Just misread Themes (as in overarching literary motifs) as Themmes (as in multiple nonbinary French people)
So I bought a couple belts that turned out to be just a couple of inches too tight-- they kept my pants up, but they were uncomfortable.
I got them at a thrift shop, so there wasn't a lot of choice regarding the size-- but also they were like a dollar each, so I figured I could play around with upsizing and if they didn't survive I wouldn't be too put out about it.
Since they were the same size and nearly the exact same style (I'm betting they were both from the same person), they make for a good before/after set.
I cut it into pieces, sewed the ends, added grommets, and laced them back together with paracord.
You can see the extra length the laces gave me, and it's a lot more comfortable to wear. The knots are a bit lumpy, though-- I'll need to experiment with ways to secure the laces that will lay flat.
I also had some extra grommets left in the kit I bought (it came to all of $3 with a coupon), I went ahead and repaired another belt, too.
In my D&D group I'm best known for what we've decided to call Stick Technology.
- Is that body actually dead? Poke it with a stick.
- Object obviously cursed to damage whoever touches it? Not if I pick it up with what amounts to oversized chopsticks and put it in a sack!
- Is that weird tile actually a pressure plate? Better poke it from a distance to make sure.
Stick Technology also applies to other non-stick tools:
- I might not pass that strength check, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a rope and a simple pulley.
- Is it safe to cross that barrier? The pebble I just vaporized by tossing it through says no.
It isn't meant to be a running gag or me trying to get one over on the DM or whatever-- it just so happens that all the puzzles that DM throws at me that he expects to require super difficult involved solutions usually can be solved in the ten seconds it'll take me to find a stick.
(To be fair, this is balanced by completely mundane non-puzzles that somehow wind up taking multiple hours of logistical negotiation when the answer is usually something like "ask the dude next to the door to let you in")
My 45-year-old coworker came up to my desk and said. "You seem like you were into the punk/grunge/goth scene in high school, right? So I thought you'd like this video."
Which very much pleased me-- she got me in one, even if it wasn't exactly accurate.
See, in high school:
- I was too broke, exhausted, overwhelmed, and depressed to figure out an aesthetic, let alone cultivate it
- Like, my clothes were almost entirely hand-me-downs, gifts, or bought by my mom. I wouldn't know an accessory if it bit me. I did wear things with holes in them, but not on purpose
- I didn't actually know what punk or grunge were or what they looked like. The music from those scenes that made it through to me were purely incidental
- I really did like the goth look, though. And attended the school poetry club (most of whom turned out to be some flavor of queer long after we left high school)
- (including me)
- (I also didn't know that there were flavors of queer aside from Gay and Bi at the time)
Now, though?
I still don't fit neatly into one particular scene, but the elements are visible there. How versatile/practical/mendable clothing is weighs about as heavily in my decision-making process as the way it looks, and I tend to wear it until it can't be mended to practical use anymore. A lot of black, though also a lot of solid colors in jewel tones, enough layers to keep me warm without getting in my way.
And weird socks.
I tried downloading some data for an ecological map off a government website.
I was expecting a .pdf, maybe a .doc file. Maybe even a .xlsx if we're feeling spicy.
What the heck kind of file is this?
As someone who gets cold easily, and whose alertness and ability to focus dissolve into nothing when I'm cold, I want to know: just how much processing power do we actually use staying warm?
Science side of Tumblr, any ideas?
From my personal experience, feeling warm makes a huge difference in my ability to do sedentary work (whether its paperwork or painting.) The room I work in is very cold in winter, around 55F/ 13C. Given that we primarily heat with a woodstove, the rest of the house is usually comfortable, but this particular room gets chilly. I find a very substantial help to have my feet warm; if I dress in a comfy sweater and have my feet on a warm surface I’ll be fine. If you are seated in one place while you are working, try putting a heating pad where you can rest your feet on it and see if that helps your overall focus and alertness.
I am reminded of this
apparently women are mentally affected far more by being cold than men ar
Oh hey! Great find, Thank you!
As someone who gets cold easily, and whose alertness and ability to focus dissolve into nothing when I'm cold, I want to know: just how much processing power do we actually use staying warm?
Science side of Tumblr, any ideas?
Listen, I've never been one for Hot Topic Edgy Slogans on my clothes.
But if I was, I would absolutely get this on a shirt
It's a line from a very important climactic turning point in the story.
But also everything about this looks like the 19th century human incarnation of Grumpy Cat
I fucking love sneaky pun names.
