Also hey I forgot to draw this earlier, but yesterday I saw a goth who was literally smoking like this:

Like I can't properly even recreate it because I don't draw that kind of graphic novels, but the dude had a whole Frank Miller byronic hero STANCE going on. And I don't mean this in any mean way, I genuinely love it when people are theatrical just for the sake of being dramatic, it gives life some flair and colour. Unfortunately it was a very lovely sunny spring day in the early may, so the poor fellow had to his brooding smoke in an environment like this:

Accuse me of bourgeoise, but I miss art nouveau architecture. I think it's kind of sad that buildings are deliberately designed to be plain and dull to be easy to maintain, because it's cheaper to make something that's ugly from the start and will remain so indefinitely, than to create something beautiful that's going to look really bleak when neglected and dilapitated. It's like deliberately raising your children to expect nothing but neglect so they won't be disappointed when nobody ever loves them.

I also believe that the maintenance of these beautiful buildings should be paid from public funding, and the government should be able to hire every single person with an autistic passion for scraping paint or polishing little brass flowers to do that full time with good hours, benfits and pensions, and paying them enough to support a whole family with a stay-at-home spouse.

I think it would be funny to learn a new language but specifically learn to speak it in an extravagantly formal way. Like people can't even tell you to just fucking talk normal because they're aware you literally don't know how. So they just have to put up with you saying shit like "you have offended me and your insult will not be easily forgiven", and "ah, forgive my previous anger. I was mistaken, and too hasty in judgement. We are no longer enemies."

Within the span of 15 minutes, over confusion about a bus ticket.

Imagine if you had the most spectacular tits in the world - like if you randomly googled "most beautiful titties in the world", you'd know there would be a picture of you showing up - and showing them to everyone had no negative consequences. Best case scenario you get someone hot into agreeing they must fuck you, and at the very worst you get a mildly confused and flustered "oh wow, you sure are very beautiful. I'm not interested, but I am flattered. Thank you for this lovely sight, you made my day nonetheless."

Of course you'd be flashing them at everyone and everything. And that's probably how life is like for a peacock.

What are your favourite animals that sound like the most absolute medieval bestiary beasts, but are actually 100% just fucking real? I'll start, with the hammerhead worm:

'tis a beast that is shaped like a hammer, but which moves like a worm. Wherever it is an invasive species, it must be killed on sight, as it will eat all normal worms and ruin the soil. They eat each other also, if nothing else is available. Do not cut one in half, as it only becomes two hammerhead worms. Every particle of it must be destroyed, lest it regrows itself from the remnants. To do so, kill it with fire or dissolve it in salt and vinegar.

Well, I am proud to announce that this year I did not fail my new year's resolution until May. However, if I adjust the "one book per month" resolution to "12 books in 12 months", and both read one book and finish last month's book this month, I'm still on track.

Änglamark water resistant sun stick. Not sure whether they sell it anywhere else in the world outside of nordics.

One thing that can save you from so much needless bickering online is always taking an "innocent until proven guilty" approach about whether or not somebody is an idiot. If something that a person you don't know is doing, thinking, or saying makes no sense to you, it's better to assume that your initial assumption of what's going on is wrong, and that there's some additional element in this that you're unaware of, and what they're up to makes sense in context.

Let's say that someone posts on tumblr: "oh great, there's a fucking crocodile on the backyard. Hope it goes away before I have to let the dog out." Talking about it in a very casual way like that's just shit that happens sometimes.

And this is read by someone whose first assumption is that everyone online comes from a similar background and cultural context as they do, and thinks: Well, if there was a crocodile on my backyard, that would mean there's something horribly wrong, and I would be unsettled indeed. As this person does not seem appropriately freaked out about this, then clearly they must be an idiot.

And so they swoop in to scold the OP for being so casual about something that must clearly be a dire situation, an apex predator like a crocodile roaming around is an emergency worse than any regular invasive species, they must immediately find out where that creature escaped from and not let it out of their sight!

And meanwhile, the original OP argues that every single step of that plan is insane and they are not going to do that. And they continue arguing like this, because one is correct in their stance that an escaped crocodile in an environment it doesn't belong in is a dire and serious situation, and the other one is correct in their stanse that it would be ridiculous to call animal control over simply seeing a wild animal naturally chilling in its native environment.

