TIL Dr. Sigmund Freud was addicted to smoking and failed to quit for good throughout a 45 years long battle that included 33 operations for cancer of the jaw, an artificial jaw replacement, and attacks of “tobacco angina” exacerbated by nicotine . He was known to smoke up to twenty cigars a day.

via reddit.com

Jesus ffucking christ bro.

Seems like he had an oral fixation… Almost as if he were replacing the cigarette with… No i shant say…

i still think about this constantly sorry nia

Inspirations for VOID 1680 AM

Earlier this year, I released a new solo TTRPG: VOID 1680 AM. In it, you use a deck of cards, a six-sided die, your music collection and a voice recorder to create your own late-night radio show.

The cards help you dig deep into your collection to reconnect with music you love; they and the die also help you create anonymous Callers and the concerns, hopes and obsessions that drove them to reach out to you, a fellow lone voice in the darkness.

I also included steps for joining the library of Callers for other players to use, and even to submit your full show for broadcast on the "real" VOID 1680 AM. You can see some of those Affiliate broadcasts here. They're genuinely very cool.

You can check out the game here, and I'm proud to say VOID 1680 AM is now a Judges' Spotlight Winner in this year's ENNIES.

Okay, enough table-setting. Let's get into it.

VOID was the culmination of a lifelong obsession with commercial radio; both the technology (which feels retro despite scarcely being over a century old) and the melancholy romance of lonesome voices baring themselves to an audience they'll never know the scope of.

This, to me, is an apt metaphor for the act of making something - anything at all. Speak into the Void, the back cover copy says. You never know who is listening. So it is with putting something you love into the world.

So what inspired VOID? I cite both Anamnesis by Sam Leigh and The Wretched by Chris Bissette in the book itself, two solo RPGs whose tones and methods did much to help me find my own.

But if I'm being truthful, VOID's inspirations mostly reside outside of games. Here are a few things that haunted me profoundly enough to drive me to respond.

The first is Talk Radio, specifically Oliver Stone's adaptation of Eric Bogosian's play. The movie's tagline is "the last neighborhood in America," which to me frames radio's persistent relevance and puts social media - often called a "town square" itself - in proper context as one piece of the many ways people find connection with others, for better or worse.

Contra the VOID DJ, Barry in Talk Radio is very, very aware of how his audience receives him (hint: not well). Barry must be heard, and so must the similarly damaged souls who call in to dump the poison in their brain into his... and everyone who's listening in, besides. It's a host of people who want to connect but don't know how, spiraling in decaying orbit around each other until something awful happens.

VOID 1680 AM was originally much darker before I decided to pull back and let players pick their own tone, and Talk Radio is why.

Oxenfree is a narrative video game about a small group of teens stuck on an island haunted by hungry ghosts who can be tuned in and out of reality with handheld radios. There's more to it than that, but I'll leave you to discover what on your own - because I would recommend this game to just about anyone.

Insofar as VOID 1680 AM can have a "soundtrack," it is this one by scntfc, created using WWII-era radio equipment.

The Vast of Night is a quietly alarming lo-fi/sci-fi set in a small town in New Mexico in the late '50s. A radio DJ and a switchboard operator pick up strange signals, and then... things happen.

This specific radio station (stylized in the poster above) is what I picture for "my" VOID 1680 AM.

Then there's Stevie in The Fog, played by Adrienne Barbeau. She's the bridge between VOID 1680 AM and my earlier solo game, Lighthouse at the End of the World.

She is, yes: a late night DJ. And her radio station is, yes: in a lighthouse. She's living my dream, at least until the ghost pirates show up.

Spoilers, I guess?

But the most important influence? VOID 1680 AM cover artist Jordan Witt's fan art for the podcast King Falls AM years ago. This image took up residence in my head, so much so that I still use it as phone wallpaper despite never having listened to the show it's for.

When it came time to partner with a cover artist, who that cover artist would be was never in question. Entirely unknowingly, Jordan took all these loose ideas in my head and gave them something to cohere to. A beacon, if you will.

They spoke something into the Void, and I listened.

Fun fact: Jordan even jazzed up the original logo I made for VOID 1680 AM when that title only applied to the AM transmitter in my garage. Here's my original - you can plainly see the influence of Jordan's art on that O. It all really came full circle.

