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#Can't overstate how good it was
laddertek · 29 days
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✨Romance✨
Etho: Uhm, I'm gonna be here for...thirty minutes...just looking in your eyes... Zed: ...only thirty? 🥺
Check out Zed's extended hermit reactions to his villager riding a chicken on ZedaphPlays2!
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atomicc · 2 years
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Dead End Paranormal Park was really good but not just because it had a trans main character. It's because the fact that he's trans is an important and plot driving part of the show. The show would not work if he wasn't trans, and didn't have those moments where him being trans is front and center. It's incredibly important to the plot, not just a side note. The other main character is autistic, which once again, is a major plot point and the show would not work without that part of her. It's who she is! And the show doesn't shy away from that! The reason this representation is so important here is because the show is actually about its characters and their backgrounds, their 'minority traits' aren't just thrown in for points, it's legitimately part of their character. It's the most seen by a show I've ever felt, to the point where some moments genuinely hurt. Hurt in a good way, a way where I felt like my experiences were understood by someone. Don't pass this one off just because other shows don't use their lgbt and neurodivergent rep well. It's utterly and completely about them. As well as having a fun plot about ghosts and demons and HELL LET IT RAIN BLOOD AND BONES
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starscreaming666 · 1 year
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When the Shrek spinoff about the silly little cats gives you fully body chills and also makes you cry
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xcziel · 6 months
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i am not kidding BLESS those jeans
if someone is somehow reading my blog and sharing last night's critique of the baggy pants vs choreo precision issue i would just like to say you are doing the work of the gods thank you SO much
#jeon jungkook#there is nothing i embrace more than an all-black wardrobe and the lines on this times square look are just *chef's kiss*#bless the piercings bless the tattoos bless the black palette is all i can say#i know it's too cold on an outdoor stage rn to do the bare arms but fck if that didn't make the choreo pop even harder#i wanna get a still from that one instant with his right arm gesturing right before The Shoulder Move#bc it's insanely hot - just the line of his extended tattoed arm and his shoulder like#it CANNOT be overstated how expressive his gestures are and how the sleeveless look really highlighted that#have i watched the mv a disgusting amount of times? i have indeed#i'm sorry it's just EVERYTHING i have been asking for from a pop song for so long#the BASS the live instruments THE BRASS SECTION .... the *BASS*#if you have followed me for more than two seconds you've probably run into me expounding on my 'horn theory' of good pop music lol#i.e. if you want a really good power hit pop song you need a goddamn brass section#evidence: the 70s and 80s. ... even beyonce knows this#but also funk/disco bass trumps everything else and i would kill to have an extended remix done by AN ACTUAL BAND#the current remixes don't add anything for me - i want an actual bass player going to town a la the disco extended plays of yore#maybe in the concert version ... kinda hoping jk takes inspo from yoongi's concert setup#i feel like that might have been part of the impetus behind recording with actual musicians#i can't believe that's so unusual these days - it's sad that i watched a reaction clip and the person was like#what sample is that?? what is that from??#and i'm like yelling at the screen it's an actual band that's how it's *supposed* to be#also can i say i love how he (and all the maknae line now that i think of it) makes it so clear when he's singing and when it's#the backing track - like no lip syncing/pretending just sticking to the bts standards for live performance vs like music show#thinking on it part of it may be that like the rap line *can't* really coast over a backing track so then vocal line doesn't either#(i say maknae line only in reference to this last year's recent live performances bc there've been multiple from each of them)#and he's outside and it's cold - that is HARD on the vocal chords#most of your diva singers - not that jk is a diva but he does have the range of one - like mariah or ariana would never#do that to their voices - i think he's just used to being the indestructable bunny#he better have people babying him tonight and giving him hot soup and tea with honey and vitamin c and idk ginseng#having the humidifier going and getting as much rest as possible to keep healthy
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funnywormz · 1 year
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im a little sad we don't get to see lister spend more time with (friendly, non-humanoid, not deadly) animals in rd bc the few seconds we get with him and frankenstein on screen together are So Cute. like he's so gentle and sweet with her and the fact that he'd willingly let himself get frozen in time for a while so she could live is such a real thing to do like i would 100% do that for my cat in the same situation. ik he has The Cat in the series but he's a whole entire person he just has cat-like tendencies. it's not the same. lister should have a little furry beast to be friends with i think
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22degreehalo · 5 months
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I wrote almost 7,000 words today!!!!!!!! \o/
And with that, I am *finally* done with [Redacted] number 3!!! Making it somewhat shorter than the unholy monster that was [Redacted] number 2, but certainly nowhere near as short as I initially expected for all of them :'DDDD
Now, we are FINALLY moving on to clearer ground: each of those above three scenes were sorta hazy in my outline, and I got the closest I ever come to making it up as I went along. (Read: did ridiculous amounts of not-writing as I brainstormed beforehand, then still had to fill in a lot of gaps in the writing.) But most of what's coming up I have already envision pretty dang specifically. So as long as I can get down into words what I've seen in my head, it should all go a lot smoother now.