And this whole argument could have been avoided if the responder had taken the alternative route: Concluding that since behaving the way OP does in their own environment would be idiotic, then clearly they must be living somewhere else.

And a simple question of "are crocodiles normal where you're from?" could have settled this immediately, as the two would have immediately come to learn that one of them is from Australia and the other one is from France.

I don't know, but "is mayday like the European equivalent of The Purge" is a funny thought.

You probably won't be harmed. If the weather is good, then people are cheery, and if the weather is bad, the people won't be there.

I made this for some reason.

Random worldbuilding for nothing in particular: Dwarvish last names.

When dwarvish workers and artisans first came to human cities for work, humans soon noticed that all dwarves seem to have last names ending in the same suffix. Soon enough they put together that these names don't go by families, but by occupation. Blacksmith is a blacksmith, Goldsmith is a goldsmith, a mason is called Stonesmith and carpenter a Woodsmith. And a horse breeder is called a Horsesmith.

(While humans would classify dwarf horses as ponies, dwarvish languages have no separate words for "horse" and "pony" and insist that dwarf horses are called horses since the way humans say "pony" seems degoratory.)

The word that humans previously assumed meant "smith" is simply the dwarvish blanket term for "one who works with their hands to manufacture/maintain." Humans originally started referring to any random dwarf they don't know with simply the suffix in a dismissive "they all have the same names anyway" sort of way, but in dwarfish society addressing someone you don't know in this way, "hey you, Craftsman" is considered perfectly respectable.

Once more dwarf society began to pour into human lands, humans noticed two other types of last names: -Trader, and -Commander. Traders are sellers, peddlers, merchants of all sorts, and while first encountering Silktraders, Goldtraders and Spicetraders might lead one to think that they are a class above -Smiths, they are not. Any street hawker, peddler or common grocer is just as much a -Trader as a merchant of kings is.

There are dwarfish jokes about how a farmer who grows vegetables and then goes to the town to sell them is a Turnip-smith at home but a Turnip-trader in the city, but getting the suffixes mixed up is a serious offense. Calling a dwarvish doctor a "seller of healing" instead of a "crafter of healing" would imply that they do their occupation for financial profit instead of a sacred calling, and is a stab-worthy insult. And they won't stitch you up afterwards.

The -Commander class is as one would expect, for leaders and commanders. The chief of a village or head of a clan is often known as "[clan name] commander", but more often it is the title for military officers and government officials. A centurion is called Hundred-Commander, a higher officer is a Thousand-Commander. The master of a spy network is "Commander of Secrets" and the national chief accountant is "Commander of Coin".

While dwarf societies are technically speaking autocracies with a single leader, humans have yet to reach an agreement about how to translate the leader's title. Most settle for "chief", as king/queen/emperor/empress would require knowing the current ruler's gender, and dwarves consider such information a matter of extreme privacy. The official dwarvish title of the ruler is "folksmith", "one who works with their hands to make/maintain a people".

This is also how my mom describes my dad while admitting that her children had a shitty childhood.

You ever suddenly connect two things from your childhood and it suddenly clicks what your parents meant to do when they did something completely different instead?

I got trained pretty early on to not show fear. I'm aware now that what my parents probably meant to do was to reassure me that whatever I was afraid of is no reason to be scared, and I should feel safe instead, but what I gathered from it was "stop showing this emotion that they don't like to see on you", and since the praise for being So Good About It was immediate, that got immediate affirmation. Good kids show no sign of being scared.

And then once I got older and started encountering situations that were above toddler-levels of scary, adults started to suspect that I don't often seem to understand the gravity of whatever situation is going on. Like I remember several occasions of adults stressing it to me multiple times that I need to be careful, do something, not do something, etc, and had me repeat the possible consequences back to them, and still not seeming convinced that I understood the gravity of the situation.

And just now it clicked. I finally understand what they thought was wrong with me. They didn't think I looked appropriately scared for the seriousness of the situation. I hadn't been expected to never show fear. They had wanted me to only express fear in situations where they thought there's reason to fear.