Truth, Beauty, Justice

oh youre a nasty computer girl, when im through with you, youre gonna need your a full factory reset on your BIOS. open up your firewall, sysadmin is about to install 1001 free cursors/emoticons from a banner ad

normies flirting with a computer girl: ouhhh wires... cards... da eroticism of da machine... geniuses flirting with a computer girl: Open your mouth for BonziBuddy you nasty bitch

Character concepts that would be funny:

Some dude who's known around the city for being a complete public menace, obnoxiously loud, zero regard for traffic rules, laws in general, or basic manners. Nobody knows where he lives or what the hell he does for a living, he seems to always be wandering around the streets but as random as his clothes are, they always seem to be at least somewhat neat and the local homeless population doesn't know him and as far as they know he's not one of them.

Everybody knows he'll steal your shit. That's what he's known for, and what people warn each other about. Shoplifting, snatching your unattended coat off the back of a park bench, taking the fries from a fast food order that wasn't his. But somehow, only ever food or clothes. You forget your phone next to your kebab while going to a diner bathroom, and you come back to find that your phone is still there but your kebab is gone. And so is that guy.

Nobody knows what this guy's deal is. Well, his deal is that he is a shapeshifter. His true form is a seagull. He doesn't give a shit about integrating into human society, he just got sick of being harrassed by dogs while trying to eat from the trash can one day and decided to shapeshift to the biggest animal he could think of - having never been outside of the city, that would be human. Which naturally freaked out the dog, which was the goal in the first place.

And it then turned out that being around the city as a human had some other unexpected perks, which were convenient. Like cars swerving around him when he's standing in the middle of the road. He shrieks at them anyway, just to keep safe. He's learned some curse words but has no interest in learning any more of human language.

One of the most fun character concepts that I've had that I've never been able to fit into anything is The Most Appropriate Socialite Lady. Nobody dislikes her, but she is, indeed, very Appropriate, always seeming to do everything precisely to social etiquette, even according to social rules that nobody else knew were a thing. If there is a protocol to how to behave or respond in any given situation, no matter how obscure or how long ago it was that this was written down in some Refined Society Etiquette Book, she'll know it. So she is a bit old-fashioned sometimes, but not in a regressive way.

Every time there's a situation where nobody actually knows what the right way to respond would be, they quietly glance at her, because either she knows exactly how to handle this, or if the situation truly is without precedent, her educated guess of what should be done must be the right one. Someone might even write it down for a future etiquette book, of how This Most Polite Well-Mannered Lady responded to this awkward situation.

She doesn't judge people, and is never rude about people breaking Good Manner Rules on purpose (as pointing out someone doing so would be impolite), but the way she seems genuinely surprised and confused whenever someone breaks the protocol that nobody else might even been aware of makes people feel self-conscious or awkward sometimes. And she politely pretends to not notice that. She is very kind, very sweet, but also extremely Appropriate.

So even if this isn't a Victorian style gentlemanly "fine ladies are fragile and must be sheltered from the world"-style society by default, people still feel the need to behave well and be on their best formal behaviour around her, not out of fear of judgement but because she genuinely is that way and nobody wants to upset her. And if someone who doesn't give a shit about protocols upsets her on purpose by deliberately doing something that's fucking rude, they'll be discreetly moved to a different location before getting the shit beat out of them because fuck you for upsetting her.

The thing is, she's actually just autistic as hell. She originally started reading up on social etiquette as a way of masking, but it became a special interest for her, and she isn't just thrilled to teach you how to properly fold a napkin to help you better fit in to the Refined Society, but because she fucking loves infodumping. She's not trying to set herself apart, gatekeep, judge others or show off how she's better than you (like many others of her background would), she just genuinely enjoys having explicitly and clearly written rules and instructions on how to behave in society.

