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American diet and "healthy living" culture is insane and runs DEEP

who the heck is eating dice, cards, and pool

WHAT is the first one supposed to be? It looks like 'piecing between meals' to me, but that can't be what it says, right?

It does in fact say “piecing between meals” and it refers to snacking

I'm more struck by the fact that the progression set forth here implies that laudanum and cocaine are less concerning that spicing your food.

What year is this? It has to be late enough that "ginger ale" means a soft drink, not a fermented drink flavored with ginger, but early enough that "patent medicines" are still a thing, and patent medicines IIUC basically disappear after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Maybe it's from the 1910s by an artist who doesn't realize they're using distinctly out-of-date tropes, sort of like It's a Wonderful Life being apparently blissfully unaware of the existence of the FDIC, established 12 years prior to the year the movie it's set?

Darcy’s introduction in Pride and Prejudice is really ‘what if you had just had the worst month of your life because your ex-bestie tried to lover boy scam your baby sister out of her share of your dad’s life insurance and your friend dragged you to a shitty party in a dive bar in the neighbourhood where he’d just signed a short term lease, and you decided to let your bad mood show because you were never going to see any of the assholes in this stupid shitty bar EVER again. And your friend ended up making out with a girl he’d just met there while you were stuck talking to her sister who was less cute and then her mother appeared and started trying to matchmake and started saying how if she was twenty years younger she’d clime you like a redwood and ooooh is that a black Amex, guess the next round is on you hahhahahahaha, while her other sister (how many fucking sisters does she have?!) flashed an obviously fake ID at the bar and ordered six vodka-diet red bulls and no one in her family except the less-cute sister even tried to stop her. And you went home and consoled yourself that you would never see any of these people again but then you met them over and over again because they live next door and your friend and the cute sister keep meeting up to make out but not actually date and then. You fall in love with the less-cute sister because it turns out she’s really witty and charismatic but she already knows and remembers and resents the fact that on a day when you were in a shitty mood you called her mid out loud in a dive bar.’

I'm not saying the author's perspective must be treated as paramount in media criticism, but sometimes the most reasonable analysis of a text on its face genuinely is "the author is universalising an experience which they possibly do not realise is not in fact universal".

Sometimes the answer to "why is everyone in this media So Fucking Weird in a way that doesn't seem to be connected to any of the work's broader themes and is never textually interrogated in any meaningful way?" is because the author genuinely thinks that's how people operate.

The plot of Evangelion makes makes sense once you realize that literally everyone in the story had Hideaki Anno's specific flavor of mental illness. Yes including the kaiju. And the giant mecha. And the members of the Omniscient Council of Vagueness.

"The Ancients were capable of wondrous things, but they often made mistakes, and 'dungeons' are the outcome of those mistakes" is a common conceit in dungeon-crawling fantasy, but the Ancients' fuckups are typically framed as products of hubris or madness. I want to see a setting where they messed up for the same reason that real-world engineering and public works projects often come to horrifying ends. The safety reports were suppressed because the architect was somebody's cousin. The plans clearly called for unobtanium rods, but a malfeasant contractor swapped them for mudanium and pocketed the difference. Somebody got sick of having to re-summon the hellgate each dawn and propped it open with a shoe.

The warding sigils would have detected the problem, but they were so overtuned that they were constantly throwing false alarms, so eventually one of the assistant thaumaturges simply disconnected them and forgot to tell anyone they'd done so.

What is hubris, though, if not thinking to yourself, "other people may need warding sigils to warn them of danger, but me, I'm built different"?

"Okay, but it's not a dragon, a dragon has" if putting it in the sky would be sick as fuck, it's a dragon. Whales are dragons.

Honestly love this OP, 100% on board. However this does feel like it would incite another "featherless biped=behold man" situation.

Concept: fantasy setting where "human" is a political category whose boundaries are pseudoscientifically justified by defining humans as featherless bipeds.

Aircraft carriers are dragons.

Honestly, tabletop RPG frameworks where your vehicle has way more mechanical detail than the character driving it are wasted on giant robots. I want a game about Prohibition-era bootleggers where the inadvisably hot-rodded Studebaker you use to outrun the cops has a three-page character sheet and the mobster behind the wheel fits on a postcard.

Honestly, RPG frameworks where your vehicle has way more mechanical detail than the character driving it are wasted on vehicles. Give me a game where the PCs have character sheets that treat them as fully autonomous biomecha.

I fully recognise that this is, in some respects, trivialising the narrative, but it’s extremely funny to me to fuck around with the symbolism of Hades and Persephone by coming up with goofy alternatives for exactly what taboo she violated that obliges her to spend half the year in the Underworld. Like, a story where Persephone is bound to the Underworld because Hades tricked her into into eating six pomegranate seeds is a very different proposition from a story where Persephone is bound to the Underworld because she raided Hades’ minifridge for a six-pack of Monster Energy.

I feel like part of the thing about the six pomegranate seeds is it's such a small violation. What if instead of a six-pack of Monster Energy, it's a six ounce mini-can of diet coke?

I think the child with a knife and the monkey with a gun would be good friends.

I think that endlessly circulating post that claims to present an actual performance of John Stump’s “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz” but is in fact an arrangement of “U N Owen Was Her?”, Flandre Scarlet’s boss fight theme from the 2002 video game Touhou: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil has to be the iconic example of Tumblr misinformation – not because of the blatantly misidentified music, but because every so often somebody reblogs it with a long-winded explanation that no, that’s not really John Stump’s “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, it’s an arrangement of “U N Owen Was Her?”, and here’s the real “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz”, followed by a link to a different arrangement of “U N Owen Was Her?”.

(For those popping up in the notes to explain that this particular bit of misinformation doesn’t originate on Tumblr, y’all, I never said it did. Almost none of the misinformation that’s popularly circulated on Tumblr actually originates here. I’m specifically talking about the pattern of some ostensibly helpful reblogger providing an essentially complete and correct explanation of what’s wrong with the original post and why, then proceeding to put forth a “corrected” version that’s somehow even wronger.)

Still, it’s pretty funny that this is so prevalent that most of the initial Google results have mislabeled U.N. Owen arrangements. I found a link in a comment section that lead to this, but I have no idea whether even that’s true. I’m inclined to believe it might be since it’s the only arrangement I found that isn’t a U.N. Owen piece, but honestly I don’t know anymore.

I think my middle school orchestra teacher exposed us to this at one point and it's every bit as hilarious as I remember it.

Okay, so I know old-school D&D had an ethos of worrying about treasure and encumbrance, but I really want to know which sourcebook had rules for not scratching the finish on a dining table.