everyone stop scrolling for a second and take a hand snail break i cannot express the amount of joy it brings
at a bar in lower manhattan and they’re playing catholic choral music. on the wall there’s a giant mural of gregorian monks on a raft
the only other people in here are talking quietly about japanese verb conjugation. there are many statues of gargoyles and gnomes
reading reviews while quietly sipping my drink. i feel like i’m in an alternate dimension. it’s called Burp Castle btw
probably goes without saying this is now my favorite bar in the world
new yorkers are so fucking spoiled it is unbelievable
they just don’t do any classic homophobic children moments like this anymore
pruane2
There was really no winning that one
Achievement Unlocked:
Not Quite What I'd Hoped
Get your meat sucked
i dont know what this means but it has to mean something.
(desc in alt)
The Swedish warship Vasa. It sank in 1628 less than a mile into its maiden voyage and was recovered from the sea floor after 333 years almost completely intact. Now housed at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, is the world's best preserved 17th century ship
Kinda funny that the best example of its kind is the one that sucked as bad as it possibly could.
Oh, it was *ridiculously* bad. That initial post says “from the sea floor,” but that implies it made it out to sea.
So Gustavus Adolphus is king when Sweden is fighting wars all over the place. They need more ships, so he commissions four of them, two big and two small. The Vasa was supposed to be one of the smaller ones. Emphasis on “supposed to be.” Because Gustavus Adolphus keeps ordering changes. Like, add twelve more feet to the keel! Pile on the carvings! Add another gun deck for the hell of it! It got even worse when Sweden lost ten ships in a huge storm, so now they needed the Vasa *yesterday*. But Gustavus Adolphus is STILL demanding changes. So the shipwright scales up the measurements to try and make things work. Which might have worked, except the ship was being worked on by Swedes, Finns, Danes, Sami people. Communication is hard enough, but also it turns out that there are two different types of rulers being used by the workers. One is in Swedish feet and one is in Amsterdam feet. Amsterdam feet were only eleven inches long. (There’s a joke there I’m too tired to make.)
Anyway, because of that, the port side is heavier.
Okay, so you have to imagine the Vasa, with its hastily-scaled-up measurements, its *seven hundred* decorative carvings, its sixty-fucking-four bronze cannons. It’s a goddamn mess, AND its center of gravity is way off. Except that’s not something you could measure with instruments at the time. What you’d do is, you’d put it in the water, then have a bunch of guys run back and forth from port to starboard a bunch of times to test if it’ll tip over.
The guys who did this test could only do it three times before the Vasa was like, “I think I’m gonna hurl,” and almost tipped over right then and there.
Everybody there is like, “… uh-oh.” The admiral conducting the test just sighs and goes, “If only the king were here,” because Gustavus Adolphus wasn’t, and maybe if he had been he would have seen they fucked up and decided to pull the plug. Oh, and those bronze cannons? They weighed down the ship so much that the lowest row of gun portals was almost at the waterline.
But. Sweden needed the Vasa. It needed it to go to war. At that time, it was the most expensive thing Sweden ever spent money on.
SO. It’s August 10th, 1628. It’s the port in Stockholm. There’s music, there’s festivities, everybody’s showed up to see the Vasa off. A few ships tug the Vasa out to the current, let her loose, she drops four of her sails, and off she goes.
For about thirteen hundred meters.
Then, a light breeze blows. When I say light, I mean light. But that was all it took. The Vasa flops to port, water flows into the gun portals, and down it goes, still in the fucking harbor with its masts sticking out of the water.
So when that original post says “recovered from the sea floor,” it means brought up from the *actual harbor*. Like, within sight of the docks.
Oh, oh! But cool story about all this. Remember those sixty-four bronze cannons? Yeah, Sweden kind of needed those back, so about three decades later in 1658, the Swedes go down and retrieve almost all of them with a diving bell. Which is kind of badass.
looks thru a glory hole & sees a train coming straight towards me
Hey, y’all remember in P1 when GLaDOS’ Morality Core fell off and then she laughed and said “good news” and her whole tone of voice just switched and it was super chilling and a little gay and it absolutely fucking reverberated down your spine?
Good times.
This reminds me of a post that compared her to HAL 9000. I think the core of it was “the horror of HAL was the moment the humanity drops and you go ‘oh shit it is a cold machine’. The horror of GLaDOS is when the humanity APPEARS and you go ‘oh this it not just a cold machine but a spiteful human’”
In the inn four meads deep and the gnome starts looking like a maiden
My 11-year-old couldn't decide what flavor of ramen to make, so I told her to flip a coin. Heads for spicy chicken, tails for beef.
Taking my advice, she flipped a penny, and when it landed on tails she said "Wait! Wait! I did it wrong!"
I told her that she did it right, because the real reason for flipping a coin isn't to let fate decide for you, but because when the coin is in the air, you will suddenly realize what you wanted in the first place.
I'm sure there's a life lesson there somewhere…
But honestly, I have never known her to pass up spicy chicken.
Update: Yesterday, her brother asked her if she wanted a corn dog and she couldn't decide, so again I told her to flip a coin. She did so, and without even looking which way it landed, she snatched the penny up and said "I want a corn dog".
for the entire time Baldur's Gate 3 has been out, not to mention early access, I have not seen a single correctly colored tiefling, so I suppose I have to do everything by myself around here.
alton brown: contestants, you have precisely one hour to assemble a dish using only one ingredient (he takes the cover off of the sliver platter to reveal a sad looking bag of pepperoni)
bald chef jeff: ok, so right away i’m thinkin pepperoni pizza. so i go to the pantry to get myself some bread, but there was a rabid dog waiting for me within, so i instantly closed the door before i was mauled and killed by this rabid dog. so my second idea was to assemble a favorite of mine: a pepperoni geyser. now in order to make a pepperoni geyser, you need a floating point unit and a pepperoni propulsion device, which can easily be assembled by [REDACTED BY US GOVERNMENT] so right away i grab the ice cream machine and [REDACTED BY US GOVERNMENT] and that should do it.
alton brown: 3, 2, 1! time’s up, chefs! chef dianne, what have you prepared for us today?
chef dianne: well today, i have prepared for you a dish we always used to make back home in louisana. it’s called “stacks”
(it’s just a stack of pepperoni)
alton brown: revered food columnist Vito Scaletta, what do you think of the “stacks” chef dianne cheyenne has prepared for you today?
revered food columnist vito scaletta, without taking a bite of his stack: i like it. it brings me back to my poker days, makes me feel like i’m winnin’ big!
