Carpenter, actor, pot dealer... that man has range.

insert that one post about the Millennium Falcon vs. The Enterprise being an arctic research ship vs. your local weed man with a van and a shotgun

Riven: The Sequel to Myst (1997) Riding the tram

Behold: the reason why it’s taken 25 years to get a remake of Riven

My theory is that they lost the masters that they created this animation from. And this seems like a royal bitch to recreate in higher definition from scratch.

I knew several people who would make this kind of thing for shits & giggles over a weekend almost a decade before Source Filmmaker came out.

Maybe, but this is literally in the top five most iconic shots from the entire series. Everyone will notice if they screw it up. And most of the Myst remakes have made it not only not ‘static screens’ but a three-D world you can move around in, without cutscenes. This is not easy to get across that bar.

Though the thing that has finally egged them across the line has been a fan project to make a remake, which sources suggest they have reached an agreement to use as the base for the new release.

Riven: The Sequel to Myst (1997) Riding the tram

Behold: the reason why it’s taken 25 years to get a remake of Riven

My theory is that they lost the masters that they created this animation from. And this seems like a royal bitch to recreate in higher definition from scratch.

Emily Blunt as Rita Vrataski aka ’The Angel of Verdun’ aka ’The Full Metal Bitch’. EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014) dir. Doug Liman.

Do you want to watch a movie where Emily Blunt does some absolute Warhammer 40k space marine badass nonsense in power armor?

Do you want to see her bisect liquid metal alien squid lions with a sword made out of a helicopter rotor blade?

Do you have the ability to tolerate Tom Cruise also being there?

Then I heartily recommend Edge of Tomorrow, also sold under the title of the light novel it’s based on, Live Die Repeat. It is a hecking good time.

I will say, for Tom Cruise likers, he is very good in this movie.

And for Tom Cruise dislikers, you get to see him die like thirty times in quick succession

Correction: While the Movie is also sold under the Title LIVE DIE REPEAT, the Light Novel it is based on is titled All You Need Is Kill

There's a Prigozhin-led mutiny/coup attempt going on in Russia rn, they've entered Rostov where the invasion force's HQ is.

okay irem rules

tactics ogre villain writing: every named boss you encounter is as much a person as yourself, no matter how despicable. they will be mourned when they die; perhaps more than you. never forget that you pave the road to your dream with the bones and broken hopes of others. final fantasy tactics villain writing: you stand before the monstrous, twisted ruin of a good man who dreamed of a better world, who longed only for the strength to bring it about. also, argath is back again. he hates poor people even more now. fire emblem: awakening villain writing: this is Villageburner the Bandit and in exactly three turns frederick will insert his entire foot into his ass

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance villain writing: Would you destroy this world to save a better one? The world is burning. Run.

If you see this post you have to say happy birthday to my lizard

She is ten* now!

She loathes the party hat

but she LOVED the cake.

She is very good and very beautiful and loves people and attention and going on walks.

She is my best friend and I think everybody should say happy birthday to Kaiju!

*Approximately. She was about one when I got her, and I’ve had her for nine years, so we’re calling her ten.

Obscure Webcomic - Round 1-M

Foreach - Ongoing

A series of people facing difficult problems in their own lives who seek to escape or address those problems through video games

Irregular Webcomic - Ongoing

A webcomic done with legos and miniatures. Fully of RPG jokes and really terrible puns.

Carmen Sandiego would never say that. It is not nearly Extra enough.

I feel like nearly all coverage of conflicts with the Tyranids completely ignores the fact that winning planetary conflicts against them doesn't matter at all if even a single Hive Ship escapes. You cannot claim anything but a partial victory unless you eradicate the entire fleet, i don't care how many gaunts you grind into paste planetside, the fucking Hive Ships can just leave and come back after they've eaten a few agriworlds and regrown more ships as they're described in canon as doing. Like congratulations you survived the deluge of chitin and xenoflesh enough that the Hive Ships fucked off. They'll be back in like a month to try again. Oh you beat them in a void conflict? I hope you're describing the complete destruction of every one of their ships and ideally the incineration of their insides because otherwise you'll be repeating this shortly with less ships, less troops, less resources. War against the Hive Mind must be one of total attrition to claim victory and they can be allowed no reprieve. We should start firing exterminatus torpedoes into their mouths.

