A Collection of Things

ICE driving behind you? Forget where you're going and Just ... sit through a green light. Don't have to keep doing it, or get caught ... just PERFORM YOUR TASKS POORLY.

Drop a wrench and say 'oops'.

because to hear even Tumblr the "gay gender website" talk people only wear harnesses while strapped into a sex swing while being fisted

but the reality is that the harness, both leather and spandex, in gay male world is like stiletto pumps, a bright red lip stick, a short skirt or push up bra.

sure some people are wearing those things because they're about to get laid or hoping to. But lots of people wear them just to feel sexy, confident or powerful. And there's nothing X rated and "shouldn't be seen in public" about any of that.

lots of gay guys wear harnesses to bars or clubs not because its a sex thing, but because its a sexy thing, they feel attractive and confident.

I get that gay men feeling attractive and confident terrifies people, but if you're at Pride and a guy walks past you in jeans and a harness, either shirtless or over his shirt, he didn't violate your civil rights or do a sex thing in front of you, he's wearing a totally appropriate outside that makes him feel confident and powerful.

The idea of colour-coded dragons basically began as a convenience thing. Fantasy minifigs were very hard to come by when D&D was first starting out – remember, tabletop RPGs did not branch off from fantasy wargames as is sometimes claimed; they developed in parallel with them, both having budded off from traditional historical re-creation wargames at roughly the same time – so groups often resorted to buying bags of cheap plastic dinosaurs from dime stores and just re-painting them. Customising a plastic figurine is hard; slapping a coat of red paint on a spinosaurus and saying "that's a Red Dragon" is easy.

(Amusingly, this is also where we got several other iconic D&D monsters. Dime stores were not always conscientious about the origins of their toys, and bootlegs of licensed characters frequently ended up in the mix. The owlbear, the bulette, and the rust monster are all the product of D&D's creators coming up with stats for some shitty recasts of several Ultraman kaiju they found mixed in with their dinosaurs!)

As for the further subdivision into chromatics versus metallics, it seems to have been a symmetry thing. Metallic dragons per se are not present in OD&D; it has the five familiar chromatics in their minifig-primer hues, plus a singular lawful-aligned gold dragon, which Gary Gygax claimed in a 2003 interview had been modelled after "Oriental dragons" (his words) in order to suggest that it was a separate kind of critter and not necessarily related to its Western-inspired chromatic counterparts. It's likely that it's gold simply because long are often described by historical sources as having golden-hued scales.

hello my friends romans and fellow countrymen to the latest but perhaps not greatest series of this blog, where i explore this very important question: How Many Shitty Grilled Cheeses Does It Take To Get A Graduate Degree?

as you may have guessed, i’m in graduate school. why? well that is a question we simply do not have the time to answer. so instead i’m going to explore something far more important: The Grilled Cheese

as anyone who has ever had access to a college dining hall will tell you, no matter how good (a term i use loosely) the food is, eventually you will grow tired of it. and when i grow tired of it, i make grilled cheese. usually because it satisfies a deep craving within me. grilled cheese has, for this reason, become essential to my college experience (source: i went to undergrad and made many a grilled cheese in the dining hall when the food was horrifically inedible). it can also be a rather motivating food—a shot of nostalgia (in this case, grilled cheese) can really kick your ass into gear for whatever adulting lies ahead of you.

what makes the grilled cheese shitty? well it is made in the dining hall with Inadequate Ingredients. but! grad school is all about innovation and i have plenty of that.

i arrived already in a nostalgic mood because i was blasting hannah montana, a show that i did not watch as a child, and was utterly craving grilled cheese. unfortunately, as it is the middle of summer, the dining hall is sufficiently lacking and there were only two kinds of bread to choose from: 1. a single slice of wheat bread or 2. a hot dog bun. i chose the latter. i put some butter on the Inside of the bread followed by six suspiciously small slices of yellow american cheese. then i crushed the whole thing to death in the panini press. i could have probably crushed it a bit longer but i didn’t want to risk getting Cheese Goop everywhere. the result? a flat, oblong sandwich with Just Melted american cheese and one weird section in the middle that tasted suspiciously like peanut butter.

as far as weeks go, this was a pretty fantastic one. i got an internship at a really Top Tier place that i’m Thrilled about and i also sent about 11,000 emails and!! started working out again. which was incidentally where i was before going to the dining hall to make my shitty grilled cheese. so i was sweaty and exhausted and yearning for the mediocre taste of shitty grilled cheese. and tonight did not disappoint.

tonight, again, we had two bread options: 1. hot dog buns or 2. white bread. since i went with a hot dog bun last time, this time we went with the white bread. i put butter on the inside of two pieces and added the only four slices of american cheese. i then sprayed the hell out of the panini press with cooking spray and pressed the shit out of the sandwich….which didn’t exactly go according to plan. the top of the bread got very flat, the bottom did not, and when i went to lift the press, the top half of the sandwich was on the top part of the press, the bottom half was on the bottom part, and the middle was a goopy mess of grilled cheese. i had to get inventive with some tongs but managed to bc it the whole thing back together again. the result was a very dry sandwich. somehow. almost like it was stale. which is confusing cause the. bread was definitely not stale.

on the way home, I encounter someone eating raspberries. I ask and they tell me that they grow their own, they got some seeds from the shop back in The Raspberry Days and kept them. They take me to a field of many beautiful raspberry plants and invite me to pick my own, they're free for all the town to pick whenever they'd like.

[ID: question by anonymous: did they answer the question though ///end ID]

the navy officer i asked about cyber attacks did answer my question very thoroughly. he also answered other questions such as "when refueling on sea, which boat is the primary course holder?" and "would switching to another government branch affect your retirement benefits?" and generally provided a lot of information over the course of a fascinating hour that as a former government employee myself i am pretty sure he should not have told me. but i also think he would have told me his social security number if i asked nicely (i didn't, I was busy learning about the tactical advantages of speedboats).

the guy obsessed with boat refurbishment that i asked about his tendency towards preservation gave me a really haunted look, said "holy fuck" and then after a moment of consideration "i think i am too drunk. i'm going home" and proceeded to leave. in my defense, it was well and truly meant as genuine curiosity and not as the attempt at psychological warfare it turned out to be. he unfortunately did not answer my question.

"First you have to ask your Responsible Adult for five dollars," says the vendor in a measured, singsong voice, and wags her index finger at me.

I look around, confused. Who is she talking about? Does she mean the young man trailing behind me? I turn back to her.

"I have five dollars ..."

"Well you still have to ask him," she smiles sweetly.

As I open my mouth to ask why, I suddenly realize she has misjudged my age by at least two decades.