[Video description: the camera follows the path of a model train track. It approaches two staring cats, whose faces take up most of the frame and are so still I thought they were were figurines at first, and pauses there; then it slowly continues. It passes one of the cats, then the other cat knocks it down. Minor incidental sounds only. End description.]
@amtrak-official is this what you meant by getting mad pussy on the train
I don't think I ever said those exact words
one small trick that keeps me immune from getting scammed out of fifty thousand dollars is not having fifty thousand dollars
A lot of people who don't have fifty thousand dollars frequently get scammed out of fifty thousand dollars anyway.
when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”
no actually me and everyone else who’s ever watched crimson peak were brainwashed by guillermo del toro into believing that incest and violence are cool and awesome. sorry
Horrifying that this pearl-clutching over horror actually being dark is unironically becoming A Thing…
ALT(tags via @waterandsilver, id in alt)
Write the problematic thing. Make people uncomfortable. Create art!
The tags are actually mine, and I need you all to know when I said "girl," I actually meant "young woman of 23 years old," and the brainrot was so deep she tried to get us all to sit down as a class and vote as to whether or not we thought the designated reading with its dark themes were appropriate reading for a classroom.
For a Gothic Horror Literature class at university level.
There was not a single person in that room under the age of 20. We were all adults, mere months away from graduating with our bachelor degrees, and this person felt comfortable trying to police us and the class contents like we were five.
Needless to say, we did not participate in a vote. Nor did the professor call her stupid to her face, no matter how much she might have wanted to. Instead, she invited anyone who felt uncomfortable to drop the class. Bafflingly, the student who complained didn't leave, but she made damn sure to let us know during every class discussion that she didn't agree with the morality of the texts.
And this wasn't recent. This was over 15 years ago, long before TikTok, so this was home-brewed idiocy likely strained through the puritanical discourse of some LiveJournal flamewar.
Basically, what I'm getting at is 'what's old is new again.'
The only difference is now everyone's got access to the Internet via the smartphone in their pocket, and they're making their ignorance everyone else's problem on a much larger scale.
vampires have been drinking human blood for centuries they don't give a fuck about guys on eight different antidepressants. they were sucking on asbestos factory workers
The absolutely hilarity of imagining some older vampires hectoring younger ones. “Back in my day, I had to drink blood with radium in it and I liked it! We glowed in the damn dark for weeks!”
You kids have no idea how easy you have it these days. "Oh last week I mixed someone on fluoxetine with someone on tramadol" boo-hoo, you know what they used to decorate houses with? Arsenic! Fucking arsenic! Oh they knew it was poison but it was such a lovely colour - now I'm as much for impractical aesthetics as the next person who sleeps in a decorative coffin but I saw it, it's just green. Green! They willingly poisoned themselves and me for green wallpaper!
You know what lead poisoning is? Nor did humans for fucking ages, they just thought the constipation was an imbalance of the humours and you know what they took for it? Mercury. Mercury! You know what they did for mercury poisoning? More fucking mercury! After a hundred years in London you can use your uncle Jerry like a thermometer!
Tramadol, gimme a break, used to be they'd take heroin for a cough. Didn't stop the cough but you'd be amazed what maladies you don't care about with your blood full of heroin. Definitely took the edge off the fucking arsenic...
undiagnosed ADHD vampire who can't understand why he is so much more focused and awake after feeding on local college student and concludes they must be destined to fall in love
@kingmakerpod This just made me think of what would happen to a vampire that tried to take Collette's blood during one of her bad headaches
Around the world today, the penumbra of the rising of the first sun of May is lined with onlookers and wellwishers, eyes on the eastern horizon to catch the first glimpse of a new season.
Because in our hearts, this is how summer returns to the northern hemisphere; this sun a baton passed in the annual relay as the south prepares for what winter may bring.
Among our number, where the hilltops flatten enough for people to trust their feet in the gloom, for over a century now morris dancers have set out in the fading dark to dance in the dawn, for the same reason we do anything: because it's what we do. That's all tradition is, after all.
And every year, alongside the bells, a passage from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather rings in my mind.
"The sun would have risen just the same, yes?"
NO.
"Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact."
THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.
...
"Really? Then what would have happened, pray?"
A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.
And so, every year, follow the sound of bells and sticks, the chorus of voices singing Hal And Tow, and you'll find a bunch of knackered weirdos in the middle of nowhere in daft hats and a chill breeze, but proud of what they've done.
After all, we just made the sun rise.
I am one of today's lucky 10,000.
