Ms. PhilosophyTube is right

Official Post of Massachusetts

patrons chose slime girl this month! :) Full pic is here!

Strong Bad is having a normal one today

MF DOOM's villainous Mac and Cheese recipe

—

The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett

(I find this entirely too funny)

I remember this one! I don't think I had it for assigned reading, but one of literature professors lent it to me. There's some interesting hair-splitting in here about evocational vs. invocational magic, if I remember right.

absolutely losing my mind that a bunch of nimby assholes spent $500k to build a sandcastle that was promptly wiped away

ted i really could not disagree more this is far from catastrophic. i am ensconced.

literally selling sand to people who live on the beach. some people's hustle and grift game cannot be overstated. world class shit right here

i love tumblr but i hate that we have been conditioned to think you can’t add some of the most insightful shit you’ve ever seen to absolute shitposts. please by all means reblog my posts with this kind of context because it’s so important. excellent points here.

Less than three months after U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin and her colleagues launched an investigation into the four major American manufacturers of inhalers, three of the companies have relented, making commitments to cap costs for their inhalers at $35 for patients who now pay much more.

25 million Americans have asthma and 16 million Americans have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), meaning over 40 million Americans rely on inhalers to breathe.

Inhalers have been available since the 1950s, and most of the drugs they use have been on the market for more than 25 years.

According to a statement from the Wisconsin Senator’s office, inhaler manufacturers sell the exact same products at a much lower costs in other countries. One of AstraZeneca’s inhalers, Breztri Aerosphere, costs $645 in the U.S.—but just $49 in the UK. Inhalers made by Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, and Teva have similar disparities.

Baldwin and her Democratic colleagues—New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—pressured the companies to lower their prices by writing letters to GSK, Boehringer Ingelheim, Teva, and AstraZeneca requesting a variety of documents that show why such higher prices are charged in America compared to Europe.

As a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Baldwin recently announced that as a result of the letters they had secured commitments from three of the four to lower the out-of-pocket costs of inhalers to a fixed $35.00 rate.

“For the millions of Americans who rely on inhalers to breathe, this news is a major step in the right direction as we work to lower costs and hold big drug companies accountable,” said Senator Baldwin.

A full list of the inhalers and associated drugs can be viewed here.

It’s the second time in the last year that pharmaceutical companies were forced to provide reasonable prices—after the cost of insulin was similarly capped successfully at $35 per month thanks to Congressional actions led by the White House.

-via Good News Network, March 25, 2024

I made this in reference to comic/game stuff but I’m glad to see this one’s going over well with all the writers

Have you played DALLAS : The Television Rolepalying Game

By James Dunnigan

Playing through scenarios, mostly as a character from Dallas. Seduction is an actual stat (along with Coersion, Persuasion, and Investigation, as well as Power and Luck)

This dumb thing has always been a personal favourite of mine. It was the second tabletop roleplaying game ever to be based on a popular media license (the first, of course, being Star Trek), and features a number of notable game-mechanical innovations for its era, including the earliest known example of a formal "social combat" framework, as well as a rudimentary form of troupe play, in which each player takes on the roles of multiple characters drawn from a common pool.

(Unfortunately, the Venn diagram of prime-time soap opera fans and tabletop RPG players in 1980 had effectively zero overlap. Eighty thousand copies of the game were produced, of which only a few hundred were ever sold; the publisher subsequently went bankrupt.)

i'll talk trash about D&D 3/3.5 all day long but i gotta say the core book cover aesthetic fucked so hard. everyone got hyper burned out on this kind of thing 20 years ago because everybody did it all at once for a while but look, get over here and gaze with new and forgiving eyes.

3rd ed went "oh wouldn't it be sick if we made them look like fantasy books?"

and 3.5 fucking doubled down.

do you not wish to crack open a fucking tome, boy?

do you not wish to gaze upon my magical spells?

they were so filled with fantasy and wonderment that the nostalgia reprint premium edition in 2012 was like oh shit we dreamed too big we gotta reduce the whimsy so nobody knows we were cringe in middle school.

I've noticed that some people making car content on the internet have stopped saying "tranny" as short for transmission, and using "trans" instead. Not sure if that's because of self-censorship to avoid demonetization on youtube, or if its because they actually don't want to say a slur anymore, but all I do know is it can end with some pretty funny results:

re prev tags

Doctor Who is celebrating 60 years by releasing over 800 episodes on BBC iPlayer.

The sci-fi fantasy show first premiered in 1963 and has cemented itself as a permanent fixture in pop culture history. This fall, fans will be able to stream the entire 800-plus episode series along with spin-offs like Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood, and Class, and the behind-the-scenes series Doctor Who Confidential.

Each Dr Who episode will be made accessible for all Whovians, with subtitles, audio description, and sign language options available for the very first time.

Oh! I forgot to mention! It’s IBS Awareness Month as well!

I'll tell you, not only is my IBS chronic but also quite disabling.

How

There's a cinematic equivalent of "this meeting could have been an email" where you get about two hours into a feature-length blockbuster and it occurs to you that this would have lost nothing meaningful if it had been a ten-minute short film on YouTube.

I would also volunteer "this miniseries should have just been a movie".

See Kenobi. It's a good story ... that only really needed ninety minutes to two hours to tell. They had to really pad out the middle to stretch it out to a full season when it could have just been a movie.

Level 1: Miniseries that could have been a feature film.

Level 2: Feature film that could have been a short film.

Level 3: Short film that could have been a TikTok sketch.

Level 4: TikTok sketch that could have been a rage comic.

Level 5: Yeah, maybe just keep that one to yourself.