuse, and human trafficking, of course! But usually that is separate from anti movements themselves.

Like I fucking hate stupid fandom discourse bs but antis take it too a whole new level of Way Too Online.

I get that but the usernames are "antifaspiderman" and "antifamutantdown", so what's the "fa" in that case? Fandom? And why... would anyone think it's anything other than antifascist?

I know what antis are, y'all, they spent years harassing my family, sending my daughter anon messages telling her I'm abusive and lesbophobic, telling my wife she's ugly and not queer and a lot of other awful things bc I'm against censorship.

But those usernames say "antifa," and if that's not what they intend, then that's ... very silly.

The two things are, probably not connected?  The antifa in their usernames maybe referring to antifacist but the stuff they’re discussing, about Neil Gaiman being an ‘anti anti’ and their whole anti mindset/culture is, unconnected to their usernames.

Yeah, that's my point.

You can't be an antifascist and be pro-censorship-of-fiction. The two are diametrically opposed and totally incompatible.

a customer just came in and ordered a flat white with six (6) shots in it. for clarity thats like.. a full cup of espresso with maybe an inch of milk sitting on top. this mf is trying to meet the hat man

same guy came back yesterday. same order. i said, "ah, entering the shadowlands again, i see." he asked me to explain this remark to him. i did so to the best of my ability. he returned again today and said, "i'll have another shadowlands please, extra hot." think i might have started something

@thebibliosphere 8 hours left and we’re losing!

To Supernatural, of all things.

"Of all things" this is tumblr. Also, what even is Hunger Pains?

I also beat Dronkey on the Shrek website by a much slimmer margin. Something being popular mainstream media doesn’t necessarily interest my readers.

And Hunger Pangs, is my original multi-time bestselling queer (bi4bi4bi) paranormal romance novel featuring a deaf, disabled werewolf, a mad scientist ND vampire and an all powerful [redacted] who save the world against dark forces with the power of science and magic, set in an industrial gaslamp fantasy world with enchanted forests, gothic castles and a smidge of coal dust.

It’s a polyamorous series but the triad doesn’t become official until the second book which I’m work on finishing right now.

It comes with two heat ratings—a high heat edition for those who like reading explicit sex scenes, and a medium heat edition where the sex scenes fade to black or have been swapped for different relationship centric content.

There’s more info in my pinned post if anyone’s interested.

Well shit, Henry Jenkins, out here in 1997 dropping truth bombs

Oh hey I need this for a research paper I'm writing, thank you!

i mean he had been out here since 1988 dropping such bombs:

Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.  

there are even some earlier works in fan studies but that’s what i have ready to hand. 

Henry's been amazing for a long time.

I’m watching The Big Bang Theory in its natural setting—playing in the background of a hot spiral room—and I can say within that specific context, it is a very charming show. Like the saltine crackers of media.

Hospital room. A hospital room. Not a hot spiral room. What a nightmare idea. And you all rolled with that idea. The idea that I was sitting in a hot sweltering spiral prison watching the Big Bang theory is actually what hell is. Bazinga.

big bang theory's natural setting:

They removed benches from subway to prevent homeless people sleeping on it

gaslighting someone by saying they're too smart to be gaslit so you're not gaslighting them

this would work on me

No it wouldn’t. You’re too smart.

Posts like this are like modern day fables. Yeah ill reblog this funny little exchange, but next time someone says this to me ill remember this post and hear kill bill sirens.

evil infodumping where you just tell lies

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