I am trying okay

Those rates are also at like 18% in the UK and around 14% in Australia which is better for sure but it’s also not like this is a problem unique to North America.

i know cheating is bad but i'd like to thank it for what it has done for music & movie industry

Blackout poetry exists on a dual axis from "banal" to "insightful" on the input side and "kind of deep" to "incredibly fucking dumb" on the output side, and while taking something banal and producing something kind of deep is well and fine, for my money taking something insightful and rendering it incredibly fucking dumb is where the real art is.

#i stuck the word 'banal' in there twice specifically so that 'anal' would be low hanging fruit#but i genuinely did not anticipate 'banana' --@prokopetz

When folks talk about male characters who are difficult to gender-bend while keeping their whole Deal intact because the deal in question is specifically About Masculinity, they're usually imagining a character who embodies some sort of sober commentary on the nature of patriarchal violence or whatnot. Meanwhile, I'm sitting here trying to picture what a thematically coherent girl version of Flex Mentallo could possibly entail.

If the core of Flex is "mysticism grounded in 1920s US advertising," I propose Listerina Bridesmaid, for whom cleaniliness is the source of all power.

The idea of advertising construed as a form of occult ritual is a big part of it, yeah. Then you've got the culture of male body worship, institutionalised child abuse as a mechanism of enforcing patriarchal value systems, the paradox of being expected to bend one's every effort toward the successful performance of heterosexual masculinity while simultaneously being forbidden to acknowledge that you're doing so because if you need to try that makes you a faggot (which might not come across very clearly if you're only familiar with the TV show version of the character, but the queer-coding of the comic book version is pretty stark!), plus all the MK ULTRA shit on top of that.

Hold on – I've gotta put this video on fullscreen so I can hear it better.

"grackle" really is a perfect name for a bird. knocked it out of the park w/ that one

Loving all of the posts about Eva Stratt being the trolley operator but what I think some people are missing in their trolley problem analogies for Eva Stratt's choice is that Stratt was not a bystander pulling a lever, the lever had already been pulled and the trolley was barreling towards all of humanity and Stratt's choice was to make a desperate attempt to block the trolley with her own body but no matter how desperate she was to solve it on her own she knew she couldn't, she knew she needed others, she needed people willing to help take the force. The trolley was mere inches away and she needed only one more person, that person was her right hand man, her closest companian, her best friend, and she begged him to sit at her side on those tracks and he refused, looking down at her where she sat on those track yelling at her how unfair she was being to ask him to sit down, as if she did not know the pain of sitting there since day one. Yes she had to tie him to those tracks kicking and screaming, yes it hurt, but she did not do it from the sidelines, she was standing on the tracks herself

(voice of a person spiralling) its embarrassing but i still havent figured out if its ok for me to be alive

my beautiful mutuals and many other enlightened minds have discussed the possibilities for tension between rocky and adrian re: gracerocky codependency, but ever since that interview with james ortiz i have been plagued with a vision of like. rocky returning to erid as the sole survivor of what, while highly dangerous, was never meant to be a suicide mission... adrian having other family (i was thinking hatchmate) on the blip-a crew as well alongside rocky, and their relief at rocky's safe return getting swept up in their grief. all the families of the other survivors. his best friend is starving in 2 months. it's touchdown day on erid and rocky's "it should've been me" stocks have never been higher

Inadvisable writing challenge #137: Write a conversation in which every utterance is tagged (i.e., either prefaced or followed with some variation of "[they] said"). See how long you can keep it going without ever using the same dialogue-tagging verb twice.

the beautiful thing about this csg relationship/kink negotiation scene i just wrote is that the kink negotiation is, itself, the kink. of course the only person who doesnt realize this is grace but thats because his brain shorted out about two sentences in. no hope for them at all.

I am a glorified office administrator who understands server hardware why am I the only person in this company who gets what social engineering is?

“Social engineering” is a way too fancy word for what it is. I know a guy (not personally) who broke several people out of prison by essentially writing “Greetings, please release this person, signed, whoever the judge is” on a piece of paper and faxing it there. Because no one would have a fax machine in their own house I guess.

not to derail, but holy shit that praxis

I’ve had clerks just give out a whole ass SSN when I asked.

An inspection in 2014 found the password for the Louvre’s surveillance camera system was “louvre.”