elefantnap

Me: "Idk man, I've just been feeling kinda exhausted and burned out with my creative endeavors. It's taking a toll on me emotionally."

Matthew Hopkins, 1654 Witch-Finder General: "You know what I think the problem is?"

watching the Thing and like

it’s a mound of flesh, right? and it keeps forming eyes capable of looking at you. and the longer you look at it, the more openings appear. and at first the openings are full of what looks like legs, which move aside to reveal a flower, which unfurls to reveal a fleshy orifice studded with teeth moving towards you with great power and longing.

and it’s like, the central tragedy is that none of these men know each other on a level intimate enough to see through the imitation. when keith david turns and asks them how they’re supposed to tell if he’s an imitation or not, none of them can honestly say that they know him well enough to test how deeply it runs; he may as well be a stranger to him. when baby slut kurt russell mentions that the long johns could be anybody’s, it means that he isn’t able to tell whose they are by taking a good long whiff of the crotch and armpits. the secret weapon that could have successfully circumvented the thing was the time these men should have spent intimately exploring each other’s bodies. I have a job interview tomorrow. I need to get this out of my system now.

having by now gotten the job for which I was interviewing, I think where I was going with this was that, the constantly moving shifting expanding de-categorizing of the Thing is its own horror vehicle by virtue of the fact that every other body in that film very much wants to be its own discrete category, unknowable and untouchable to the other bodies around it. and the more you look at the Thing, the more there is of it; the more openings it has, the more eyes it will form for which to see you, the more limbs it will form for which to touch and know you. and these men do not want to touch and see and know each other. they do not want the joyous erotic sound of each other's stevie wonder albums to enter their ears. they do not want the joint that touches their lips to touch the lips of another man. the first and only horror of the Thing is its drive to touch and know and queer the coherent category that is the human body. I will be washing dishes in the back of a bakery while blasting mongolian throat singing if anyone has any further questions.

n___n

This is the artist Chris Burden’s Metropolis II from 2011. It is on display at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) courtesy of the Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Foundation, and is located on the ground floor of the Broad building. I have posted it because this work simply brings me joy, and seems to do so for those of every age and background. If I can spread a little joy, then I am pleased to do so.

You may think it cruel but when a white witch pisses me off I go through her etsy listings for native bird feathers and forward it to fish and wildlife services

Keep sweating girl the game wardens on his way

i keep sending my friend blurry pics and he grows increasingly frustrated whenever he screenshots it back to me and i tell him he needs to fix his phone quality

the idea that your friends won't like you if you're too weird is wrong you just need better friends for example one time I told a friend whenever I was losing my mind I laid down on the floor under my desk and stared at it until I was better and next time she visited me she taped a bag of salami snacks to the underside of my desk with a message saying "going insane all by yourself, handsome?" which I only saw months later when I had a breakdown. that's friendship.

new evidence shows dogs have "intuitive mastery of the bessemer steelmaking process", backing up centuries of anecdotes by blacksmiths in which a dog would whine and bark in distress when pig iron was heated without sufficient access to air in their presence. "It's possible Bessemer or others who claimed to have invented the process were inspired by the behavior of dogs, or that dogs communicated the details of this vital industrial process to them by unknown means", paper concludes

Welsh actor Ray Milland.

Washington Post, May 18, 2023:

QORQANYA, Syria — U.S. military officials are walking back claims that a recent strike in Syria killed an influential al-Qaeda figure, following assertions by the dead man’s family that he had no ties to terrorists but was a father of 10 tending to his sheep when he was slain by an American missile.

Lotfi Hassan Misto, 56, whose family identified him as the victim of a Hellfire missile attack on May 3, was a former bricklayer who lived quietly in this town in northwest Syria, according to interviews with his brother, son and six others who knew him. They described a kind, hard-working man whose “whole life was spent poor.”

The operation was overseen by U.S. Central Command, which claimed hours after the strike, without citing evidence or naming a suspect, that the Predator drone strike had targeted a “senior Al Qaeda leader.” But now there is doubt inside the Pentagon about who was killed, two U.S. defense officials told The Washington Post.