I did not know until this moment that Morris Dancing existed as an irl phenomenon. I thought Pratchett made it up for his books. I was wrong. Apparently Englishmen will really get out of bed in the pitch black, stalk through the night in a costume with bells on, and dance to herald the dawn on the first of May.
Pratchett did not make this up. He didn't have to.
Dear OP, thank you for dancing in the dawn.
Oh it gets weirder! There are different schools of Morris dancer. They have fun.
The Cotswold Morris dancer is usually an old white British man, extremely serious and would be the perfect uncle if you yearned for an uncle. They wear bowler hats with flowers, white clothes and bells on their legs. They do a symmetrical polite dance with a hanky. They are VERY spry, like alarmingly spry and athletic. There is usually an accordion. In addition to the hanky thing, they also carry small rounded sticks like spoon handles, which they gently tap against each other in a pattern (this is called rapping.) Their presence usually evokes the vibe of cricket grounds, mown grass and a speech from the mayor: the genteel English folk tradition whose pagan roots are endorsed enthusiastically by the history-minded vicar. I think the best thing about everything Cotswold dancers are is that they are doing something in public that is likely supposed to be incredibly embarrassing and they are completely immune to that. Because of the purity of their confidence and focus and the courage of their convictions, nobody can object to them or interfere with them or even mock them. If a straight old man wants to wear a flowery hat and strap ribbons and bells to his legs and high-kick in the middle of town, then that’s what men do, fuck off. The cringe factor is utterly dead in these men. The second best thing is that their mathematical focus and hypnotic autistic rizz DO make you think that they are doing something Significant and Important here. Clearly they ARE underpinning the seasons because why else this confident wizard behavior?
The Border Morris dancers are the goth ones, usually wearing some mixture of black, stompy boots, a decorated top hat and a “tatted coat” of colorful dark rags. They used to paint their faces black to disguise themselves, but as this began to collide unpleasantly with blackface and anti-Blackness, the progressive ones now use alternative makeup. Today they might do a black painted eye mask or other gothy looks. Women are more common in this tradition. Their dances often involve rushing at each other in mock battle and thwacking each other in ferocious patterns with sticks. There is whooping and howling and a sense of chaos and usually a Hobby Horse; they are going for a mad max witchy vibe. Clearly these rituals also do something.
You also get fusion ones…
And outliers like the extremely sexy topless young men with knives, who randomly broke out at the wassail this year and did a sexy knife dance with each other before shouting HUP and sprinting off into the dusk. I don’t know if anyone knew who they were, but they were great at it. I’m sure it did the apples a lot of good, and I’d like to study the effect further, please come back and try it again with a control group etc. Secretly hoping OP is one of those
There are morris dancers in a whole lot of places. Some of them may have made the sun come up near you, possibly while putting on a play.
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.
children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.
couple things here:
couple more things:
from an adult point of view:
- When my work day is done, it’s done. I don’t need to spend hours each night to study or do homework.
- I don’t have tests and exams.
- I MAKE MONEY.
Sometimes I’ll be at home and start freaking out that I haven’t done any homework yet before I realize “Wait I’m 30.”
Or I’ll be asleep dreaming that I’m at school but suddenly realize at the end of the semester that I’ve missed all my classes and don’t know what’s going on
School/homework has to be a stressful thing if it gives people anxiety and nightmares over a decade after graduation.
On a serious note: I agree with all of this.
On another note “you sound like a 19th century textile baron” is my new fave insult.
Also just… *no-one* should be working 40-60 hours and struggling to support themselves. It’s obscene that that is happening no matter what age.
We shouldn’t be going ‘well I have to live this so younger people should also have to suffer it’ about.
40-60 hours is a stupid amount of time to spend working. 5 day work weeks are fucking ridiculous. Working from 18-23 ish until you’re 70-ish is disgusting, especially when we’re also more productive than we were 20 or 30 years ago.
The thing neurotypicals tend not to understand about the ADHD brain is that it really only has two gears
I turn to the chalkboard and carefully write out
WORKIN' HARD
HARDLY WORKIN'
Much like a cars transmission getting stuck between gears the adhd brain can also access a secret mode called HORKLY WARDIN' that feels bad
kd-heart
queerly-it-is
[Video description: the camera follows the path of a model train track. It approaches two staring cats, whose faces take up most of the frame and are so still I thought they were were figurines at first, and pauses there; then it slowly continues. It passes one of the cats, then the other cat knocks it down. Minor incidental sounds only. End description.]
@amtrak-official is this what you meant by getting mad pussy on the train
I don't think I ever said those exact words
