whatafuckingnerd782

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“Use your gifts and your talents to greatest possible effect while you can. Spread joy wherever possible. Laugh at jokes. Tell jokes. Make puns and bugger the embuggerances. Read books. Read my books. You might like them. You might find something else you like even more than them. Look for these things in life.

Question authority. Champion good causes. Speak out against injustice. Do not tolerate bullies or bigots or racists or anti-intellectuals or the narrow-minded. Use your education to challenge them. Broaden their perspectives. Make the world you interface with a happier place.

These are your choices. Choices you have been fortunate to have been given, so don’t waste them while you have them. Don’t look back in years to come and wish you had grasped a fleeting opportunity. Grasp it now with both hands, Live. Strive. Love.”

from A Little Advice for Life taken from ‘Terry Pratchett: from birth to death, a writer.’

—Sir Terry Pratchett; April 28, 1948 – March 12, 2015

One of the greatest compliments I've ever received is that I resemble Sam Vimes.

Mind how you go.

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Dunno how to put it properly into words but lately I find myself thinking more about that particular innocence of fairy tales, for lack of better word. Where a traveller in the middle of a field comes across an old woman with a scythe who is very clearly Death, but he treats her as any other auntie from the village. Or meeting a strange green-skinned man by the lake and sharing your loaf of bread with him when he asks because even though he's clearly not human, your mother's last words before you left home were to be kind to everyone. Where the old man in the forest rewards you for your help with nothing but a dove feather, and when you accept even such a seemingly useless reward with gratitude, on your way home you learn that it's turned to solid gold. Where supernatural beings never harm a person directly and every action against humans is a test of character, and every supernatural punishment is the result of a person bringing on their own demise through their own actions they could have avoided had they changed their ways. Where the hero wins for no other reason than that they were a good person. I don't have the braincells to describe this better right now but I wish modern fairy tales did this more instead of trying to be fantasy action movies.

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When can I start talking about the genuine rise of illiteracy going on in the U.S. without being called ableist? Because I'm not talking about people whose first language isn't english or about people with actual disorders, diagnosed or not.

I'm talking about the fact that several of my professors don't know where to put commas, apostrophes, and are spelling words wrong that they DEFINITELY should be getting right in their position. I'm talking about the fact that a lot of grown adults don't know the difference between your/you're, it's/its or there/their/they're. I'm talking about this weird rise of people interchangeably using woman/women??

Mistakes are mistakes. I make mistakes CONSTANTLY. Does it crush my soul when I mix up your/you're? God, yes 😭.

So I'm not talking about mistakes. I'm talking about "they never taught us that" mfs. I'm talking about "whatever it's the same thing" mfs.

I swear I don't want this to come off rude or mean but I just notice it more and more?

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one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but their unhealthy parasocial relationships with one or more of the people who created it

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but some elaborate shared-universe subset of fanfic about it that's only barely related to the original at this point, and/or an esoteric reading-against-the-text reinterpretation of the source material (often if the canon is active and ongoing this leads to becoming actively hostile toward it for its inevitably increasing failure to conform to their preferred fanon)

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but the fandom itself and gathering clout within it, so that the source material basically only exists to them as a tool for scoring points in increasingly arcane fandom disputes

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts

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if you’re having a bad day, here’s a cute little marching band

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Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

After raiding a Joann’s of materials I thought belonged in Hot Topic circa 2005 (before it just became Think Geek II: We Don’t Light Our Store,) I almost immediately tested positive for covid. So I made most of this over the last four days, and with varying levels of coherent thought and common sense. The process is documented in a thread here

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Amazon is being sued by the FTC and 17 states for being an illegal monopoly

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I do love the phrase executive dysfunction bc the image it conjures is of a bunch of people wearing business suits around a long oval conference table  arguing with each other to the point where they’re getting into physical fights, but in the background there’s just a big empty whiteboard with a To Do list with one item on it and that item is “take shower”

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I do love the phrase executive dysfunction bc the image it conjures is of a bunch of people wearing business suits around a long oval conference table  arguing with each other to the point where they’re getting into physical fights, but in the background there’s just a big empty whiteboard with a To Do list with one item on it and that item is “take shower”

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If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn't sound so bad, until you're waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it's delayed. Then you're waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that's probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they're expecting it, it's baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

Every 15 minutes, everywhere, all of the time.

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Because some people seemed curious and/or uneducated about the issue, here’s why I personally don’t eat fish:

Over half of the plastic in the ocean comes from fishing items. Mostly nets. I personally don’t want to fund an industry that causes this issue.

Common fish such as tuna and salmon can have mercury in them

Fish raised in fisheries can often be fed fish caught in the wild

Wild caught fish for general markets are caught with large nets, which often kill fish that weren’t being fished for, including endangered species.

Fish fraud, that is, a fish not being the species the seller says it is, is a huge problem and may happen in as many as 40% of sales worldwide and around a fifth of sales in the US. So that makes it difficult to know exactly what you’re buying and what impact it’s having on the environment.

I make exceptions for stuff that’s already been paid for like canned fish from food banks or fish that someone I know already bought or caught and was going to throw away.

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I personally don’t think that spiritual experiences being caused by chemicals in your brain makes them any less special

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If you think about it your grandparents talking to the cashier isn’t actually weird and in the grand scheme of things we’re the weird ones for being afraid to talk to strangers. Like obviously if someone doesn’t wanna talk don’t talk to them. But I’ve made a point recently of giving cashiers and strangers openings to talk to me if they want like saying how’s business today or how long have you owned this shop, or asking how’s things, or commenting generally how hot it is today. Things people can ignore if they want or comment on if they want.

And honestly I think it’s made my life a bit richer. I’m still terrified. I’m still scared of people because anxiety is a hard thing to fight. But it’s just nice to connect with strangers actually. Chatting with the Uber driver about his engineering degree hes getting, learning about the history of a glass shop I visited, chatting with a stranger about his escape from a war zone, telling people I’ll never see again about my dreams I know are unlikely but I’m pursuing anyways, connecting even briefly with other coffee lovers, cat people, babysitters, and wine haters. I almost never see these people again but they make my life way more fun when they take my invitation or I take theirs.

Maybe we do need to talk to other people instead of being on our phones sometimes actually. Not forcefully. And time alone on your phone is a right you have. A good thing in its own right. But you don’t have to be isolated either. It’s nice sometimes to chat with the old lady in line at the grocery store. And she’s not weird for giving you that option.

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If people don't admit that alcohol is a drug so help me God I will pour an entire bottle of wine on their hair.

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Link has powers. He can slow down time when he shoots a bow in midair or when he flurry rushes and I have the additional headcanon that he knows he’s a video game character and doesn’t care on like an existential level but will take advantage of it.

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Since Apollo is the god of medicine my personal headcanon about him is that he knows about bacteria but nobody believes him when he tells them about it and the people in Greek mythology that are supposedly great healers like Chiron and Aesculapius just listened to him and washed their hands.