“We are no longer confident we killed a senior AQ official,” one official said. The other, offering a slightly different view, said “though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.” Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss preliminary determinations of an ongoing investigation into the incident.

In the weeks since the attack, U.S. military officials have refused to identify publicly who their target was, how the apparent error occurred, whether a legitimate terrorist leader escaped and why some in the Pentagon maintain Misto was a member of al-Qaeda despite his family’s denials.

In a statement, Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for Central Command, said officials are aware of reports of a civilian casualty and continue to assess the outcome...

Last year, facing accusations the military had covered up past instances of errant airstrikes that killed innocent people, the Biden administration vowed to take steps it said would reduce such risks while promising greater transparency when unintended killings do occur. Investigations conducted by multiple media outlets, including The Post, have revealed how flawed intelligence and what the military calls “confirmation bias” have led to disaster, including a 2021 strike during the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan that officials initially declared had resulted in the death of a suicide bomber but instead killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children.

The Post provided four terrorism experts with details about Misto and where he lived, and asked them to survey online discussions among jihadists after the strike for any talk about the attack in Qorqanya. None found references indicating Misto was affiliated with a terrorist group. And each said it would be very unusual for al-Qaeda — particularly a senior leader — to operate in any meaningful way near the area, which is controlled by a rival group that split from the organization years ago and now considers al-Qaeda an adversary...

In 4th grade, my bff was in a death feud over chess with a boy in our class but instead of competing like normal people they decided that the best way to determine who was chess master was for each of them to select one of the two biggest idiots in class and teach them to play chess, My Fair Lady style, and see whose idiot won. We are just now, 22 years later, grappling with the moral implications of this exercise.

Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment (I&M), The Hague, The Netherlands, 2014.

Myphoto

Imported from a thread I’m currently in on /tg/:

There’s different kinds of garbage, and it varies both by year and by which board you visit.

/tg/ was better before idiots invented “X-General” culture. (We had idiots in 2010, too, but they were different kinds of idiots)

And I’ll tell you what fucking changed:

TG became more of a spectator sport.

I’m not blaming Critical Role (because the problem existed before CR) but I’m also not NOT blaming critical role.

The  absolutely biggest leap in quality between boards is this: Whether the board is for consumers, or if it is for producers AND consumers.

The  more producers a board has, the better the board culture. /sci/, /ck/,  /tg/ are all better than /vg/ and it’s not because video games are bad  (I love video games) it’s because the discussion of “which consumption  product is superior” is straight garbage.

A conversation between two producers, even if they are GMs for two vastly different campaigns,  can be interesting. We didn’t have generals, because we didn’t NEED  generals, because a WoD storyteller and a D&D DM can have a useful  conversation about how to make an old mansion creepy to explore for  their players. Hell, I used to read the Warhammer threads despite never  playing warhammer because at least they were painting, and coming up  with lore for their chapter or tribe.

And you could have  interesting talks between producer and consumer - because the producer  brought something interesting to the table, or because the consumers could talk about what/why they enjoyed some things more than other.

But  there is very little value to be found in a consumer/consumer talk -  and if you are so consumer you don’t even make characters to play  because you’re just here because of your favorite TV show? Absolute  trash, you have nothing of value to say to me.

Generals are a purely consumer phenomenon. You have them to isolate  consumer posts - because consumer posts give no value to anybody else.

“I am angry. Angry about sigmarines” -> please fuck off to your containment general.

“Check  my technique for painting chapter symbols on power armor” -> useful  to painters in every game that paints symbols on surfaces.

“I am angry. Angry about SJWs in 5E D&D” -> please fuck off to your containment general.

“How do I challenge high level characters?” -> Also a relevant thread for Exalted ST’s and high-point Hero System GMs.

Producer  threads and consumer threads are fundamentally different, and the  biggest change in this boards character has been as the consumers,  especially no-game consumers, have crowded out the producers.

There’s more to it but this was the most important part.