Attie the Penguin

help

So this showed up on Twitter and

And here’s that link you’re welcome

“if I cant have my dignity, at least I have something to read” <- put this on my tombstone

i nipped into a car park for a vending machine break, and while i was sat there drinking my lemon boss, a priest in full finery walked up, fervently blessed all four sides of a minivan, and then walked away again

the few minutes before google maps shed some light on this were uniquely confusing ones

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

Small Town Grocery Store Stories: LGBTQ+ friendly edition

Me: minding my own damn business in the grocery store

One of my students and a few of his teammates enter the dairy aisle. 

My student is holding hands with one of his teammates. 

My student: Oh hey, Professor X!

Me, who has both my student and his girlfriend in my class: …Hello

My student, looking at his hand-holding partner: Oh! Don’t worry. My girlfriend knows. Not that I’m cheating! I’m not cheating. I’m not gay.

Hand Holding boy: Not that being gay is a bad thing! It’s a good thing!

My student: Right! But no, listen. We aren’t together, we just hold hands in public sometimes.

Hand Holding Boy: Especially on Friday nights. And weekends. And at away games.

My student: Because sometimes people will say shit and then we can punch them! And if the fight started because someone was being homophobic, coach won’t get mad at us.

Hand Holding Boy: Always nice to punch a homophobe. And [gesturing to another boy in the group] maybe they’ll think twice about saying something to [other boy’s name] if he ever gets a boyfriend and wants to hold his hand for real. The Gay One, resigned but smiling: I’ve decided it’s sweet and not really fucking weird.

This is what “boys will be boys” is meant to be

This is the best thing I’ve seen in a while.

Doctor: $140,000 a year

Furry artist on Patreon: $160,000 a year

i think you’re lowballing the furry art amount tbh

I’m sorry for the inaccuracies, Doctor Yiff

no matter how I respond to this I don’t look good, well played. i walked right into that

Well, furry artists are typically more competent and courteous than your average doctor, so I can see that.

Did you just legitimately tell me that a person who draws wolf ass is more competent than a dude who spent 8+ years in a university to give you your lung transplant?

doctors are bullshit and furry artists perform an infinitely more valuable service to society compared to them

You will die in 7 days

It took doctor’s like 10 years to diagnose what was wrong with me, some insisting I was faking for attention while a furry artist I knew just went “that sounds like crohn’s” after hearing me complain once and ended up being right

Also I can’t go to a doctor and ask them to draw Rouge the Bat wider than she is tall with tits to match, now can I

You could if you weren’t a fucking coward

World Heritage Post

Art by coolfrogdude together at last

[ID: a comic illustrating the above thread as if it was happening in a theater. The users are mostly shaped like their icons, pukicho is a pikachu and hokuto-ju-no-ken is a gengar. The last panel is gengar looks back where a speech bubble comes out of the crowd to say, “you could if you weren’t a fucking coward.” /end]

I can’t believe I’m actually seeing this post

Magic of tumblr,

I am morally obligated to add the YouTube video whenever this thread crosses my dash

I’ve seen this thread more than a few times. But this is the first time I’ve seen this video. So thank you for your service.

Come on [tumblr] where’s my Mars Bear fanart?

i love this

Wonder if they're cousins?

I found this online and I love it.

Agglutinative languages everyone

if you ever doubt your writing, be it your themes, or the reason behind it, remember that h.g wells wrote war of the worlds both as a commentary on colonialism and the horrors it brings, and because he fucking hated his neighbours and his 13 hour job, and wanted to write about the town in which he lived getting blasted to the fucking ground by lasers into an irreparable heap and all of the townspeople dying painfully 

you, too, can channel your hatred for that guy that lives down the hall and blasts music at 4am into the one of the most influential science fiction stories ever written! fuck it! i believe in you!!  

This is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever seen

Been looking for this

Just putting this out there to let people know to watch what they post because you can be found and if you think that the government can't do this ...