oh my fucking god. I just checked and this thing is TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND WORDS LONG. that is ALREADY LONGER than what I thought the whole thing would be. And I still have like. Several really big important scenes to go.
Send thoughts and prayers my way si vous plait :')))))))))))))
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femmeboyant · 2 years
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dammit i lost the link to my favorite nsfw garashir fanart AAAAAGH and i can't reverse-image search with the file i downloaded because it died with my laptop 😭 they were in a bed, with Julian on top looking smug as he's fingering Garak. anyone know what I'm talking about???? if so please HELP i need it for reasons 😫
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kenobihater · 1 year
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man the mummy novelization is REALLY trying my patience... in less than 50 pages it has 1. described anck-su-namun's dead body as beautiful and was just very icky in general with how it described her 2. compared rick to not only custer (may he rot in piss) but the alamo defenders as well and 3. used the following terms to describe the med-jai: human battering rams (literal objectification), a swarm of locusts (dehumanization), and as a different breed of human (i don't even know where to START with that one)
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percocet · 2 years
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indy 500 quali and the mcr show tn i am hinging all of my sanity on these two things
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neontaxidermy · 3 months
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These Talenti's vegan gelato layers. Really changing the frozen desert aisle game. ESPECIALLY the blueberry one
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disillusionmp3 · 1 year
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did u guys know that ummmm u have permission to feel good and happy and comfortable at ANY given moment, no matter what happened before it and no matter what will happen after??
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xythlia · 1 year
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I had to use superhuman effort to not shake my car in the parking lot bc !!! holy shit the comments & tags that series has gotten is making me lose my minddddd 🖤🖤🖤
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reasonsforhope · 5 days
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I don't know who needs to hear this, but especially with the end of the school year coming up soon, and a bunch of people about to leave high school or about to leave college, I just wanted to say:
Being an adult can be really nice, actually!!!
Like, okay, yeah, life can be fucking stressful sometimes, and there's definitely an annoying amount of paperwork.
But me and just about every single adult I know will agree: I would never choose to go back to being a teenager, even if I somehow could.
Insert obvious disclaimer that nothing is universal. But for people worried about aging or graduating into the next chapter of life, here's some words of reassurance:
When you're a teenager, your brain is extra mean to you. Like, neurologically. All of the changes it's undergoing really, really increase rates of depression/anxiety/etc. A lot of the time, literally just not being a teenager anymore is really good for your mental health
Less than five months out of high school, everyone I knew my age was like "Thank fuck we're no longer in high school." Once you leave high school and adolescence there's really just such a dramatic drop in petty bullshit. Shit that would have been a huge social humiliation or gossip in high school is really often just like, "Hate that for you, man." Boom, done.
When you're a teenager or a brand new adult, you're encountering so many problems for the first time ever. When you're older, you just. Have learned how to handle a lot more things. You know what to do way more often and that builds confidence
When you're an adult, other people generally don't care if you don't do things perfectly, because jobs and life don't work like grades. This was such a trip to learn, honestly? But when you are an adult or have a job the bar for success is usually just "Did you do the thing?" or "Did you do the thing well enough that it works?" or "Did you show up to work for your whole shift and look like you were doing things?"
