noonmutter

[noonmutter]

terry vs. toffee?

terry vs. toffee.

@bovineblogger

[noonmutter]

Well then. Pheonix had originally only called Leon over to playfully push back at Barry after he taunted her. It had been for fun, really, and After Dark really brought no shame, hence the reason why she didn't think twice about yelling across the crowded room to summon him over. When Leon asked if he had permission to touch Barry, she'd said yes. Leon was their friend, he knew they were married, he wasn't going to suddenly do anything explicit with her husband. "Put him in his place." Another bluff. "Make him get on the floor." "She thinks she can win tonight." Barry had responded, a smirk on his face. That smirk had been wiped off as soon as Leon took hold of his hair and lowered himself - Barry not even fighting back - to the ground. Phe watched in flustered shock as her husband's cheek was pressed to the floor, Leon giving HER a little lesson in the process. She could barely get the words out when Leon reached up for her hand, to replace his on Barry's head. And then he stood up, brushed his knees off and left them there to go back to whatever it was he had been doing before she had called him over. It had taken a little bit of a wheeze and chuckle for Barry to break her out of her thoughts. And all of her smugness and cocky demeanour from earlier had disappeared, even when she grabbed Barry's hand to lead him outside for some fresh air once he'd been released up off the floor. For a moment, she'd been overwhelmed. She wasn't angry at Leon, and she never would be. She'd given him permission. But perhaps she didn't expect THAT to happen. What had she expected him to do though? Leon was...well. He was an expert in a side she'd rarely explored the depths of herself up until recently. And even then, Phe had BARELY scratched the surface of it. There was a different mood between herself and Barry afterwards, as they sat outside. A bit of banter back and forth....but something else stirring under the surface. Something that she was going to talk to Leon about. @noonmutter & @disruptanddisturb for mentions

#not my writing #leon #phe #barry #he'd do it again too #it was all he could do not to burst out laughing at Phe's expression

[noonmutter]

I will never not watch glam kitchen.

"Enjoy the sodium desgraciadas"

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...how on earth is DBZ not here?

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With the caveat that you talk to me about it OOC first and don't just pop up one day improv-ing about childhood memories and expecting me to yes-and you, ye I'm all for this

This has been on my mind for long but I’m gonna do this - please reblog this if you’re comfortable with pre-establishing relationships. I do not mean “met at the grocery store two weeks ago” or “have a common friend”, but rather stuff like “have been best friends since kindergrden”, “go for a beer every friday”, “friends with benefits”, “dated in highschool”, “hate each other’s guts because -insert reason-”  etc. Something meaningful (but not necessarily shippy) and I mean with muns/characters you have not interacted with, because I cannot believe I am the only one who prefers jumping right into the heart of the human interaction.

[noonmutter]

I went to a restaurant with a friend yesterday and upon entering we saw these splendid blueberry tarts under bell jars on the counter and we made jokey small talk with the waitress like oh, people will fight over these if there's not enough for everyone, it'll tear families apart, are you making more later? and she said no, I'm afraid that's our entire stock for today, but there are 18 slices, it should be plenty! It was a small village restaurant with only one menu du jour so there weren't any other dessert options but they don't usually get that many customers—but then a couple of large groups arrived and most people noticed the tarts like we did, and went ohh blueberry tart, it's been a while, I can't wait, and it became clear that when we'd get to the end of our meal there would be winners and losers in the blueberry tart rush

But later as we were about to order dessert I wasn't hungry anymore and I was like well that's too bad but someone else will be glad to get 'my' slice of tart—and my friend said yeah, me :) You should order it anyway, I'll eat both! At first I thought she was joking, but no. I said, there's not enough for everyone, you can't take two, and she said, we were going to order two slices, what difference does it make? and I was baffled that she couldn't see the ethical difference between two people eating one slice of tart each vs. one person eating two, when there's a limited quantity of tart. I felt like we were in a simplistic social justice metaphor it was so obvious, but there was no changing her mind. When I said "it's just... not nice" she said "okay" with a shrug, and what can you say to that. She added, you don't know any of these people and I was like, why are we reverting to tribal dynamics in a non-apocalyptic setting, how would you feel if we'd arrived a bit later and seen others ordering two desserts knowing you'd get zero? And she said, I would think that's their right, and I felt kind of amazed.

