The Kraken

watching my kitties groom eachother and being like “waow thats love” and then continue watching as one of them immediately pummels the shit out of the other for looking at them wrong

that is also love

god the way people talk to their pets

like i’m calling myself out here but i just uttered the words “you did the stretch and now the rare and powerful double pets” (two hands at once!!) to my cat without a trace of irony

like i do not believe my cat understands a word of what i am saying but he absolutely knows my voice and i think also my tone? but also all day i’m just randomly looking over at him like “good boy!” or “are you fluffy?” or singing little songs about his current fluff levels. to an animal. a wonderful animal but a creature who absolutely does not speak english and probably only vaguely is like “this creature is communicating with me” when the strange noises come from the person’s mouth

like i just think about this sometimes

i never wanted to baby talk this cat, i dislike the whole “i am a cat mom and this is my baby” thing, he is a cat, i am a person, and yet i just spend all day talking at him. while typing this he rolled over to show off his tummy and i had to restrain myself from saying “you got a tummy?” aloud. and then i did it anyway

(he is indeed in possession of a tummy)

talked to an offline man named tyler today who argued that tv isn't defined by interpretation the way that music or books are because "people don't have differing interpretations of, like, tony soprano"

i would like to set him loose on deangirl tumblr for 24 hours like a gerbil in a snake exhibit

obsessed with the category “offline man”

i really didn’t think it could get worse, and then-

??????????????????????????????????????????????

LMFAOOOOO

OH MY GOD.

Me at the start: weird but this isn't that bad.

The second bit:

The ending:

Yall when I found out rich people have special therapists to help them cope with the guilt of hoarding money I literally considered throwing away all the morals I never had to become a psych major for like an entire day like I would have emotionally damaged them so badly

---

From an article about these "therapists"

SEE I TOLD YALL I WASN’T MAKING IT UP

They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.

They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.

So its that easy huh

Of course it is

Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.

Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)

Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).

What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….

Nobody else has any excuse.

harold fisk - meander map of the mississippi river (1944)

quilt by timna tarr "mississippi meander"

Understanding the Johansson/Disney lawsuit thanks to Twitter wisdom…

Here’s part of Disney’s statement…

Yes. They’re excusing a breach of contract over the pandemic. Oh. So righteous.

And because context is everything…

Some say Johansson made a dick move because Disney is “the hands that feeds her”. I wonder if they’d say the same thing if this was Tom Cruise or Robert Downey Jr or some MAN of the likes.

Last, but not least:

I say: good for her. Go after the mouse. Let it all burn if you have to.

The worst part about writing fantasy is being keenly aware that you’re writing fantasy, which means that you always have to straddle a thin three-way line between anachronism, cliche, and clunk.

Take money, for example. You can’t just have people in a fictional fantasy world walk around using Euros. You consider something generic, like ‘silver coins,’ but before you know it your world starts sounding like a shitty ren faire.

So you think about the world you’ve built and its needs and its history to come up with some unique and relevant terms. But if your terms are too unique and relevant you wind up writing “yarr, you’ll be ransomed for a hundred Trade League Silver Gyrblonks” and realize your worldbuilding is now getting in the way of basic readability.

“They’re using golden valley coins!”

…didst thou mean dollars?

“Nevermind. They’re using some basic silver coin and then enough gold to be worth ten silver coins is called a ten-piece”

…Si, si, el Peso!

Trying over, they’re minted by the king so they’re called crown coins, or, these days, abbreviated, they’re just Crowns

Naturligvis, vi skifter Daler ud med Kroner!

—

The Lesson Of The Day is that all the names are already claimed by IRL, and all the almost-good-names that you could invent to get around that were used by some SFF author in the seventies e.g. I bet you can’t do Suns and Moons for your gold/silver coins, I bet some author did that already.

My fantasy nation uses solid gold coins marked by the dental impressions of the reigning king, as a sign of their purity and authenticity.