Those are the biggest ingredients in the stew that made VOID 1680 AM. It's fun to talk about stuff I like, but also I hope it might nudge someone - anyone - to get going on something they're after.

(That's you. I'm talking about you.)

A project finding its voice is a wonderful thing, but there's no real miracle to it, no outside influence that will tell you what to do. It's just things in your head magnetizing to each other until they got a shape that - with coaxing - can stand on its own.

See you on the dial.

is this even funny i dont think its funny im not putting it in the tags

How has this comic made such a groundbreaking cultural impact without getting over 40k notes

these posts have the same vibes imo 💯

and this tweet as well

this also

Just so you know, whenever we invent yet another fake fandom character, they inadvertently blink into existence, ill-formed and meaningless, only to be trapped within the hellish liminal space created by the zeitgeist of our collective consciousness.

I have a certain amount of admiration for cognitive scientists who are prepared to cut the Gordian knot of defining what a mind is and simply deny the validity of their own subjective experience. I mean, obviously someone who looks you in the eye and says "I'm not actually conscious, I just behave as though I am" is full of shit, but you've gotta respect the audacity.

If our brains are just matter and electricity, there’s no room for free will.

As soon as you allow our brains to NOT be just a giant electromagnetic-enhanced billiards game, and thus allow an active consciousness, you’ve opened the door to all sorts of ‘unscientific’ things like telepathy.

So it’s more like ‘I can’t acknowledge my own consciousness without allowing a bunch of pseudoscience as well, therefor consciousness must be some sort of illusion’. Also lots of cool experiments showing what we think was the idea causing our action is actually post-hoc rationalization…

The problem I have with "consciousness is an illusion" is that it's a turtles-all-the-way-down argument. Speaking of false perception necessarily asserts the existence of something that's experiencing that false perception; there's just no useful way to distinguish between the illusion of subjectivity and subjectivity itself. That's why I have some respect for those who respond to "well, if consciousness is an illusion, what's perceiving that illusion?" with "you can't prove that I perceive things" – it's absurd, but at least it commits to the bit!

he'd be on here with a lana del rey profile pic and if it didnt say like 48 in his bio he'd just be instinguishable from any other type of tumblr mutual and he'd come on here every day posting like "still havent fucked that old man" and we'd be like nooo 😭 dont give up king 🥺

not a salt or a pepper, but a secret third thing

TL;DR - The third thing was Sugar. Not mustard, not paprika, not dried herbs, not something lost in the mists of time.

It was sugar, and there's historical proof.

*****

ETA: I'd put about 70% of this post together before @dduane said "Have you seen this?"

"This" was from @jesters-armed, in first with my notions about The Fifth Element Third Condiment, and even a mention that the posts were "...a bit long(ish)".

Ahem.

Yes they were, with no change here. You have been warned. :->

Well, okay, there's one change. The pix in this post are new and, combined with the illustrations in older posts, go even further towards confirming that what I once called a theory, I now regard as Fact.

*****

Here are a couple of 19th-century table caddies, proper name "cruet sets". Take a look at the labels. They answer the "what was it?" question asked by that TikTok in a single word.

Sugar.

Not just in English, Spanish too.

Azucar.

Even without labels to tell them apart and even when the containers were of matched size and shape, sugar-casters always had larger holes than pepper-shakers.

Sometimes not much larger, as here...

...but usually, like those below and above, more than big enough to ensure no confusion between sugar and pepper.

A container of similar shape with no holes, as in the set above, held mustard.

Mustard was never a shaker seasoning; it didn't work that way. Its spiciness doesn't activate until the dry "mustard flour" was mixed with water, vinegar, beer or wine and left to stand for several minutes.

This produced a runny-to-stiff paste which was at first transferred from pot to plate on the point of a knife, but soon got its own dedicated spoon.

There's a slot in this mustard-pot's side for a spoon, and the set pictured above may also have such a slot, unfortunately facing away from the camera.

A matched spoon became part of any mustard-pot set...

...and was such a uniform size that "mustard-spoon" was a recipe measurement along with dessert-spoon, tea-spoon, salt-spoon and even cayenne-spoon. (I've posted about cayenne as a table condiment elsewhere).

*****

Where's the salt-shaker in those sets?

When sets like those were in common use, salt-shakers weren't.

