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Bitches be like ‘I’m so tired and sleepy’ and then stay up doing hyperfixtation shit for the next 5 hours

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‘unreliable narrator’ but it’s ’narrator is deeply in love with the person they are narrating’

#this is just Lemony Snicket

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Today, I would like to commemorate an event which has laid a very profound impact on the internet.

Ten years ago on this day (06/08/09), a forum website called SomethingAwful held a photoshop contest titled “create paranormal images”.  The contest would require participants to edit ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images, and then try to pass them off as authentic photos on other paranormal forums.

Two days later, on June 10th, a user by the name Victor Surge would find this thread, and become inspired.  He submitted the two pictures above, featuring a tall, faceless monster which would stalk children, who would then disappear.  He called his monster “the Slender Man”. After this initial post, Surge and others would expand on the character and the story, creating one of the internet’s most famous monsters.  The Slender Man proved to be popular enough to spread to other websites, with 4chan, Deviantart, and TV Tropes all having their own Slender-Mania. On June 20th of that same year, another user on the SomethingAwful forums found the Slender Man, and also wanted to contribute.  Noticing nobody had made any videos yet of the monster, he sat down with some of his friends and planned out a video webseries involving a former college film student discovering and unravelling the mysteries surrounding Slender Man; this would become Marble Hornets, one of the first horror-themed ARG’s of the internet.

That all happened ten years ago.  Ten years of haunting the darkest corners of the internet, and Slender Man has built up a surprisingly dense resume, for a fictional monster.  Several popular webseries, a couple hit games, at least two movies, even inspiring other characters in seperate series like the Silence in Dr Who and the Enderman in Minecraft.  And all this within a ten-year period.

I think this just attests to how much humans can be inspired by an idea.  From a small handful of edited photographs, we collectively constructed a new monster which lurks in our nightmares, and now it almost seems as natural as the horror mythos he was based on.  For better or worse, the Slender Man seems to be here to stay. Happy Birthday, Slendy!  Here’s to hoping you continue to be both terrifying and terrific!

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For those not in the know, this is one of the Amanita mushrooms referred to as a Destroying Angel. Never, ever, ever, ever forage with an app. Especially for mushrooms.

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Me: I shouldn’t buy a dessert with my order. It’s 5 more dollars. I should just get the bare minimum meal and spend less.

Karl Marx: The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Me: You’re right, Karl Marx, I am going to get a dessert.

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tumblr is, if anything, the Appalachia of social media...easy to get lost, sparsely populated, out of the loop with fast-moving modern trends. Attached to tradition. Close-knit communities. Believe in "talk shit, get hit." Everyone is doing their own thing in their own obscure little holler. Prone to pulling the most inventive turns of phrase you've ever heard out of nowhere. Somebody's always starting a racket. We sometimes repel outsiders with much aggression. Lots of talk about hell and damnation to be found. Everybody tends to forget about us for some reason

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Men invented dueling so they could shoot hot loads into eachother

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A combination of nature documentaries and crappy horror movies had broken my brain in a very specific way

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When kids are trying to explain a problem they are having to you, you need to ask questions. Kids often don't have the words that they need to explain what is going on. So, they substitute in words that they do know that are as close as possible. If you take what they say at face value, you can sometimes entirely miss the actual problem.

A recent example is a kid, ten years old, I know who kept saying that their problem is that they "get bored" when reading. I've been helping by recommending books and other material relevant to their interests to their parents, but it didn't seem to work. So, I came over, sat down with the kid, and asked them to read as much of a short story as they could before they got bored.

They could read about sixty or so words before they were unable to focus on the text any longer.

According to them, this has been a problem since they were seven. But because "boredom" was the only word they had for it, they received attempts to get them more engaging texts. That's a great strategy for most book-shy kids, but not when it's looking far more like an undiagnosed disability. This kid has amazingly supportive parents who are now looking to get them more expertly evaluated, but because they didn't have the language to explain how bad the problem was, it flew under the radar for three years.

Ask kids clarifying questions when they're having trouble, especially when the problem you think they are telling you about isn't being solved by solutions that would normally work. You might figure out why those solutions aren't working.

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yet another one forgets that linguists don't really know what a "word" is

i really don't think it's common knowledge that "word" isn't a technical linguistic term.

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“why do i believe this” and “who benefits from me believing it” are the first steps to decolonization and we should all be doing this more

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TIL anyone who's going to overwinter in Antarctica has to have had their appendix out. Because removing an appendix that's not causing any trouble just as a precaution is way better than having one that's about to burst when you're on the ass-end of the planet with no way to be rushed to a hospital if shit gets real.

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The Danish training ship “Georg Stage” (1934) dresses in rainbow colour, 2021 

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So I've had this joke in my head for a couple months (at least), but hadn't found the right spot to make it. Today it is complete.

A hole in my jeans?

Hmm? What's this?

A Patchypus?

REPAIRRY THE PATCHYPUS!!!?!!!