someone: hey I noticed this thing you did in your writing!

me, kicking my feet up flirtatiously: oh??? do you want to hear my thoughts on why I did that? do you want a play-by-play of the language choices in every related sentence? do you want an exhaustive breakdown of The Themes???

If you fall for a social media prank, do you reblog/pass it on to your followers?

So my mother recently got married (mashallah). And she set up this thing where guests were encouraged to take photos of the proceedings on their phones and text them in to a given number, after which they would be played as a slideshow on a screen at the front of the venue. I want you to take a minute to imagine how this went.

It began just about as you would expect. People taking photos of each other and the décor and taking selfies and having a good time. The slideshow was tasteful. Clearly not “professional,” but nice and personal.

And then people start getting a little drunk. A person who signs their work only as “Moo” posts this masterpiece:

[ID: a vertically oriented photo of a garbage can. A long table draped with lavender fabric at which the bride and groom are seated is in the background. The garbage can is centred in the frame, clearly the focus of the photo. End ID]

Someone at my table notices. “Is that... a photo of a garbage can? What?” We all express confusion and have a chuckle about it. Clearly someone is taking the prompt liberally. But the avant-garde approach to what is worthy of documenting does not end here, and our artist soon enters these submissions into the canon:

[ID: photos of a pendant fire sprinkler, a ceiling vent, a lightswitch, and a door handle. the photos show a casual, non-intensive approach to framing (neither perfectly even nor deliberately askew, &c.) end ID]

Meanwhile someone has uploaded this photo of the groom:

He is sitting at the bride and groom’s table alone with his hands clasped in front of him. I can’t show you his face but he has a bit of stubble and is wearing wire-framed rectangular glasses. I can best describe his vibe to you by saying that he wore this newsie cap to his wedding and this made perfect sense.

Using this photo, someone at our table makes their first few volleys:

[ID: the groom cut out of the photo from before and edited into an empty booth at an empty chain restaurant and an empty movie theatre, respectively. End ID]

At this point, basically everyone except the bride and groom have noticed, and are more or less following the evolution of this guérilla art project. Some people are trying to talk the instigators out of submitting their unworthy photos; others are riling them up.

Moo makes several more of their found object entries:

[ID: a cleaning schedule sign on a bathroom wall; a bathroom sign reading “men”; a digital thermostat; a framed photo of a smiling man, the sign for the men’s bathroom reflected in its glass. end ID]

And it goes back and forth like this for a while, Moo submitting objects (a close-up on the tines of their fork; a mop bucket; a framed fish head) and their nameless collaborator, not be to undone, putting the groom into more situations:

[ID: the groom's head edited onto the body of a cast member in the Broadway musical Newsies, his cap causing him to blend in perfectly; the groom's head edited onto Jamie's head from Mythbusters as he poses next to Adam, his cap causing this edit to be perfectly seamless. end ID]

A further development in the form of these submissions occurs when The Editor invents reappropriation and collage, beginning to edit the groom into photos that other people have uploaded:

[ID: the photo of the groom at the table from earlier, edited so that there are two identical grooms sitting side-by-side: text over their heads reads "Just Married!"; another photo of the groom standing and smiling with a drink in his hand, apparently talking to another groom who is holding his stomach, throwing his head back and laughing aloud. end ID]

Meanwhile, Moo has taken his aesthetic ethos to its only possible logical conclusion:

A photo of a urinal. “Fountain,” Moo, iPhone camera, 2023.

People are now watching the screen even more actively, laughing each time a new silly photo arrives in the stream of genuine submissions. Moo submits a photo of a dented Pringles can seen through a grate in the street outside and a photo of a bag of road-salting ice. The photo of the groom at the table is edited so that he sports a towering Cat-in-the-Hat hat instead of the newsie cap; the groom is edited into an astronaut suit on the moon; he and the bride wearing her fur stole are edited as Jackie O. and JFK in the limo (this last The Editor wisely did not upload but sent only to me).

Not content, however, with editing the groom into non-wedding photos or with sabotaging earnest submissions to the photo album, The Editor proceeds to bring us full circle by reappropriating Moo's recontextualisations, Sherrie Levine-like:

[ID: 1. the photo of the garbage can from earlier, with the groom edited onto the flap that you push garbage through; 2. the groom edited into the photo of the framed photograph from earlier; he has been made greyscale to match the photograph; 3. the photo of the urinal from above, with the groom edited into its bowl. end ID]

The people at Moo’s table (groom’s family) love this last submission ("Urine a Urinal," Anonymous, iPhone camera, 2023). They watch the screen waiting for it to come up again, and when it does, they shout “there it is!” and laugh and clap.