Also the tactful and graceful way in which she doesn't pay notice to veiled insults, or people accidentally saying something insulting to her, isn't always an act. A lot of the time she genuinely just does not notice.

self-flagellation and self-bullying are all bad motivators for change BTW. it can be hard to escape from a spiral but genuinely u have to be nice to urself or nothing will change

you have to take care of yourself and not punch yourself down because you feel like you 'deserve it'. if you feel like the world is against you, you should at least be on your own side while you work through things.

anyone else

ADHD

Add onto this the constant feeling of being overwhelmed. You didn’t get the laundry done yesterday and now there are piles of it. You forgot to take out the chicken so now you’re trying to throw something together for dinner at 9 pm. You forgot to order your prescription and now it’s the weekend so you’re going to go without for 2 days. There are dishes in the sink. You forgot to plug in the vacuum so now you can’t even clean the floor. There are hobbies you can’t do because you’ve convinced yourself you aren’t allowed to experience fun until the work is finished. Slowly, it all builds and you are left sitting there with so much to do and the inability to organize tasks leaves you paralyzed and lost amid everything! Honestly, you fucking break down crying because you feel like an incomplete person incapable of caring for themselves.

God invented winter so girls could exchange body heat

reminder that your and [social media company]'s interests will never be aligned

what if I bought [social media company]?

data is admittedly sparse on this one but i have a case study saying not even then

Oh my god Wisconsin's governor just used a line item veto to secure school funding increases every year through 2425. He struck out a line so it now reads "through the 2023-2425 school year". He's allowed to do this lol

Coastal Dems: now we can't go too far now haha, we can't. We've got to be reasonable, you know, also eight of us might defect to the Republicans if you're mean to us

Midwest Dems in control of no legislative bodies:

this level of line-item vetoing is hilariously bad policy but honestly my immediate reaction was almost the opposite of this. first thought was like "this would be a great premise for a puzzle game", then "I guess it's not really feasible to implement though. Now I want to become governor of wisconsin just so I can play"

creating regexes to line-veto-proof your bills

Ok I love this???

"baptise me in hot dog water"

Hot dog water - there's a Tumblr post out there I've seen saying hot dog water is the opposite of holy water, due to the fact that a single drop of it will contaminate what it touches. I assume this was partly inspired by this allusion but who knows for sure.

Also the the idea of holy water as inhuman and cleaning vs hot dog water as the remains of feeding someone - often a child - and entirely human. It may be dirty and I do not want it on me but God hot dog water has some memories. You will not wash away my sins. They're mine. Also, anyone can make hot dog water but holy water is refined, restricted (yes anyone can make it in an emergency but lay people are restricted from it)

"you and I both know"

Unlike baptism for babies, this one is done between two people who are both aware of what is happening. The one receiving the baptism gives the orders about what they want to happen. The giver and receiver are portrayed as equals. They are equally aware of their humanity.

"the holy stuff won't take"

Ooof heartbreaking, amazing line. Raises so many questions. What does it mean when the water "takes"? What has the receiver done that makes them unfit for holy water? Or, what has the holy water done that makes it to weak to help, to be a part of your life?

The poem as a whole - I love the lack of capitalization. It adds a sort of intimacy to the poem, and the statement from the speaker. The high words "baptise" and "holy" being offset by "take" and "hot dog". Also "hot dog water" vs "holy stuff." The cadence! I would lick it.

this poem is moving me to tears. the only reason twitter user yiffpolice thinks it's self-evidently garbage is theyre trying to read it as prose

i read "the holy stuff won't take" slightly differently though. when you look at other things that are said to "not take" it's an expression that refers to impermanence, generally of training or a mark. in that context, for holy water not to take comes to mean that the speaker will not remain holy after a baptism, with the suggestion from "you and i both know" that this has already been proven

the use of the word "take" further reinforces the idea of training or marking and ties in with the idea of the speaker's incompatibility with holiness by suggesting that god has rejected them, that they have rejected god, or both

this also ties back in to the request for baptism in the opposite of cleansing water and creates a narrative in which the speaker has tried repeatedly to be Good but to no avail and is now choosing to try being Bad on purpose in search of a choice at which they can succeed, but needs help to do this; needs someone to baptise them. the implication being that they've spent so much time trying uselessly to be Good that they don't know how to stop

with hot dog water as a metaphor for human connection, especially framed as a foil to divinity, this turns the poem into a call for help from a speaker whose righteous isolation is killing them but who only has one person, if any, who can connect them to their first real community, which they hope will destroy the urge to be Good with a permanency that destroying the urge to be Bad has never had

EDIT BC I'M NOT DONE: also the way the only two-syllable words are "baptise" and "water" and "holy" suggests a rejection of the lofty in favor of the base

