One Of My Favourite Genres Of Character Is , Specifically A Doctor Or Scientist Who Is So Deeply Evil

June 15 is the anniversary of both the Night Vale and Gravity Falls pilots, as well as Vanessa Doofenshmirtz’s birthday and “give it up for day 15” day

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I wanted to make a backstory for the time I found this in pokemon Violet XD

i say this in all seriousness, a great way to resist the broad cultural shift of devaluing curiosity and critical thinking is to play my favorite game, Hey What Is That Thing

you play it while walking around with friends and if you see something and don't know what it is or wonder why its there, you stop and point and say Hey What Is That Thing. and everyone speculates about it. googling it is allowed but preferably after spending several minutes guessing or asking a passerby about it

weird structures, ambiguous signs, unfamiliar car modifications, anything that you can't immediately understand its function. eight times out of ten, someone in the group actually knows, and now you know!

a few examples from me and my friends the past few weeks: "why is there a piece of plywood sticking out of that pond in a way that looks intentional?" (its a ramp so squirrels that fall in to the pond can climb out) • "my boss keeps insisting i take a vacation of nine days or more, thats so specific" (you work at a bank, banks make employees take vacation in long chunks so if youre stealing or committing fraud, itll be more obvious) • "why does this brick wall have random wooden blocks in it" (theres actually several reasons why this could be but we asked and it was so you could nail stuff to the wall) • "most of these old factories we drive past have tinted windows, was that just for style?" (fun fact the factory owners realized that blue light keeps people awake, much like screen light does now, so they tinted the windows blue to keep workers alert and make them work longer hours)

been playing this game for a long time and ive learned (and taught) a fuckton about zoning laws, local history, utilities (did you know you can just go to your local water treatment plant and ask for a tour and if they have a spare intern theyll just give you a tour!!!) and a whole lot of fun trivia. and now suddenly you're paying more attention when youre walking around, thinking about the reasons behind every design choice in the place you live that used to just be background noise. and it fuckin rules.

The central joke of the Ulysses Ogre meme hinges on the Ogre holding themselves to unreasonable standards by expecting to fully grasp one of the most famously difficult works of the 20th Century after only a single reading, which just doesn't work if you substitute your favourite video game, because frankly, your favourite video game is not Ulysses – but to be fair, the overwhelming majority of books are not Ulysses either. There's probably a video game somewhere out there that's as textually challenging as Ulysses, and it's probably some random-ass RPG Maker game from 2006 with an author whose name is a dick joke and a present fandom of approximately eleven people.

thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.

Today I learned that Van Halen have that rider in their contract about “a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed” in order to know at a glance if the promoter read the entire contract.  And the reason they do THAT is because they once had a stage collapse because a promoter hadn’t read the proper way to set up all the specific technical stuff.

So if the band goes in the dressing room or catering and sees brown M&Ms, they know they have to double-check the stage setup for safety.

something i've noticed that has become really annoying in the past 10 years or so is this fad of what i've been calling, for lack of a better word, "structural whataboutism." it's that thing where, when faced with a concrete, resolvable problem in your community, your answer is to blame it on a vast, unsolvable issue of structural inequality and then throw up your hands. "there's trash all over the ground in this corner of the park" becomes "well, that's where MEN OF COLOR congregate after their 12-HOUR GRAVEYARD SHIFTS and i'm not going to support a CARCERAL SOLUTION to a CAPITALISTIC PROBLEM. WE NEED TO ELIMINATE POVERTY AND THE SUBJUGATION OF THE WORKING CLASS" and it's like okay but sis. someone still has to go pick up the trash. we don't need a carceral solution, we need more trash cans. you're not going to eliminate poverty and the subjugation of the working class and even if ya did, there would still be trash on the ground. how any of this passes for radicalism within their peer groups i simply don't understand. it's radical laziness more than anything else