I pointed out that if she didn't think it was a wee bit wrong, she wouldn't ask me to order her second piece as if it was for me, and she said yeah maybe we don't need to do that, there's no law preventing me from ordering two desserts. What about Kant's categorical imperative Okay I guess you're not breaking any laws by taking more than your fair share of a thing other people also want, just failing a kindergarten-level morality test. I felt embarrassed for sounding like an annoying preachy rigid person so I dropped the issue, and as she ate her two slices she'd smile at me every time we overheard someone order coffee without dessert—like "See? There'll be enough, no one will be deprived of tart because of me!" as if that cancelled the fact that she didn't care in the first place. I guess it was one of these tiny issues that can still significantly alter the way you perceive a person. I tried to tell myself not to be so bothered about this small thing but I was! so bothered. And I felt like writing a letter to some agony aunt like "should I end a friendship over irreconcilable blueberry tart ethics"

#meh #it's a restaurant and all the food in it is therefore a luxury item #i don't really feel bad for buying what i want if i want it #since i am not denying somebody a thing that they explicitly Need or will actually suffer for not having #it's not only about how much is available it's about whether it's actually a loss not to have it or just not a treat

[noonmutter]

Doing something embarrassing, gross, or graceless in this household = suggestive eyebrow waggle and an extremely confident "lllladies," as though we just finished flexing our Adonis-like muscles that we absolutely do not have. It makes us laugh and we move on with our days

a fools guide to not wanting to die anymore

by me, a fool who doesnt wanna die anymore 

never make a suicide joke again. yes this includes “i wanna die” as a figure of speech. swear off of it. actually make an effort to change how you think about things.

find something to compliment someone for at least 4 times a day. notice the little things about the world that make you happy, and use that to make other people happy.

talk to people. initiate conversation as often as you possibly can. keep your mind busy and you wont have to worry anymore

picture the bad intrusive thoughts in youe head as an edgy 13 year old and tell them to go be emo somewhere else

if someone makes you feel bad most of the time, stop talking to them. making yourself hang out with people who drain you is self harm. stop it.

[noonmutter]

Limiting the choice to the shows and movies I have seen/know of. I'm not asking who the first actor you have seem playing Arthur was, rather the one you instinctively think about when someone mentions him or the one closest to your heart.

#graham chapman #monty python #I literally watched 90% of that movie through memes as a kid

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I don’t think it’s true at all that the reason most people dress boring is that they want to fit in sometimes you just need to accept that not everyone is obsessed with finding a unique style some people just wear clothes to avoid public indecency

#look i get tired of clothing so fast #it's annoying and sometimes its coarse and it has to be everywhere

[noonmutter]

*slowly looks at Dwyn and Terry*

[noonmutter]

ⓘ You can Bite your Friends.

#gnar gnar gnar

[noonmutter]

mmm purple

no I don't see any reason to consider this a warning of any kind what are you talking about

Home Ownership Was a Mistake

This is for @trickybonmot, who may or may not use some of these stories in a fic.

Okay. So.

In the year of our lord 2010, my wife and I were lucky enough to be gifted $20k by my parents, which in those days (given it was a historically low point for real estate prices in Seattle) was enough for a down payment on a house. It was an astounding confluence of luck and privilege that led to us being homeowners, because if they gave us the same money now it would go precisely nowhere.

Anyway, it was not enough money for a large house, or a fancy house. We looked at a lot of places, only some of which were move-in ready (and one of which was absolutely just a tear-down) and eventually settled on our current place, which is a 1910 bungalow with a detached garage that was finished and turned into a studio.

Was it the most aesthetically pleasing house when we bought it? No. The walls were white, the carpet was light beige, and the paint had seen better days. That said, it was move-in ready and the owner was pretty desperate to sell, so we took it!

The inspector let us know that some of the wiring was still the old knob-and-tube, so we'd want that updated sooner rather than later, but it looked pretty good. About half the outlets were grounded, so it didn't stop us from plugging in three-prong appliances. We just had to use more extension cords than maybe we'd prefer.

The Electrical

The first big house thing we paid for was to have the entire place rewired. Our circuit breaker was a mystery, we didn't have enough outlets, and we were tired of being stuck with specific layouts of our stuff due to the lack of grounded outlets. We were expecting about half the wiring to be up to code, and the rest would need an update.

Spoiler alert: HAHAHAHAHAHA.

The rewiring took about a week, and every morning the electrician sat down with us and told us what new fire trap he'd uncovered.

"Yeah, so the knob and tube wiring going to the lights in the ceiling? Knob and tube gets hot when it's running, and yours is under three layers of insulation."

"You know how you thought your outlets were grounded? They weren't, actually, the ground wire just went elsewhere into the house and wasn't connected to anything."

"So there's wiring in your crawlspace? Whoever put that in nailed some sheets of wood paneling over it, so we had to rip the wood paneling out to access it."

I think the job was about $15k when it was done, we had many many more outlets, and our house was no longer one bad day from lighting itself on fire. Victory, I guess?

The Studio Window

This was leaking a bit, and we knew it was leaking when we moved in. (South facing walls get all the weather in our region.) We were not handy enough to replace it ourselves at the time and we also didn't have money because I got laid off shortly after we bought the house and was making my living doing costume commissions. Solution: Trade costuming work to an acquaintance who did carpentry.