Is it? They spawn themselves off of surface biomaterial, but they don’t immediately send it up for harvesting. They process it below, then relay it to the fleet once they have more control.

So what you need is to deny them material (=materiel in this case) by a higher fraction than they take off you, plus put picket fleets around Agri World on sufficiently high alert to catch stragglers.

(source)

thank you scherz et al. for bringing us the frogs Mini ature, Mini mum and of course, the Mini scule

The first 'conspiracy theory' here is true, what else?

This one is from The Policy Institute of King's College London.

Statement 1: "Central bank digital currencies will be used by governments to control people's money and restrict their freedom"

One-third of people think this is definitely or probably true. The talking heads sneeringly and contemptuously imply it is false, and a conspiracy theory. The one-third of people are entirely correct. The statement is plainly true. Central banks are already used by governments to control people's money and restrict their freedom, there is no reason to believe governments will do an about-face when given a technical advance that provides more control.

For the forty percent of normies who think it's false, I imagine that most of them skimmed the question and heard something like "Government bad with money? true or false".

For the people at The Policy Institute, I think a permanent ban from public communication is in order. The misinformation is once again coming from inside the God-damned house of the professional informationists and the academic-industrial complex.

Two of those three ‘true’ things are false. Probably all three.

This is not true.

This is not true.

This is not true. The pandemic actually happened, without human agency involved; it was not a global effort of any kind.

“tumblr” “grindr” do the gays not like the letter e for some reason

it’s lgbt not legbet

Bobbie how dare you hide this gem in the tags!

Oh, that’s why Xkit took over from Missing E.

I have had it with this likescolding. “Tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm so likes don’t actually do anything” motherfucker I am not clicking that heart to give some post better ~algorithmic visibility~ I am clicking that heart to help my internet friend microdose on serotonin as god fucking intended

Likes don’t do anything -- therefore spam likes everywhere you have any impulse to!

You have to be careful of upvotes on reddit and similar sites - they float whatever’s both fast and easy to understand to the top, so if you just like everything vaguely neat you tend to dumb down the subreddit and make it full of lowest-common-denominator content. But likes don’t matter on Tumblr! Go nuts!

I've survived my first day on Tumblr

Achievements:

Oh boy oh boy you're gonna get a Rare achievement for this one

Containment Breach

Herschel Has Discovered Tool Use. Again.

In january of 2021, deep in the throes of pandemic psychosis, we acquired a Corgi Puppy.

I would like to go on the record that we did not get a Corgi because they're cute. We got a Corgi because they're criminally brilliant and enthusiastic working dogs that were bred to bully cattle, which is the exact temperment a dog living in a house with three ADHD adults should have. Herschel does commit a lot of crime, but he also does his appinted service-dog job of "make everyone wake up, eat meals and go to bed at a reasonable and consistent time" extremely well, as well as his bonus jobs of "Keep the squirrels the hell out of the garden" and "Yell every time the cat does something". I didn't actually ask him to do that last job but it has helped in the "teach the cat to stay the hell off the stove" area.

But even with having a whole pack of humans another dog, and a cat to manage, this pales in comparison to his genetic capacity to manage several hundred sheep or cattle across the fields of Wales, and thus, Herschel has decided on further intellectual pursuits to occupy himself, namely, speedrunning the early phases of human tool use and terraforming.

