Hey, it's the Durvin

@thedurvin / thedurvin.tumblr.com

All facts are fun, you guys are just mean

My first video game, "StarStabber Zirc: Gemstone Collect-'Em-Up", is playable free in-browser on Itch.io. Infinite lives, nineteen levels, weird collage graphics, and dozens of evil weirdos in the way of collecting precious Plot Gems. Play it here: https://durvin.itch.io/starstabber-zirc-gemstone-collect-em-up

Main blog for the guy that runs:

Also: shirts, stickers, pins, &c. on my TeePublic shop, found-object installations on Instagram, many-song mashups and badcore boogies on YouTube, and various original and fan fics on AO3. I, uh, just really like making things

It’s so hard to babytalk a kitten named Kevin properly when he’s doing shit like this, but fortunately after I took the picture he immediately started biting my ear

#I really hope he grows out of this shit though #hopefully we’re disciplining properly and not reinforcing #but he thinks EVERY interaction is play

Got called “ma’am” again at Kroger today. I guess I shouldn’t complain about people thinking I’m a butch woman, it’s a great look and a great vibe, but like…is it really so strong that not even a beard sways them

Tip for my fellow vegetable-averse people that are learning that if you want to be healthy you should probably have some vegetables: dry-fried fresh spinach is tasteless and nearly unnoticeable in pretty much anything savory or salty.

Just toss a handful of shredded fresh spinach (remove any long stems, which I didn’t do here) into a steel pan with no oil or water on medium heat and stir occasionally to make sure it doesn’t burn onto the pan; the moisture cooks out and you’re left with a small bit of papery green that you can add to soup, pasta, sandwiches, &c., all without affecting taste, smell, or texture. It does affect the nutrients a bit, but while cooking reduces some, it actually seems to increase others, all in a much denser package.

(If you just eat it plain it will still have a taste, it’s just really easily masked)

(Also sorry but you have to use fresh, canned spinach is disgusting and nothing you do to it will ever mask that taste and smell)

(I’m sure there’s a fancy culinary word for frying without oil, but if I was a fancy culinary man I wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with)

Insomnia the other night left me brainstorming an underdeveloped OC, a Predator-knockoff alien hunter whose failure to kill Arnold Schwarzenegger is punished by her civilization by forcing her into human form to rack up some cool kills by hunting various movie monsters. I specifically want to avoid or subvert “badass alien that hates Earth” tropes:

She loves human food, although since her race is strictly carnivorous she’s having a hard time adapting to eating plants and carbs and drinking water; low-quality processed meats with lots of organs and bone meal are her favorite. She especially loves condiments and will drink them directly from the bottle
She absolutely loves dancing, which she considers a way to show off your grace and agility, important aspects of a warrior/hunter culture, and she is actually a better dancer than hunter. The only problem is her culture’s music also displays similar traits and most closely resembles avant-garde jazz while the dance moves combine the elegance of a tango with the violence of moshing, sort of like a fighting game rhythm game where you have to hit on the beat. She was an aspiring musician at one time and her newfound independence on Earth allows her to practice, but the closest she’s been able to find to her preferred instrument is one of those power drills where the speed (and thus the pitch) goes up the harder you squeeze the trigger, with rhythmic accompaniment from bone claves in the other hand
She has no problem with how humans smell. She can identify and locate people by smell. Her hygiene is fine because she understands the urge to mask one’s scent from predators and enemies, although while on a hunt she does compulsively roll in things to help her blend in.
She is still getting the hang of the human form and tends to use her lips in the same way that Predators use their mandibles, writhing them constantly when she’s agitated. She is frustrated by the fact that she has long hair but it’s limp and can’t be used to grab things. Her race’s natural form is something like a velociraptor (or rather a mimic octopus impersonating one), and when she gets angry or excited she goes into those postures.
She is absolutely terrible at explaining xenobiology and space travel and has no idea what her human sidekicks are talking about when they ask her how it works, and while she does have some cool alien weapons she bought most of it from a catalog and periodically needs to check manuals and Space Reddit to figure out how to use them.

#my muse #Astro huntress x

starstabberzirc

starstabberzirc

HEY

So it turns out I MAY have accidentally, subconsciously “borrowed” the protagonist for my collage video game from They Might Be Giants’ collage music video for “the Communists Have the Music”

#is it a completely unique concept? no.#but still

This dude needs to have a name you can snap at him when he’s climbing your leg or chewing on power cords (which he is always doing if not sleeping), not something prosaic like George (his original name) or cutesy like Pickle (vet nickname due to his dick problems) so last night we decided to name him for a friendly but stupid and combative man we used to know:

Kevin

Turns out it’s a great name for when he’s in trouble but feels a little weird when he’s feeling mushy and kneading and cuddling to be like “aww, Kevin”, but fortunately that only happens like ten minutes a day

chaumas-deactivated20230115

diysyfhcjtssuiteryyxhcft

The biggest lie in fanfiction is that everyone has a first aid kit in their house. I have never owned one in my life

ragingbookdragon

Wait do y’all not have like…first aid boxes in your hall closets? Like just a plastic box that has your basic first aid shit?