The window, we discovered, was not so much a finished window as it was a single sheet of glass sandwiched between some boards.

Badly.

The carpenter was not entirely she that she was qualified for the job, but she did manage to remove the single sheet of glass and replace it with a window that was insulated and actually capable of opening. She used caulk around it. It was way better than we had before. Maybe someday we'll have both studio windows replaced by a contractor who actually does windows, but this is not that day!

The Siding

The cedar shingles were no longer cutting it at a certain point, so we had the house resided. (Houses are money pits, in case you didn't know.) This was a $30k job (MONEY PIT!) and had several layers of badness.

Bad: Our house had no insulation. It was cedar shingles over the original siding, with nothing in between that original siding and our INTERIOR WALLS. There was occasionally a newspaper. Our PM asked if we wanted insulation? And we said yes, please!!! We did not have a lot of time to think about insulation or research the best type, so it's just sheets of the pink fiberglass stuff in there, but it exists and we have it now!

Worse: Underneath our laundry room was a horrorshow. The laundry room is an addition that was added to our house probably sometime in the 50s? And, uh...

Well, the siding guys pulled off the siding, took a look at what was under it, and immediately called the project manager. The project manager came out, took a look, and then called us. He said that the siding guys thought it really needed to be reinforced and stabilized before they re-sided it, which is very fair, because I think the people who built it originally were drunk when they did it. It was a fucking Wild West cowboy construction situation under there.

Yes, you heard that right: A LOAD-BEARING SHINGLE.

Our project manager also informed us that the siding guys couldn't do the reinforcement, because they're just siding guys. They don't do structural. This is very fair.

It also needed to be done by Monday so we could stay on schedule for the siding work.

We learned this on Friday.

I immediately called my general contractor dad and got his voicemail, because (I remembered belatedly) he was in Mexico getting dental surgery. There was absolutely no way we could get another contractor out to do the work over a single weekend.

It was up to us.

My wife and I (mostly my wife) went HAM on it. We rented big jacks from the tool library to prop the laundry room up while we replaced one of the entirely rotten support poles. One of the big telephone poles was so wrecked with dry rot we could kick it out of place. (It didn't even touch the BIG ROCK that was supposed to be its foundation!!! It was floating!!!) Several of the joists were also fucked, so we ran new joists alongside them and married them together. My wife dug holes while crouched in a 4' high space, filled the holes with gravel, compacted it by putting a piece of wood on top of it and hitting it with a mallet, and then installed an entire additional support system from 4x4s and deck blocks. She actually attached the support system TO THE FUCKING HOUSE, which was a big improvement from the way it was originally held on by vibes and paint.

Here's a tasty little before and after:

(Yeah, see how that visible joist at the front just... stops at the far left? There's a new joist right behind it now.)

This was completed with resounding cries of, "Good enough!" and "It's better than it was before!" The siding guys thought it was fine and sided over it. Someday hopefully we will be able to afford to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it with a properly poured foundation, but in the meantime the spin cycle on the washing machine no longer shakes the whole house. Victory?!

Ridiculous: The purple paint saga. My wife and I are lesbians who tend toward maximalism in our decoration style. Construction companies find this baffling. We paid extra to our siding company to get the extended color choices (if you order the siding with the color baked in it lasts longer, but you're limited to a particular range of colors) and spoiler alert: 90% of them are boring as fuck. We basically paid extra to have access to 400 shades of white and 400 more shades of beige. There were like three saturated colors in the whole book. Pathetic.

Anyway, we chose the one nice teal that was available and decided we'd paint the door purple, since all the purple colors were gray at best. The project manager then forgot to put in our order, and when he remembered he'd forgotten, ordering our siding through his company would have pushed back the start time by six weeks. We could still make the original start time if we ordered through a different company doing the same thing, though!

Me, immediately: And we wouldn't be restricted to your color palette, right? Him: Yeah, they can do custom colors. Me, slapping down a color card called "Fully Purple": MAKE IT PURPLE.

Bless this man, he went to the siding company and asked for Fully Purple. They told him they couldn't do that color, and also is he sure anyone wants this color? He called them on the phone and informed them yes, we did want that color, and also that he'd worked for them and he knew damn well they could do that color, they'd just have to custom mix it, so they needed to do their fucking jobs. Suitably chastened, they finally sent us a sample of the siding, and it was... okay. It was purple for sure, but a little de-saturated. Not the purple of our hearts.

I asked if they'd actually started manufacturing our siding yet or just sent the color sample. The project manager confirmed they hadn't, and if we ordered this imperfectly-purple siding now, it would be several weeks before we could get started.

"We're gonna paint," I decided, and our project manager put in the orders.

The paint store called him and said, "Hey, are you sure you want this color?" Yes, he assured them, that's the right color.

The guys doing the painting opened up the can and then called him and said, "Are you sure this color?" and he told them yes! They want that color!

At this point I told him he should just start responding with, "They're lesbians!!! Yes! They want the purple! They're lesbians!!!"

Eventually we cleared every hurdle god and the construction industry put in front of us, and now our house is Fully Purple.

It also has insulation, wiring that won't kill us, and a laundry room that hopefully won't collapse anytime soon. We got a heat pump installed that took shockingly little time and worked immediately, and our next project will be having the roof redone. Check back in to find out what fresh horror awaits us then! I think it'll be a second roof under our existing roof made of lead and asbestos tiles, probably!

[noonmutter]

Announcing the theme for Terry Pratchett Day 2024: START IN THE WRONG PLACE.

You'll hear people say time and time again that you can start anywhere with Terry Pratchett's work, but don't start in the right place*, so let's truly embrace the joy and chaos to be found in the many routes through Discworld and beyond.

We will be making Sunday 28th April, Sir Terry Pratchett's birthday, one brimming with bookish delight, celebrating the many ways we love and travel through his work, and we're inviting you to join us.

Follow along with The Terry Pratchett Estate to stay up to date. We will be sharing more ahead of the weekend on how to get involved.

*A lot of people say the right place is anything but the right place, which in turn, may make it an equally wrong place...

#gnu terry pratchett

[noonmutter]

My name is in Aerosmith's "Dream On," among a million billion other things. Anytime somebody says "sage," ta-da.

Yes I could've said Scarborough Faire, which I frankly like more, but Dream On was the one that popped into my mind first today

and if you feel comfortable sharing what song(s), let us know in the tags!

[noonmutter]

for a website that has lots of super in-depth posts about how hard tone is to convey in text and how you should never assume anybody knows the same colloquialisms and idioms as you when communicating, tumblr slang is just. violating all of those rules as hard as possible 90% of the time

like just. just don't. do that. at people you don't actually know.

you should at least have some kind of actual relationship with somebody before you're casually a douchebag to them

if you need to explain that you're joking or not being insulting, then you probably should consider saying a thing that doesn't need that to be explained instead

I will say it is hard to be nice to people here when so much of casual tumblr vernacular is just… inherently hostile. Some of you genuinely do not seem to understand that there are alternatives to flippantly insulting strangers.

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would you settle for a pile of delicious fried foods on account of I'm aego

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

[noonmutter]

10: hadrosaur.

I am now thinking more about the Jurassic Park/World - Animorphs crossover AU (Dinomorphs?). It has stuck in my head like a bad song and I can't get it out.

InGen and any of the other companies involved with making the dinosaurs would be taken over by the Yeerks almost as soon as the Yeerks arrive. These companies have biological engineering capabilities approaching the level of the Arn, but on a much better planet. The Yeerks would be salivating over that.

Following on from this: Hybrid dinosaurs like the Indo-series Rex and Raptor or the Stegoceratops from the video games are probably Yeerk projects. The Yeerks are looking for ways to create more shock troops to unleash on the Andalites.

Similarly, we could expect to see even more interesting hybrids involving alien DNA. Velocihorks and Pterotaxxons and Geddosaurs. I imagine most of these hybrid projects would be failures that illustrate the depravity and utter inhumanity of the Yeerks, like the failed Aquatic Hork-Bajir project.

Dinosaur-controllers, mostly with medium-sized dinosaurs that can function as guards or shock-troops but aren't too big to fit inside of Yeerk ships. As much as Visser Three would love to have Tyrannosaur-Controllers on the payroll, they're just too big and their arms too tiny to be useful to the Empire on a day to day basis. (I imagine this is the same reason the Yeerks can't deploy the giant monsters on the Hork-Bajir homeworld to other planets - their spaceships just can't hold the critters, there's not enough room.)

Visser Three, of course, would have all the big dinosaur morphs. He can bypass the "too big to fit" limitation thanks to Alloran's morphing ability.

Because the Yeerks have to use smaller dinosaurs in their ships and Yeerk Pools, the Animorphs could still use their regular battle morphs (or in Ax's case, his normal Andalite body) for a lot of the fighting, if they aren't able to acquire dinosaurs themselves. And if Visser Three turns into something too big for them to handle, they can do what they usually do and run.

If the dinosaurs have escaped into the wild before the Animorphs get into the war, then smaller dinosaur morphs could be acquired at Cassie's barn.

Following on from the last point - if Cassie has any mid-size theropods at the Barn, or if there are any at The Gardens, then Tobias definitely gets stuck as one of those instead of a hawk.

How would the chimeric DNA of the dinosaurs affect morphing allergies? What if Rachel burps up a Baryonyx or an Ankylosaurus because it has the part of the crocodile DNA that she's allergic to in it? Is this how we find out Jake is allergic to Tree Frog DNA?

Toby and the Free Hork-Bajir adopt a dinosaur early on. I don't know what kind yet.