frog

the first is a photo of an indigenous amazonian man from an uncontacted tribe shooting at a camera drone with a bow and arrow. the second is a photo of an australian couple throwing beer bottles at a camera drone as it flies over their yard.

Like, I’m not sure how many people remember Build-a-Bear Workshop’s MMORPG, but the chat function was a very open free type style (kind of like club penguin) with the exception that the censors were INSANE.

Like at first, people were just kind of substituting words like in tiktok, except you could only use words that the computer recognized as words, so alternate spellings were out of the question. Let’s take “sex” for example. As the middle school kids we were, we just swapped it with a permitted dictionary word.

Sex becomes “sat”. “I heard my parents having sat.”

But THEN the computer or whoever was monitoring an online game directed at kids starting picking up that the word was being used in certain contexts, and shut it down. After this, you couldn’t use “have” before almost any verbs without getting your message blocked as potentially sensitive.

Enter the completely useless invented particle “ds”. I don’t know why this was in the dictionary, maybe because of Nintendo, but we quickly discovered that ds was allowed almost anywhere as a minimally sensitive word. It could be thrown in to break any pattern.

“I heard my parents having sat” becomes “I heard my parents having ds sat.” Ds was a word used as a punctuation mark whose sole function was to throw off an AI’s sentence recognition. And it’s function was spread only by word of mouth from child to child for who knows how long, and accepted into the Bearville vernacular. When I was new, I even asked a few friends what it meant. Their reply:

“Ds means nothing. It’s for computer.”

I really wish I remember more of my middle school exploits on Bearville before they shut it down, or had the time and sense to study and write down some of it, because the natural state of kids when left alone in Lord of the Flies style isn’t to kill each other—it’s to adapt as a group, and to randomly ask other people if they want to be their gamer girlfriend/boyfriend.

straighten your back

go pee goddAMN IT STOP HOLDING IT

go take your meds if you need to

drink some water

go get a snack if you havent eaten in a while

maybe wander around the house/stretch a little if you’ve been sat at the computer a while (artists especially: sTRETCH THOSE WRISTS)

reply to that text/message from earlier you’d forgotten about

Ummmm sooooo I did some Lascaux-inspired mugs and I love them...........maybe TOO much? Even just in bisque-fired unfinished form?!!?!?? The possibility that one of these will live with me forever? Is HIGH?

There are three of them* & every single one is my precious perfect bébé!!!?!?!

(I had the good fortune of visiting Lascaux & seeing the beautiful interpretative recreation of the cave paintings when I was 10 and YES they have stuck with me and also YES I did, not long after that, also read Clan Of the Cave Bear at an Impressionable Age!!!!)

WHY ARE YOU HAUNTED?

💖 i mean who else is going to do this very easy idea again 💖

camp here & there - somewhere between nightvale and magnus, inexplicably  scored by will wood, camp here & there is about a summer camp nurse and his crumbling interpersonal relationships. the episodes are mostly broken up into fun whimsical camp stuff and then deeply personal agony. very crisp very fresh.

WOE.BEGONE - imagine if you joined some quirky internet arg and found out time travel was real and everyone wanted to kill you because you simply can’t leave well enough alone. woe.begone, more so than any other show on this list is about a guy that seems normal but in fact has so many things wrong with him wow! stop over achieving but doing grievous bodily harm to yourself you weirdo.