Another bit y’all should all have: Benadryl (or equivalent). A friend of mine just yesterday got stung by a yellowjacket and despite never having reactions before developed a full-body rash that she didn’t seem to realize was a Very Bad Sign

ALSO one very basic thing: try to make sure your first aid stuff is all in one place (hence “kit” not just “own these things and store them in various place around the house”) so if you, say, break a glass washing dishes, your guests can FIND it without you having to brainstorm which of six drawers in different rooms the gauze might be in

This dude needs to have a name you can snap at him when he’s climbing your leg or chewing on power cords (which he is always doing if not sleeping), not something prosaic like George (his original name) or cutesy like Pickle (vet nickname due to his dick problems) so last night we decided to name him for a friendly but stupid and combative man we used to know:

Kevin

#my cats #orange cat

Curious about the rest of the career of Christopher Collins, aka Chris Latta, the original voices of Starscream and Cobra Commander; turns out he was a stand-up comedian and died unexpectedly in 1994, but not before being the original voice of Mr Burns on the Simpsons, several minor roles on 90s Star Treks, and starring in the bizarre lost “King Koopa’s Kool Kartoons” where he gave away Nintendo-related prizes and showed non-Nintendo-related public-domain cartoons while dressed like this

timemachineyeah

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

hugh-lauries-bald-spot

whats a stereotype for your country that you absolutely do. mine is that i unironically go "eh" and apologize a lot and i often drink maple syrup straight

#burger #large soda #processed cheese #not the American portion size but the food choices yes

cuties-in-codices

cuties-in-codices

luna, riding a cancer

in a medical-astrological manuscript ("iatromathematisches hausbuch"), bavaria, ca. 1474

source: Munich, UB, 2º Cod. ms. 578, fol. 6r

This is just such a strange image in a way that’s difficult to articulate. Not just the face she’s making, or the basic fact that she’s riding a giant crustacean. It’s also that it seems like she’s riding it by standing on its back in a sort of half-crouch. And that I can’t figure out how those wheels are supposed to work.

I’m just picturing running across this in real life. Like you’re a medieval peasant, minding your own business, when you see someone traversing the dirt road nearby. They’re moving incredibly slowly, because they’re standing on the back of a giant wheeled lobster that’s just inching its way down the path. Well, kind of standing — it looks like the rider’s knees and elbows are bent to keep her balance, so it’s more like she’s in a slight crouch. She has a strange grin on her face, and carrie’s a horn and what appears to be a lit torch. It’s daytime. You watch for a bit, as the wheels squeak and the rider wobbles on the back of her crab-thing that moves significantly slower than normal walking speed. “Oh,” you realize, “it’s just the moon.”

The half crouch + the hands out with bent arms: she’s skateboarding. She’s about to do a sick grind off somebody’s hayrick

GIF by fuckyeahstu

therobotmonster

Tumblr’s new sexyman is

*spins wheel*

LONDO MOLLARI

#oh god no #the worst part is he has all the sexyman attributes #weird genitalia #flamboyant personality #war criminal364 notes

Deathly pale
Flamboyant personality
War criminal
Gay as fuck for his arch-nemesis
Six prehensile penises

Really, he checks all of the boxes

therobotmonster

Wait till this website gets ahold of Vir.

GIF by yumyumpod

About ten years before Babylon 5 had the Centauri, Devo used weirdly similar costumes in a promo for LaserDiscs

Hey all you outdoorsy types and naturalists and whatnot: what would cause raised itchy bites that develop bruises two days after?

This is on my wife and she’s already been to the doctor to start, uh, a medicine whose name I forget that should help with everything they thought it might be, but I’d love any input. Happened in the woods in central Virginia

#bruises #bug bites

blancamzlooksat

Title illustration from a 1678 pamphlet called “The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire.”

the-october-country

And here are scans of the pamphlet! https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=oxFIAQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PP1&hl=en

blancamzlooksat

old timey crop circle story?

Yeah, actually, it pretty closely matches a modern crop circle story, followed by descriptions of some UFO sightings (and also some of what was considered at the time to be similar stories like “in Lincolnshire there was an evil Papist and then his wife had an ugly baby”)

It kicks off with this brilliant bit of logic: obviously demons are real, but that just proves God is real

(Maybe just included to make sure the publishers didn’t get in trouble for Purposely Scaring People With Spooky Stories?)

Source: Wikipedia

Marco A. Cezar, from Talento 5 (1992)

scan

Love how we all freaked out about the idea of celebrities making Tumblr their primary platforms and then to my knowledge the only ones that did it were Chuck Tingle, Maia Crimew, and Doug Jones

I did somehow forget Lynda Carter and Mark Ruffalo, but I’m not counting Wheaton and Gaiman because they’ve been here all along. Jim Benton has been on here for a while but I think nobody quite processed who he was, and I know there’s a few novelists and staff members from A-list comics and TV around too.

I’m still curious about the celebrities that seem to know about Tumblr but don’t use it under their real names. Yes the DropOut team and at least one McElroy are on here someplace but I’m thinking more of Malala Yousafzai and the Obama sisters. You could be mutuals with them and not even know it

Oh oh oh I forgot another important one: if you see someone fact-checking a Tolkien shitpost with incredibly precise citations punctuated with devastating insults so absurd they clearly mean no actual offense, there is a very real chance that’s Stephen Colbert. He purposely does absolutely nothing to identify him and he’ll deny it if you ask

Not shaming anybody for their shipping and fandoms and such but I’m still taken aback every time I stumble onto Tumblr’s Moe From The Simpsons fandom. You do you but that is an unusual choice of blorbo

That was one option they explored but seemed to generally prefer shipping Moe with trans!Herman the Gun Store Guy. Again I am not shaming anyone for this but what a lens to view the Simpsons world through

#skinner and chalmers though? almost canon

Not shaming anybody for their shipping and fandoms and such but I’m still taken aback every time I stumble onto Tumblr’s Moe From The Simpsons fandom. You do you but that is an unusual choice of blorbo