*****

So how did people use salt if it wasn't in a shaker?

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance salt was put out in ornate dishes called a Salt which were often spectacular works of art.

This was placed at the top end of the table where important people sat; those seated further down were "below the salt".

Later, and still nowadays in formal settings, salt went into smaller dishes - salt-cellars - which like mustard had their own spoons. These were set on the table between two or four guests.

They took salt with the spoon, and instead of sprinkling it all over, they made a little heap of salt on the side of their plate and added pinches as required with finger and thumb.

*****

The same side-of-plate thing is done with mustard.

English mustard is extremely pungent *, far more so than the Grey Poupon which TikTok Guy slurps so casually off his finger. A little can go a long way, too much can be overpowering, and slathering it over an entire plateful of food can make that food inedible.

(* I'm aware Chinese and Russian mustards are even hotter; they're not relevant here.)

I once had the educational (okay, also entertaining) experience of watching a friend from the USA putting Colman's English on their hot-dog as if it was French's Yellow, then taking a bite. Even then they were lucky, because mustard is hottest when made fresh and the shop-bought from a jar was much weaker than it might have been.

"Made mustard" of the kind which went onto Regency, Victorian and Edwardian tables packs quite a punch, and dishes of that period was far from bland; it took two world wars and their associated rationing to give British food its rep for being dull.

Here's an example of how mustard is used.

Even though it's from a jar and feeble by comparison with fresh-made, it's likely that most of this will remain untouched when the meal is over.

Jeremiah Colman, founder of Britain's best-known mustard company, was only half-joking when he claimed that the firm's excellent sales record, and his own fortune, came from not from mustard eaten but from what was left on plates.

Whether on the plate or on the food, mustard for table use never came out of a shaker.

*****

The TikTok cites Bill Bryson, an American writer who, though living in the UK and presumably familiar with local grocery shops, failed to connect the proper name of the shaker ("caster" - TikTok Guy uses the name himself) with a grade of sugar sold by Irish / UK shops right now.

Here are the three standard grades - coarse, medium and fine. Note what the middle grade is called.

""Caster" has become a single-word description for "fine-grain quick-melting fast-mixing general-purpose cooking-and-baking sugar" but is a literal description both of how it was used ("cast" as a verb) and the container ("caster") it was in.

*****

TikTok Guy mentions the "expense and effort" of using sugar.

Expense:

From the Middle Ages up to the early 1600s sugar was indeed expensive and only for the rich.

Good Queen Bess's teeth were in an appalling state because of her sugar consumption, and less-wealthy people sometimes blackened their (healthy) teeth, to suggest they too could afford enough sugar to cause rich-people tooth decay.

However, increased use of slave labour on sugar plantations meant the end product became more and more affordable, and by the mid-1700s sugar was no longer "a luxurious delicacy". It became a household staple, enough that in 1833 politician William Cobbett ranted about how overindulgence in sugary tea had sapped the vitality of the English working class.

His remedy was home-brewed beer, and lots of it (!)

Effort:

TikTok Guy uses the word as if it's something out of the ordinary, and seems unaware of how much physical labour - from preparing and cooking food to fetching water to washing dishes to tending the fire or range - went on every single day in a pre-modern-gadgets kitchen.

For instance, before electrical ease or hand-cranked convenience, whipping cream to thickness or beating egg-whites stiff enough for meringues meant thrashing away with a bundle of twigs "until it be enough", however long that took.

By comparison, breaking down a sugar-loaf was quick and easy, especially since there was a tool for the purpose called "sugar nips".

There's a set in one of the TikTok photos, though TikTok Guy didn't comment on them. He may not have known what they were.

Once nipped off, sugar chunks were reduced to the required texture with a pestle-and-mortar, exactly as was done with every other crushable ingredient in that period kitchen.

This and everything else wasn't effort in the way TikTok Guy thinks; it was just - especially if a mortar was involved - The Daily Grind.

*****

Conclusion:

I've posted about sugar casters before, and the first time (six years ago) was amusingly cautious:

Since then, backed with increasing amounts of hard visual proof as shown here and elsewhere, I've gone from caution to Certainty.

The "mystery" third container in table cruets was for SUGAR, with enough historical evidence in the form of specifically labelled and shaped containers to confirm it beyond doubt.

*****

And they all sprinkled happily ever after.