Similarly, if you're about to graduate college and you're really stressed about it, fyi just about everyone I knew in college ended up very quickly going "wow, 'real life' is way easier." Admittedly I went to a school full of very stressed out perfectionists and the like, so I can't promise this is universal, but there's a very real chance that life will in many ways get easier when you graduate
WAY MORE CONTROL OF YOUR OWN LIFE
Literally I cannot overstate that last point. As an adult, you are (barring certain disabilities or shitty circumstances like abusive family/the criminal justice system/etc.) able to make most of your own decisions. If you want to rearrange your furniture, you can. If you want to eat tater tots at midnight, you can. If you want to get yourself a little treat, you can. You can sign contracts and make your own legal and medical decisions and not need a parent or guardian signature for just about anything ever again
You generally learn how to give fewer fucks
The people around you have also generally learned how to give fewer fucks
Even when things are shitty, being able to choose what kind of shitty a lot of the time can really be worth an awful lot
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nehts · 2 years
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Well.
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Lies, damned lies, and Uber
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I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!
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Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.
Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.
Here's how they did it.
For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.
These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.
Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.
Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.
It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php
Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."
Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:
https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage
Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):
https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf
Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.
Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars
After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division
The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/
The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.
How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html
But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.
In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible
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Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
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Best ways to restrain your Whumpees (a subjective scale)
Tied to a chair: 7/10. Classic, gets the job done. Rub their skin raw while you're at it.
Cuffed to the chair: 9/10. The more cuffs the better. Sure, cuff each wrist to an arm chair. But what if you also cuffed their wrists together with just enough slack so their circulation doesn't cut off? ... what if you didn't give them enough slack? What about their legs?
Chained to the chair: 4/10. Oppressive weight is nice and all, but unless you know what you're doing, these are easy to slide off and best used alongside other methods.
Strapped to the chair: 6/10. Better suited for impersonal settings.
Duct taped to the chair: 7/10. Potential 9/10 if you rip the tape off every time you move them. Do you do it hard and fast, listen to their sudden scream? Or do you do it slowly, savor each pitiful little whimper?
(Surgery required) Put magnets in their wrists: 9/10. Make them try to lift their arms, only to feel like their skin is ripping from the inside. Make sure they know you put the magnets in there. Nothing that will make them sick, you reassure. Just making sure they can't go anywhere without you un-magnetizing the arm rests.
Chained to the wall: 7/10. How much room do they have? Is it only one wrist, both on the same chain? Each one on opposite sides of the room? What about ankles? Do their steps rattle? Can they toss and turn in bed without making any noise?
Chained/cuffed to the floor: 10/10. Absolute humiliation. Forced to kneel, bow their head, cower like a dog before you. Their restraints holding them down every time they try to rise against you, reminding them of their place.
Ankles chained to a pole: 6/10. Oh sure, you can run. You just can't go very far. An interesting idea, but overall mediocre.
Leash wrapped around a pole: 8/10. Leave your pet unable to wander too far, perhaps keep their food bowl just out of reach. Make them dependent on you for bathroom breaks, food, and water.
Tied to a beam/pole: 8/10. How big is the pole? Are they tied so tight that all they can do is squeeze their shoulder blades together, and every time they try to relax the ropes tug them back? Is it large enough that their entire arms can wrap around it? A little too big for that? Did you tie up their feet as well?
Tied horizontally to a beam/pole: 9/10. So many ways this could go! Arms and legs above them like they're a pig on a spit, or one of those rotisserie chickens in the grocery store. Arms below, facing up, like they're laying in bed. Forced to look down at how high up they are, unable to do anything to get down.
Dangling by their wrists: 8/10. Once again, a classic choice. Rope or cuffs work here.
Dangling by their hair: 2/10. Not a long-term solution, hair will be pulled out. Only works with certain Whumpees. Only suited for short-term punishments.
Dangling by their neck: 7/10 if done right. Once again, a temporary solution best used to scare and threaten your Whumpee. I cannot overstate that you must be careful with this method if you like to reuse Whumpees. Remember to let your Whumpee down once they pass out!!
Dangling by their leash and collar: 6/10. Same concerns as above.
Dangling by their waist: 4/10. Has some potential, but have not seen it used much if at all.
Dangling by their ankles/feet: 5/10. A good way to disorient and weaken your Whumpee, but must be used in moderation. Excessive blood rush to the head can cause permanent damage and makes your Whumpee less fun to play with.
Standing in water: 4/10. A good short-term punishment, but can cause loss of toes and even feet of water gets too cold. Proceed with caution.
Gags: 9/10! