Bugsy

When I hear "tumblr sexyman," I think of Cecil Night Vale being constantly depicted as a skinny white man instead of literally anything else. I think of the background character white men who get elevated over protagonists that are women, people of color, or otherwise not the white man power fantasy.

Cecil Night Vale, as previously mentioned.

Oncelercest, because if there aren't two skinny white men to ship, tumblr fandom will start shipping the skinny white man with himself.

Bill Cipher inexplicably being fanon'd as a white twink despite being a fucking triangle.

Everyone fawning over Marvel Loki while shoving every woman and Black person in the MCU aside.

The way nearly every single character in Hazbin Hotel has the same "tall and skinny" body type, along with all the criticisms Black audience members have made about the issues with Alastor's design.

A YTP of a bowhunting instructional VHS. I picked up a copy of this tape at a flea market and was delighted to find that it had been digitized and uploaded to YouTube.

Initially I had some inexplicable technical headache with the project file and had to start the whole thing over, but I'm happy I could preserve what I'd started and produce a hefty 10+ minute video.

Full YTP with captions here!

Okay, so, I am showing this graph with the HUGE CAVEAT that

this is just a very rough estimate and i have no idea what's going to actually happen

So my guess is that we MAY, PERHAPS, end up with a final participant number in the low 30,000s.

The thing is, this number goes up and down based on all kinds of unknowable things, all working in combination, and I have varying amounts of control over any of them.

Things I can control: E.g. how much time and energy I have available to put into promotion within the first 24 hours (and throughout the rest of the month), launch date and time of day, whether and how long the survey stays open past the planned closing date.

Things I can control somewhat: E.g. whether the survey works properly.

Things I cannot control: E.g. whether the survey goes viral, whether Big Name Queers help with promotion while it's open, whether people's inboxes think the mailing list emails are spam.

This year, I'm trying out a new survey provider. This contributes to us having technical issues within the first 48 hours, which means probably more people giving up mid-survey, and definitely me having to divert time and energy from promotion into technical work behind-the-scenes. The behind-the-scenes UI being very different to what I'm used to has also had a knock-on effect on my promotional work.

No matter what, people speculate on why the survey is getting more or fewer responses than usual. I remember a time when it was booming and people were discussing whether it might be because I posted it during term time and academic people were sending it to their colleagues and classmates and students and so on. Ultimately, there are so many different kinds of people participating from so many different timezones and cultures that it just isn't possible to know.

But I think my main take on this question is: I think it is way too soon to speculate about whether survey participation has "peaked" and is trending downward. There's only been one complete year since the record number of responses!

Readers who want to mess around with this extremely meta data may wish to send the survey to their favourite Big Name Queers, and/or promote the survey on several platforms and in innovative ways!

many such cases

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

The administration either got rid of or didn't listen to people who could explain the algae problem, and decided that the problem was because other administrations were just stupid and didn't know how to take care of the pool, and also saw an opportunity for grifting some money.

So they painted the bottom of the pool dark blue, which absorbed more heat from the sun and made the algae bloom faster than ever. So they dumped hydrogen peroxide in it, which only killed the algae around the edges and also made the new paint job peel.

Waste tax money on vanity projects

Ignore experts saying the project will cause numerous problems

Said project fucks up shit that was working perfectly fine beforehand

Claim the problems caused by the project dont exist

Switch to saying none of this was a big deal in the first place despite costing millions of dollars

By the time Obama rocked up and it became his issue, the initial issues had compounded with "it's old as balls" and "this was never designed to have this many visitors." Obama undertook a massive renovation that included stabilizing the pool structurally and rerouting the water source, as noted above. He was aware that this was only a partial fix to the problem--there's only so much you can do with a megastructure that was built improperly when cars were still a novelty and that sits in the middle of one of the busiest metro areas in the US--but he did what he could. Perfect is the enemy of "mostly right."

Now if you wanted to fix the pool properly, the way to do it would be to tear the whole thing out, go back to the original blueprints, and have a modern architect look at what needs to exist as substructure to make the superstructure viable. That is, understandably, not a cost we can really afford right now. And replacing it with a different form of monument somewhat less problematic, like a garden, would be extremely politically fraught. So "we're going to deal with problems as best we can when they crop up" is the name of the game.

TRUMP TRIED TO REMOVE OBAMA'S RENOVATION. Like. The thing that meant he had a pool to paint in the first place.

He took it out because it was installed by a black man.

Trump did this because he is a racist piece of shit who cannot stand anything that was done by a black man. It must be removed and replaced with something done by a white man.

And every time he does this he makes things worse.

🧶🧶🧶 Latvian braid

fuck ton of tennis shoes fitted for hooves despite the fact that none of the present holidays wear shoes (the type of monster that the dreemurrs are don't wear shoes either)

fuck ton of heart-shaped-pillows that have been around since kris and noelle were little. and most of them are in HER CLOSET. Literally WHY that's so fucking weird. Carol is obsessed with them. Carol's home decor is giving struggling to connect with her kid mom lalonde/bro strider guardian style tbh. has something to do with "The cage with human soul and parts!"

HC, but "no one gets to choose who they are in this world" being a quote from dess to kris in a bout of despair.

water/darkness metaphor. if you go deep enough, it becomes too dark to see. dark world kris looks like like they're underwater. the knight looks like they've been consumed by darkness.

kris's empty room vs dess's cluttered room. 1 important personal possession that represents them. knife, guitar. (i actually think that most of kris's stuff is in the unused classroom & that they used to play together before she went missing but it isn't really relevant here.)