The End.

wtf drinking is cool again

kink that doesn't say it's kink

i never thought id have a full blog post in me about writing but ive been rotating this in my head for days and finally think i can put my thoughts down. obv this is all subjective and only relative to me, it's not a screed about how you should write. it's more a look into my thinking.

for the past like, two weeks, i've been trying to come up with a story that fit the title "bred and breakfast" and coming up miserably blank. because hard as i try i couldn't find my way into a story that was a) about a bed and breakfast b) involved breeding kink in the way i want to do it and c) did not look at the camera and go "today we're writing about someone engaging in breeding kink!"* and issue C is what i'm gonna talk about.

for me, the purpose of writing smut, particularly genre smut that isn't just two people in the regular world having sex, is to present a reader with a fantasy situation where their kink is a natural consequence of the narrative. a situation where the fantasy is not an imagined fantasy for the characters, but a lived reality. obviously there are exceptions and ways to work a character having a relevant kink into the narrative (ex: the xenosexuality conference, brilliant's explicit kink for being an object of curiosity feeding into her situation as an object of curiosity to a bunch of horny aliens), but generally i want my stories to be about sexy things happening without premeditation or the characters pointing out that the situation is constructed.

it's the difference between a story about a bdsm couple tying the sub to a wall and pretending he's a prisoner in a dungeon getting whipped and getting off on it, and a story about a sexy criminal being tied to a dungeon wall and getting whipped and getting off on it. they are ultimately the same thing. guy gets whipped and gets a boner. the latter just does away with the tools of constructing the fantasy (negotiating, safewords, aftercare) and serves you the fantasy direct as part of a larger narrative you can care about. why is the prisoner there? what is his relationship to the whipper that makes this erotic? what happens to him after they fuck? his answers to those questions are more interesting to me than the bdsm sub's.

but as i said, this is all highly subjective. maybe the bdsm couple is more your speed and that's fine. but nothing pulls me out of a narrative like a story going "we're going to do bdsm now!" if bdsm and the fact it Is bdsm are not vital to the narrative. i do not want the strapping stablehand to explain safewords to his master he's about to spank in a barn. just spank him without asking, because he doesn't respect you. spank him til he bleats like a sheep and understands how hard you work to take care of his lordship's horses. spank him because it's what he deserves, not because we're engaging in spanking kink.

and the challenge for me now is figuring out a convincing way to get a character on a breeding bench at a bed and breakfast without them going "i would like french toast and to be put on a breeding bench for big cow men to fuck please" because while that might be funny, and might be sexy, it doesn't make for a very compelling narrative.

*and i don't want help figuring it out. i'll get there on my own

I wish wizards were real so bad imagine coming out of a wal mart and seeing some guy with long robes and a big hat in the parking lot surrounded by wacky particle effects screaming some shit like "By the moon and the starlight, by the shield and the sword, I summon to me, my Honda Accord!" And then just getting into his car and driving off

child handling for the childless nurse

My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old.  Here’s my impressions so far:

Birth - 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal.  Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.

Age 1 - 2: Hates you.  Hates you so much.  You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them.  There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.

Age 3 - 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe.  Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them.  Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.

Age 6 - 10: Really cool, actually.  I did not realize kids were this cool.  Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn.  Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”

Age 11 - 14: Extremely variable.  Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other.  At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult.  Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers.  (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)

Age 15 - 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience.  Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care.  Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there.  At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny.  And they’ll want one.  Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.

This is also a pretty excellent guide to writing  kids of various ages

stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot) it was on the driveway got out of the car and accidentally (didn't know it was there) stepped on the plum (warm) (on the ground) (it had fallen from the tree) barefoot (no shoes) wearing long pants (too long) (need to hem them) plum viscera got on them (the pants) unexpected plum on the driveway (hot plum) (97 degrees out) already super hungover (throwing up all morning) (should not have been driving at all) and I stepped out of the car (black car) (97 degrees out) and onto the plum (unexpected) (didn't know the plum was there) and it burst (plum nightmare on my only good pair of sweatpants) still we find ways to keep ourselves going from day to day

guess what post just got read aloud in poetry club tonite by an unknowing club member as I watched on in terror

What actually makes the zombie apocalypse genre boring is that the characters never try any interesting solutions real people would actually brainstorm. It’s always just “we need to find food and guns” never “we need to strip the inside of this building for material to construct a better stronghold up on the roof” or “make something like a huge impenetrable hamster ball out of car parts” or “let’s cover ourselves in so many layers of stuff that it just keeps coming off in the zombie’s hands.” I mean I could think of hundreds of tricks and strategies like that and I think lots of people can? But no all zombie media is written like the only solutions against zombies are the same resources, used the same way, that the world already revolved around and it’s probably because all the interesting solutions would be seen as silly or uncool, unlike the 50,000th iteration of people just hiding in a fort with canned beans and rifles.