Alas, our destabilisation of what constitutes artistic merit was not allowed to persist. Like the Society of Independent Artists sticking Duchamp’s “Fountain” behind a partition, the bride and groom silently deleted all of the unworthy submissions from the publicly shared album. Luckily, I saw this coming and was able to document the proceedings.

In conclusion, I recommend not crowdsourcing your wedding photos unless you have a very well-developed sense of humour.

when ur mutuals with some1 who identifies as a character and you see some stranger get them all wrong like dont talk abt my friend like tht

The really weird autistic sweet spot where you just say things you think and people find you super funny

trail mix fucking does something to peoples brajns what do you MEAN GORPCORE

The Crushing Weight of Not Knowing If There Is a Task

im starting to think this crushing weight is not about the tasks

i keep mentioning the bread pudding incident and not telling the full story and at some point i really should

Yes you should.

im procrastinating so i will tell the story.

despite the incident in question happening about a year and a half ago, it has two preceding incidents, the contents of which are needed in order to understand the full scale of the bread pudding incident.

two facts about me:

1) i recently found out i have what was described to me as “the worst case of adhd that (my therapist) had ever seen”, totally unmedicated and,

2) i cannot reliably count to ten.

so a couple years ago, i tried to get into box-baking. my husband is an incredible baker, and has made some awesome things (including one time a pancake-based strawberry shortcake for my birthday because i hate cake? he’s a gem) but he doesnt always have energy to bake and i crave brownies literally at every minute of every hour of every day, so i was like ok sick ill bake box brownies. thats easy. (i have since, with a liberal amount of help, learned how to reliably box bake precisely one brand of brownie)

the first time, i misread the instructions and made them with the oil and water reversed and only one egg. they were inedible. the second time i realized we had no eggs ¾ of the way through, panicked, put in applesauce but only half the required applesauce, and they came out (mostly) inedible.

so at the time my sister sensibly decided “you cannot bake any more” and i sensibly agreed with her.

last year in the deep swings of my masters-induced depression i figured i had forgotten about a loaf of french bread in my fridge for weeks and it was approximately the same hardness as a stone. i should use it for something! bread pudding. that is what you use stale bread for.

i cook to taste—i rarely use recipes, because of the aforementioned “i have the attention span of a gnat and i cannot count to ten” so using a recipe? pretty much useless. this does not work to bake. so i googled a recipe, figured, okay, i can get the ingredients, and pretty much guess? i closed the recipe immediately afterward, and forgot my laptop even existed within minutes.

things bread pudding requires: stale bread. butter. milk. sugar. cinnamon. raisins. eggs. vanilla. and, if you are southern™, alcohol.

things i had in the house: stale bread. margarine. sugar. pumpkin spice. one egg. vanilla. alcohol.

first i broke up the bread. with a hammer! like you do, for weeks-old french bread. i put it all in a casserole dish, because that was what was clean. no milk? water is fine! throw that shit in! how much water? i dont know. enough to get it wet! submerge all the ingredients. how much sugar? i don’t know. the recipe said brown sugar.

me: can i use the brown sugar to make bread pudding? james: sure. but don’t use much. me: ok. (takes less than a teaspoon of brown sugar, one of the big-ish clumps) that’s enough, right? throw that in there. that’s enough sugar! i don’t need more white sugar.

pumpkin spice is essentially cinnamon! can’t use too much vanilla. just shake a little bit in there. that’s good, that’s enough. how much was that? two drops? plenty! that’s how much vanilla it needs, right? how much margarine? i don’t know! i closed the recipe. let’s get three or four big pats. i don’t have any stick margarine. crack that egg in there.

can’t forget the whiskey! just slop some in there. i’m southern. a dollop? a dollop. a dollop sounds right.

what temperature do you cook bread budding at? i don’t know. this casserole dish is only barely like, a tiny bit full. just coating the bottom. not much, then. 250 is probably right?

and then i forgot i was cooking until the kitchen began to smell.

the object which was removed from the oven was approximately the same size and density as a bowl full of very, very burned sand. two square inches of it was the correct texture for bread pudding—i.e, soft, squishy. the rest of it was as like unto hardened lava, and the same color. a single taste revealed it to taste like wet, disgusting bread or almost sort of exactly-unlike-bread-pudding but in the saddest way imaginable, the potential had been there, and had not been achieved. the brown sugar had not even dissolved it was just there. in a chunk. burned into the bread. it all smelled strongly of whiskey. it took about three weeks to soak totally off of my casserole dish, full of daily-replaced soapy boiling water.

so i’m not allowed to bake any more.