"baptise" is semisarcastic, used only as an explicit and intentional misappropriation for want of a secular equivalent

"water" is even more explicitly appropriated from its orifinal context, with holy water being reduced to holy "stuff" and the water itself being explicitly and intentionally corrupted and placed at the opposite end of the line from "baptise"

and "holy" is of course separated by an entire line—one which speaks of agency—from both of these sister words, only to be directly rejected wholesale

EDIT 2: someone in the notes said its trochaic and i realized:

the first line is in trochaic tetrameter, which sets you up to read the second line as trochaic, but its five syllables have a symmetrical stress pattern, which leads you smoothly into the iambic trimeter of the third line, which is not only an inversion of the trochaic first, but feels clipped by comparison

this poem, hated by the poet (which thematically adds to it, imho), is not just moving in content but also technically very well constructed

is it bad that i like the name womanikin

call my pussy Donut Hole the way everyone wants to lick it but there’s nothing there

i think a big blackpill in programming is you don't actually need to bother with optimizations if your program is going run in seconds regardless of what you do. it doesn't matter if that dataframe is 35 MBs you can just copy it willy nilly for stuff. or load all of it when you only need something at a specific location. it doesn't matter

this is true for every individual program but when everything everywhere is designed like this it starts to become a bit of a problem

anyone else learn to write in tolkien's elvish script when they were like 12, proceed to write 2+ years of diary entries in it and then almost entirely forget how to re-translate them? becos uhhh

help HELP NOOOOOOOOOOOO I just found this passage:

Which translated into English script (phonetically accurate to mimic my pain upon reading this) reads:

FUCK FUCK KILL DIE FUCK

OP attained enlightenment at the age of twelve only to descend back into the gladiator pit of mortal cringe

stop saying youre investing in posts. i dont make my jokes for any kind of economy. banker-like behaviour of you

nurturing this post while it's young

supporting and cherishing this post in its infancy.

Exposing this post to my followers for socialization

Watering this post so it grows up big and strong

Sending it to the reblog spiderweb playground to learn lifeskills

packing its lunchbag and sending it to school, while reminding it all the while that our state school system was designed to produce obedient factory worker drones and that they should question everything and reject the concept of blind obedience to authority being a virtue <3

Being a mathematician does irreparable damage to you vocabulary. I have on more than one occasion forgotten that certain words have normal every day meanings

Normal meanings as in, what, they're orthogonal?

You’re thinking of a normal vector! Normal meanings are meanings that are invariant under conjugation.

That's a normal subgroup! Normal meanings are those where any two disjoint closed subconcepts have disjoint open neighbourhoods.

You're thinking of a normal space! Normal meanings are those where if you take their infinite expansion in any base, any sequence of subconcepts appears equally frequently.

Imagine knowing The Most Generic basic dudebro guy who somehow manages to match the exact stereotype of a dude of his approximate age and background. Like you could not even say shit like "you look like you'd listen to [the most generic dudebro band]" to insult him because he'll just go "oh shit yeah they're my favourite band, how'd you know." Just like a physical manifestation of an unanimaginative generic dudebro.

Then at some point you hear that Dudebro Friend came out and is trans, actually. And for a minute there you pause to think "ah, of course, now that makes sense. She was just trying her best to keep up some sort of a fake male persona, and probably just pulled whatever random masculine-enough sounding shit to pretend to enjoy", and now feel kind of bad about making fun of it.

And the next time you see her - actually presenting female, all dressed up - she's like. in the exact same outfit as women her age have apparently all been posing in on instagram this season, her nails are that exact same beige, she's snapping some most generic #justgirlythings photograph of something, and her new chosen name is one of the top 3 of the nationally most popular baby girl names of her birth year. And she didn't even look that up or do it on purpose - you looked it up - she just happened to like that one.

And seeing the same person in a completely different light and angle, you kind of catch a glimpse of the deepest core of who she is as a person. Now happy to finally be the most true, genuine and uncompromising version of herself, which just happens to mean being the most standard, generic and predictable person in the universe.

Such a good reminder that there are people out there who enjoy doing seemingly silly little inconsequential jobs. It’s not the job they hate, it’s being treated like undervalued shit.