They’re called Bitcoins.

oh you can go the fuck to jail that’s what you can do, where you’ll be shackled to a chain gang hitting the blockchain with a pickaxe

[Ray Bradbury voice] He was a boy, a perfect boy. A boy in the full swing of boyhood. Ten golden summers swelled in his chest like stolen berries plucked from neighbor’s gardens on gilded afternoons. It was 1947 and holy fuck he was so fucking good at being a carefree white American boy in an idealized ode to my own romanticized childhood. I wish I were ten. I am old now and Death comes for me like the wind.

I’m just going to leave this here…

im on mobile, can someone make one that adds “jews”

Done

Cowards won’t reblog this version.

Add black people/ethnic minorities in general and you’re set

The PR after the Meghan and Harry interview has been pretty desperate and transparent but I am LOSING it over this headline, what a gift

The reactions. I can’t stop laughing.

Lost it at the rock’s tweet

I’m not sure which is funnier. Stanley Tucci saying that Ryan Reynolds is a sexier bald man than Prince William when he has a full head of hair, or Stanley Tucci saying that TILDA SWINTON is a sexier bald man than Prince William.

He’s correct

mythbusters

Attention: On July 14th 2021, the God of Mischief will be transforming Tumblr into TOMBLR and Tom Hiddleston will be answering some of your questions!

Ask wisely.

Tom Hiddleston coming to tumblr is going to be like when the actors in Galaxy Quest find out an entire race of people have been secretly worshipping them and they’re all hella weird

Let’s get it done

Teamsters, with their very well established "don't fuckin test me, buddy" policy, might be able to help make this happen...

yes! 

This would be amazing for those workers.

Ummm now that you say it, it would be really great for the workers too but my first thought was how pissed off bezo will be and that tickled me

YES!

Oh, this is exciting! According to this article from CNN (published June 24, 2021);

Like, this could legitimately be huge. I'm tentatively extremely excited about what this might mean for the future.

Diné mythology:

Unfortunately, Coyote had “a good idea”.

Celtic Mythology:

Unfortunately you pissed off the Fae

Hindu mythology:

Unfortunately, another asura managed to obtain a boon from Bramha/Vishnu/Shiva

I love how everyone’s mythology has some variation of “And then there was This Asshole”

What a funny way to say “cops blew up neighborhood”

It’s been really hilarious to watch the LAPD try to dodge any responsibility for this while the media tries desperately to help them by publishing the most confusing fucking headlines but what really happened is that the cops found and confiscated thousands of pounds of “illegal” fireworks in LA and then decided to take 10 pounds of that, call the press, and make a show of using their new expensive toy, the “total containment” truck that is supposed to be able to take explosions of up to 15 pounds.

So they took the 10 pounds of explosives and their toy truck to a poor Black neighborhood, got reporters there, stuck the explosives inside, and set them off intentionally instead of just defusing them like they did with the other 4,990 pounds of fireworks.

For some reason, likely because something went wrong with their truck which I bet cost the city a shit ton of money, the containment completely failed and the explosion destroyed cars, homes, and injured 17-19 people (I’ve seen different reports with different numbers), a couple of whom were in critical condition but it sounds like everyone survived.

The LAPD then had the audacity to tweet that they didn’t know what caused the explosion when it was them who caused the explosion, intentionally, and we know because they called the media so that everybody could see them do it.

In summary, the LAPD wanted to show off/justify their ridiculous budget but their expensive toy was a dud and so they ended up bombing a poor Black neighborhood (because they would never risk this in a white neighborhood) and don’t want to admit it.

This is your annual warning that *there will be no warning* when fire season is about to start. Nobody’s going to post “Hey everyone, remember, fire season starts next Friday!”. The state will just catch fire. You will wake up and the sky will be orange. It could be tomorrow, it could be July, it could be August, we could get incredibly lucky and skip it altogether. If you hope to buy an indoor air purifier before fire season, if you want to ensure everyone in your home has a P100 for going outside, if you want to stockpile water and you haven’t already, the time to do it is today.