This is the most “Cooking while ADHD” thing I’ve ever read and I feel much better about Switching “3 Eggs & 4 cups flour”  to “4 eggs and 3 Cups flour” earlier this morning.

hey remember this post? in case you’re wondering “i think i might have adhd and it’s too much work to get it diagnosed/medicated” then let me tell you i now regularly bake bread from scratch, bake cakes, have perfected my ideal chocolate chip cookie recipe, and i can make three different types of biscotti. and also pie. and quiche.

if you need something to tell you “it’s worth doing the work to go get diagnosed and medicated for your adhd” let it be that i, jon “bread pudding incident” phaedrus, am now not only allowed but encouraged to bake.

WE LOVE A SUCESS STORY!

I just played a video game called Vale: Shadow of the Crown.  It has a blind protagonist and is 100% navigated by audio.  You need headphones to play it.  I was intrigued by the premise, but worried that it would be a gimmick that wouldn’t actually hold up well. 

Turns out it worked just fine and I found myself really sucked in!  I even turned off all the lights and played much of the game with my eyes closed.  Though there were a few difficult sections (for me, using the bow was hard), it was mostly pretty intuitive.  Honestly, the biggest problem was getting sleepy after a while, because as far as my body is concerned, if I spend that much time with my eyes closed, it’s bed time.

Anyway, it was a neat story with good voice acting and I actually really enjoyed the combat sections.  I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a novel gaming experience, as well as to anyone who has impaired vision.

Agreed!

To give more of a plot synopsis and potentially draw more people in, the story is about a blind princess named Alex who is sent to a remote corner of the kingdom when her father dies and her brother assumes the throne.  Her convoy is attacked and it appears that war has suddenly come to her kingdom.  She decides to go back to the capital to warn her brother, and enlists the aid of a shepherd to help guide her on the long journey.  Though she grew up fairly sheltered, her uncle trained her in weaponry and self defense and these abilities flourish over the course of this adventure (she also learns some magic as well!). 

It takes a little less than 7 hours to play through the story, and I mostly did it in one sitting because I got hooked.  And if the Falling Squirrel development team comes out with any other audio based games, I’d definitely be inclined to give them a try.

[ID: tumblr tags

#Just finished the game and I am fucking invested. #Characters? Glorious. #Mechanics? Really fun and interesting #I damn loved the voice acting #Also #Shepherd?!? #IT’S SO DAMN GOOD PLEASE I NEED A FANDOM FOR THIS. #Things that def changed my brain chemistry END ID]

@mythandlaur

just invented a new pride flag for people who have given up on their identities this one goes out to anyone who knows that theyre not cis or straight but is just plain fed up with thinking about it like seriously? figuring out your identity in this day and age? due to personal reasons i will be giving up

i’ve been waiting for an “undefined” flag and this is the closest I’ve ever seen. love this as someone who 1) resents the idea of having to define her sexuality, 2) doesn’t like defining herself in general, and crucially 3) likes cock so much it gives her imposter syndrome.

(Horizontal stripes: gray, light green, white, pink, gray and a second version of it that has a shrugging emoji on the inside made up of punctuation marks like slashes)

Happy pride to the undefined 😭👍

nothing can break the bond between a friend who loves spoilers and a friend who just watched an amazing show and needs to tell someone the entire plot from start to finish

My hot take today is that fun is more important than optimal in video games, as long as you're not actively negatively affecting others with your playstyle you should be able, nay, encouraged to get silly with it

for the love of everything that is good and nice DON'T DO THIS

Please do not do this! I'm happy to talk about 'what ifs' or 'what happens next' even if I can't write a whole fic but PLEASE don't put any fics into AI!

#i'm so exhausted#fic being scraped off ao3 by bots is bad enough#readers actually FEEDING fic into AI is breaking my actual heart#DO NOT EVER FEED FIC INTO AI WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PERMISSION#99.999% of authors are THRILLED to discuss AUs for their fics#the 'what ifs'#the 'missing scenes'#the possible alternate outcomes#JUST ASK THE AUTHOR TO CHAT WITH YOU ABOUT THIS#most of us would cry with joy if you gave us the chance to ramble about our fics!#DO NOT FEED MY FICS TO AI PLEASE I BEG YOU -@cicerfics

the worst is wanting to create and create and create but being trapped in a body that is so so so so tired

When your friend starts getting into a series you already know

I see a lot of comics talking about smut vs fluff reactions but I see no one talk about

Vs

IT HURTS ME

call me a first level warlock the way i can do one thing before i need to lie down for eight hours