That bothers me too, also the distinct lack of bicycles. Even if the zombies are the fast kind, they can only be as fast as humans are capable of, i.e. slower than a bicycle. They’re also easy to maintain even with scavenged materials and can go for like 5 years before needing any significant repairs, instead of needing specific parts and constant maintenance.

Every zombie movie is all “we need to pile into a large vehicle powered solely by a very lmimited resource that’s only going to get increasingly scarse from here on” and not “a bike with a decent rear-mounted basket can move us and supplies fast enough to avoid the zombies and consumes no fuel other than calories.” Hell, if you grab some motorcycle armor, you’ll be protected from bites too.

op is posting from tamriel. or perhaps the lands between

"EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL TO THE POINT OF STERILE UNFUCKABILITY. " 1 . // 2. // 3. // 4.

13 Jul 23

yes that's how bourgeois media tries to trick workers into being against strikes. Any delays are solely due to United Parcels Service incorporated not properly paying their workers.

By not negotiating, the company - hand-in-hand with the bourgeois media trying to make that the sob story - are actually holding medical equipment for ransom.

If you're concerned about medical equipment maybe UPS should stop forcing its preload to go faster than it is safe, leaving open packages all over the place because they say that slows us down, loading tractor trailers not only to the ceiling but to the point where you can't even open them because they're that packed in. UPS is causing this shit, not Teamsters, not the employees.

UPS has never respected things like medical equipment and your packages. They don't care, it's all the bottom line.

This is what the company thinks of everyone’s packages, these are all from average days. This is what the Teamsters want to prevent by making kig conditions materially better for us.

I was quite literally told to stop repairing and taping open boxes by a manager because when you stop unloading a trailer for even ten seconds it “hurts production”.

I’m a package loader.

I have to step over piles and piles of packages to get inside a trailer that’s completely swamped with them. Yes, I am crushing your packages because my supervisor told me to.

I’m expected to lift 100+ pound packages at least 5 feet high into a trailer by myself. I’m 5′4.

I watched my supervisor stack a ULD in a way that was gonna make it hard for the next person. When I asked her about it, she said “That’s the point.”

I have to climb over and onto thin metal bars and walk on moving belts to unjam chutes because they’re so heavily backed up with packages. Those jammed packages also get massively crushed by the sheer weight of packages coming down. Sorry, your Amazon box got crushed, there was a 75 pound package that the unload team sent to me instead of setting it aside as an irregular like they’re supposed to because they’re being yelled at to unload faster.

I have had over 32 bruises from various packages beating me on one leg.

When my shift (Twilight) is understaffed, instead of asking people on day sort if they want to double (which I’ve heard they want to), the supervisors just do the work instead which they’re not even supposed to under our contract.

I had a supervisor accuse me of not wanting to work because I suddenly took a week off. I took that week off because I was so stressed out and suicidal that I couldn’t drive. He also tried to get me to quit in the same conversation.

I once accidentally broke something in a package and a supervisor told me to tape it up and send it anyways. It was an acrylic shelf display and it was extremely sharp.

This job is fucking cruel. And currently I am flat broke and have spent many weeks having to cut back on the amount of food I eat because I can’t afford anymore.

We do transport a lot of medical supplies, resources, test samples, etc and those people who work those jobs, who move all of those priceless items are paid the exact fucking same barely livable wage, and I would know because I’m one of them.

I’ve never been more disrespected at a job than I have here. Walmart treated me better than this.

UPS workers deserve so much more for the shit we have to go through.

Actually, I'm not done. I have my own pictures.

This is what UPS thinks of your packages.

watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)

women want me for my huge cock (silicone) and my huge tits (silicone) and my funny pointed wizard hat (silly cone)