I realized he has the brains of an entire hunter-gatherer tribe shortly after he got fixed, and within 24 hours and still dpey from anesthesia, he'd figured out that his plastic cone could be used to monopolize the water bowl and his favorite chew toys, and within a week, had learned how to carry three toys at once while leaving his mouth open by tucking the toys behind his enormous ears and under his chin. He also figured out that he could wiggle the cone to rest against his shoulders, and started using it as a shovel by literally running the bottom edge into the ground. But that wasn't making holes effeicently enough, apparently, and I ended up watching him figure out how to rotate the cone around so the two pieces of overlapping plastic were under his chin, then use his chin and the stairs to the deck to pinch both ends into a much more efficient V-Shape that let him gouge huge strips of dirt up in seconds. The anthropologists and animal behaviorists in the audience may recognize this as Tool Creation, a behavior normally only seen in higher primates, crows, and some parrots. Once a hole of suitable length, depth and temperature had been achieved, he very carefully rolled the cone around so the digging side was over his head and the smooth side under his chin, and splooted into his hole to cool his little tummy and stitches off. It was at that point that I realized that I was going to have to teach him how to garden, or he was going to teach himself.

He no longer has the cone (He was beginning to experiment with it as a battering ram), but his morning ritual is now "Wake everyone up at 8AM by screaming, locate everyone in house and jam my nose up theirs to make sure they're alive, go outside and scream at the squirrels. Now that Yard is Secure, go get Fun Parent who has hopefully taken their meds by now, and supervise them while they rifle through the plants (this is apparently KEY to their mental health), eating any pest animals Fun Parent points out, chase squirrel AGAIN, go inside and get Breakfast cookie." and BY GOD if we deviate from it there will be much screaming and destruction. If I am not home, it has been reported that he walks round the garden beds and sniffs the plants in the order I usually check them in before he will agree to come in. He doesn't quite know what the deal with the melons is, just that they need to be checked.

But we're out of the labor-intensive parts of gardening and now into Harvesting Season, and this is a bit boring except when I give him snap peas right off the vine, and he has decided to work on the complex physics problem that is Doorknobs.

And last week, he had a breakthrough.

Sometime in 2020, my mom sort-of taught her horrible crime herding dog Arwen how to open the back door so she could let herself out as she pleased during the day and stop interrupting Mom's Zoom calls. Arwen is a Kelpie, which means she's about 60lbs with full-length legs and horrible monkey paws that are one joint away from being hands, so when Arwen wants to open the back door, she sits up, leans on the door for purchase/to push it, and uses her terrible crime hands to *push* on the knob until it turns. She can pull the knob open by pawing and catching it on her toes, but she's 11-13 years old now and has mild arthritis, so she prefers to catch it on her central pad instead. She taught Charlie, the other equally brilliant but less criminally inclined dog, to do this but he doesn't like to go outside alone, so he rarely does this.

Herschel, ever the observant student, immediately tried copying them, but even though he is actually tall enough to reach the knob, his toes are just too stubby to get a decent grip on the knob, pushing or pulling, and the first few times, gave up and sat down to scream until one of the fullsize dogs or humans came to open the door for him.

Last week, we were up at my parent's again, and I watched him hunt around the living room until he found his slightly-sticky orange rubber ball (It's clean, it's just a kind of rubber that's always a bit tacky), carry it across the house, stand up on his hind legs at the back door, put the rubber ball on top of the gap between the knob and the wall, and then push down on the ball, which caught the doorknob and turned it for him, thus opening the door. He let himself out, had a merry time yelling at the squirrels, came back in, stopped a few feet inside the door, went back out, grabbed his ball, and brought it back into his kennel, a place he can leave toys if he doesn't want the other dogs playing with them.

This means he somehow worked out how doorknobs work, how fucking levers work, and that his orange rubber ball specifically was the one that would work (none of his other toys are the correct size/texture), that he'd need that ball specifically to open the door again, and yesterday he did the same trick with the bedroom door, so he knows that the rubber ball/skeleton key can be used on all doorknobs, not just that one.

I wonder if I can teach him to sweep.

___

If you want to fund Herschel's research into Tool Use and/or get me therapy for the ensuing chaos, please feel free to donate to my Ko-Fi, or get further Dog Content by subscribing to my Patreon.