Names that make sense enough in context, but then you learn that they're actually cribbed from an existing term (preferably an obscure one), and that the term itself adds some fun meta about the character in hindsight.
For example: Gul Dukat
And his (probable?) namesake, the Gold Ducat
I've talked to some friends about this before. It's a lot more obvious when living in a culture that still refers to ducats in certain contexts. (like danish) We even spell it dukat. These days it's mostly mentioned in pirate focused storytelling.
More so, "gul" means yellow in danish, so it adds a layer of something trying to look valuable, but is really just a worthless piece of junk.
I've picked up a lot of weird skills from a lot of weird jobs, but I really did not think that knowing the proper way to hand-dig a grave would be quite this useful outside the workplace.
For less serial-killery context:
I used to work at a cemetery. Most of the graves I dug were made with an excavator, but sometimes a family wants to inter cremated remains, and those holes are too small for heavy machinery.
Also:
When I find dead animals in my yard (it happens; between the feral cat population and my dog, life can be hard for rodents etc), I bury them right away. For the smell, for sanitation reasons, because I don't want my dog getting into it, because the bodies will replenish the soil, etc.
But sometimes I find bodies a bit after the fact. In the case of one unfortunate squirrel, it had been more or less skeletonized by the time I got to it. Yesterday's corpse was far enough along that I needed a box.
Which meant I needed a box-shaped hole with straight vertical walls that was deep enough to make the carrion uninteresting to the local wildlife, plus some in-tact sod so it doesn't look like I just buried a body in my front yard.
Which happens to be a lot of the skill set you pick up preparing a grave for cremated remains.
I've picked up a lot of weird skills from a lot of weird jobs, but I really did not think that knowing the proper way to hand-dig a grave would be quite this useful outside the workplace.
I wish there was a way to express "I was really enjoying this fic, but kidfic hurts my soul (in the squick-bordering-on-trigger sense), so the fact that you've
1) significantly aged down the canon young adult character,
2) given them multiple younger siblings, and
3) made the collective clutch the central focus of the story a good twenty chapters in
is doing damage to my psyche. I wish you success with the rest of this fic, but at this point it's not for me."
Without it being discouraging to the writer.
The correct path (or at least, the one I'm taking) is to stop reading without a comment.
I fucking love sneaky pun names.
Names that make sense enough in context, but then you learn that they're actually cribbed from an existing term (preferably an obscure one), and that the term itself adds some fun meta about the character in hindsight.
For example: Gul Dukat
And his (probable?) namesake, the Gold Ducat
I had a very vivid mental image of the various characters from The Marvelous Mrs Maisel doing Marc Antony's monologue from Julius Caesar. And it was a fascinating mental exercise because each one of those characters absolutely bleeds irony, but it really hit home to me the different flavors that irony can take.
(This, of course, isn't news to anyone who's seen the Southern Marc Antony video.)
"But Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man" takes on completely different feels when it's spoken archly by a socialite still holding her tea cup, or an overbearing housewife, or a scrappy bartender, or a stand-up comic halfway through a good rant. And each one of them brings a very particular body language and rhythm to those same words.
So of course it turned into a writing exercise-- how would I have various other characters deliver that same line?
- "--But Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious." He shrugged, his attention on lighting the pipe bowl. Abruptly a spark caught, for an instant it reflected dangerously in his eyes as he sucked at the reed. Satisfied, he sat back in his chair, watching from beneath hooded eyes. "And Brutus is an honorable man."
- "But Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious," she recited, as dutifully as her evening prayer, and just as empty.
- "And Brutus--" She smiled, brittle and painfully wide, but for all her effort it didn't reach her eyes. "Brutus is an honorable man."
Anyone know some good garashir fics?
There’s so many amazing garashir fics out there that I don’t even know how to narrow it down to a reasonable number of recs! But anyway here is one of my faves that happened to cross my mind today: The Play’s the Thing by M_Moonshade
For a guy who's spent most of his career in computers, you'd think my dad would be less homophobic.
If anything, searching frantically for one fucking male/male cable in the bin of male/female cables one too many times might just turn me heterophobic. I'm amazed it hadn't happened to him yet.
My mother bought me some sturdy wrap-around shapewear (so basically a corset)
I've actually been wearing it off and on-- because it's surprisingly effective as back support that I can wear under my clothes (so basically a corset)
To my understanding, Homestuck is like pi: it's so long and so unbelievably random eclectic that you can find literally anything referenced inside it if you have sufficient time and a tenuous enough grip on your sanity.