Well, you better think again!!

Reminder that in 2017 4chan played capture the flag with Shia LaBeouf. Without any kind of a retail store to use for landmarks they got a rough estimate of the flags location from a livestream. They used the position of the sun to narrow it down to a specific time zone, they tracked the flight paths of planes seen flying overhead to further narrow it down. Then someone in the area drove around honking his horn while viewers on the livestream told him if he was getting closer until he found and stole the flag.

A good example of what one person who knows coding can do, and what a mobile group can do.

Reading the wikipedia page on the list of emerging technologies –

agriculture, material science, etc: MAGIC!… can I chew on that

information technology: ugh. that buzzword. 

gell-mann amnesia but for feeling let down by developments in your own field

I take it back. This gives me a bone deep ugh feeling even though I know I’m doing the Copenhagen theory of ethics thing.

I take that back. The background on this is that most bullets are made out of lead (I didn’t know this! Apparently the even fancier choice with the desirable material properties is depleted uranium) and shooting victims can get quite bad lead poisoning if bullets fragment and are left in.

Okay, yes. Please make bullets that don’t do this. I am on board.

I was in Pinnacles National Park like two weeks ago and while hiking we came across this California condor preening itself near the trail. They nearly went extinct - there are only 300 left in the wild - and lead shot was one of the big reasons why:

As of a few years ago, it’s now illegal in California to hunt any wildlife (but not people I guess) with lead ammunition, largely for the sake of the condors.

humanity assiduously devising ways of killing things that don’t cause lead poisoning is very on brand for us as a species I have to say.

we’ll put lead in the water pipes but not the bullets

It’s a little wild to me to see the non-lead ammo debate brought up in the context of school shootings, and yes, it is wildly dissonant to discuss gun violence in terms of “how do we make our deadly weapons only deadly in some ways and not others,” but in the specific context of hunting, the question of moving to non-lead (typically copper-based) ammunition is an actual big deal. Both for species like condors, eagles, and other scavengers likely to ingest lead fragments from gut piles, as stated above, but also for anyone who eats hunted game meat. When game is butchered, the wound channel is usually cut out - but lead bullets fragment so much, and their fragments penetrate so deeply, that there is still considerable amounts of lead left in. It’s a particularly thorny risk problem and overlooked hazard for families in low-income, rural areas that rely on food banks; many states have programs for hunters to donate venison to food banks, and it can be one of the few affordable protein sources available. But it could also be chock full of lead - because the venison is donated, rather than commercially sold, neither the USDA or FDA regulate its quality or lead content. (There is no safe level of lead exposure. To quote the CDC, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified. Even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to negatively affect a child’s intelligence, ability to pay attention, and academic achievement.”)

I used to live in North Dakota, and so I know quite a lot of people who do not buy meat at the grocery store. Ever. They hunt for deer and other wild game, have their kills butchered, buy half a pig from a local farmer and use some of that to make venison/pork sausage, and that’s their meat for the year. It is way cheaper than buying at the grocery store, they enjoy hunting, the deer population is unsustainably high (because we killed all the wolves), and also if you’re judging ‘what meat should I eat based on the animal’s quality of life,’ it’s probably a better life if the animal is wild and free than to be raised in a feedlot where you have nothing to do but stand around and eat in very crowded conditions.

Now, some of those hunters hunt with bow and arrow, because they enjoy that more than guns. And you don’t have to worry about lead poisoning because arrows don’t fragment and even if they did they’re not made out of lead. But most of them hunt with guns.

y’all need to go see the titanic jokes they were making back THEN.

it’s the precursor to “they’re writing fanfics” oh my god

are you THIS old?

Excuse you I am this old

Translation request by @unbridled. English added by me :)

:3

Don't ask me to explain, I thought of a pun and I drew it

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

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

first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line

second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all

third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below

fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?

fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves

sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it

seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him

eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night

ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him

tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk

eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important

twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go

thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme

fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader

fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that

sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why