I can't believe I wrote this and then forgot to include a picture of the little man for a solid 24 hours:

Behold, my Crime Tube.

It's two and a half in the morning and I have no words or brain capacity to process the joy I feel right now, so I'm going to reblog it and look at it again later.

Thanks for reminding me about this post because The Crime Tube has bullied me into doing a garden this year, with the kind of patient positive re-enforcement and blatant emotional manipulation that would make a dog trainer or Hannibal Lecter would admire.

I wasn't planning on doing a garden this year because we just moved house, had an extremely expensive plumbing event and I got spayed this spring, so I had neither time, money, nor core muscle fortitude for starting a garden this march, which is usually when the beds have to go in if you're trying to establish a garden out here. But we have had an extremely wet spring so everything's running a bit late and I was on the fence about starting a little one, and put some of the plastic bins from the Pandemic Patio Garden out to see what kind of sun exposure they'd get.

Once sighted, Herschel realized that A Garden was a possibility and started on a campagin of psychological manipulation.

Herschel loves the garden, because he likes green beans off the vine but more than that, the garden attracts squirrels to the yard and his bloodlust has been left wanting of late. He also loves activities and I think was maybe a little sad that he wasn't getting to do his morning patrol of the yard with me this year.

So he stopped going out in the mornings.

He clearly wanted to. Charlie, who very much likes having his little helper dog around, wanted herschel to come out too. but instead, Herschel would run to the far end of the house where he can still see the back door, and watch me.

...he wants something. I try offering a treat. Nope. I try calling Charlie over and heaping attention on him, something that usually makes Herschel's jealous little ass hustle on over. Nope. Still waiting for something. I put my shoes on. ZOOM. Ah. My presence is wanted outside. I step out with them. I step back in. Herschel stops MID-PEE to turn around and come back in, and stands at the far end of the house. I go back out. Morning yard activities resume as normal.

He continues this nonsense of running away from the back door until I put on my shoes and go outside with them, and immediately stopping what he's doing if I go back inside before some internal metric of his is met for the better part of a week.

Then it's herding me outside, and jumping on me for attention, running nine feet away, stopping, and looking over his shoulder at me, which has previously been established as his "Are You Following Me? Please Follow Me." I follow. He has shown me carrion instead of just eating it before and I gave him a whole piece of turkey about it because that was VERY good behavior and I am eager to re-enforce it. Instead, he patrols around the plastic bins, doing a "Follow Me?" check every few feet.

Yesterday I returned from the nursery with 70% off annual plants for a mini-garden and not only were there extreme yard zoomies of excitement, I got three toys piled on my foot as a reward for the desired gardening Behavior.

Now, This is the kind of behavior I got and trained Herschel for- Herding dogs are good at remembering load-bearing rituals like "Take your meds" and "It's time for food!" and other stuff my ADHD Brain struggles with. So I'm very proud of him.

...I just didn't realized this memory and enforcement behavior extended all the way to "IT'S TIME FOR THIS ANNUAL BEHAVIOR I'VE ONLY SEEN TWICE BUT IS APPARENTLY CRUCIAL AND I WILL BE A LITTLE ASSHOLE AND ALSO FLAGRANTLY DOG-TRAIN YOU TO DO IT, BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU TEACH ME THINGS".

Great job, little Crime Tube. I got extra green bean plants for you.

For sake of clarity: when I say “philosophical anarchism,” what I mean is the claim that laws have no inherent moral force, and that one has no inherent responsibility to obey them. That there are various reasons to obey some laws, both moral (murder and rape are bad) and practical (it’s not immoral per se to drop acid on the doorstep of a police station, but you probably won’t like what happens next), but the fact of being illegal does not make an action immoral, nor does the fact of being legal make it morally acceptable.

I’m interested how you thinks this interacts/relates to the ‘a ~natural set of laws exists (but it’s not much like any actual legal code)‘ position implicit in: