Maybe if I try hard enough

Stephen King rightly gets a lot of shit for frequently having his characters think and speak in pop culture references that only make sense if you spent your formative years in 1970s Maine, but I feel like articulating that particular criticism on Tumblr is something of a glass-houses situation.

Like, yeah, King will have literal space aliens making pop culture references that only old men from small-town Maine would plausibly make; however, I have seen the kinds of novels that people who spent their twenties on Tumblr write, and there is also a very definite sense of time and place.

In science it's important to resist the natural human impulse to ascribe telos to inanimate things. The things we study simply are; while their interactions may reliably produce certain outcomes, this does not imply that the production of these outcomes is what those things are "for". So, yes, the ray often causes death, but that doesn't make it a "death ray".

It’s not a Discworld joke unless you read it, don’t parse it as a joke, and then carry on with your life for ten years until someone stops you to say something like “It’s a pavlovian response because the dog ate a pavlova” and you scream Terry’s name with enough indignant rage you hope it rattles the pillars of the multiverse so wherever his soul is he’ll hear it.

When I was informed that “Vetinari” is a pun on “Medici”. That pun was so painful I couldn’t even see it.

OMG I FUCKING *KNEW* VETINARI WAS A JOKE ON FUCKONG SOMETHING I JUST COULDNT GRASP IT. I THOUGHT IT WAS A REFERENCE TO WIND SOMEHOW

I am not a talented punster so I was today old when I realised about Vetinari.

*smirking* you couldn't waterboard that out of me, but even if torture was an effective method of information extraction and not a futile display of state-sanctioned sadism, the high percentage of false confessions it produces would mean that even if you could waterboard it out of me, could you even trust the veracity of my statement?

@shesmadeoutofwood

Item: trick throne that bonks anyone that sits in it with a concerningly pointy weighted devil head

Anybody else have no idea how their personality is perceived by others? Like am I nice? Am I mean? I have no idea.

When people tell me stuff about me I literally think about it nonstop for 3-5 business days.

A coworker casually said “everyone else likes you” (because one coworker was mad at me) and I was for real like ????everyone likes me??????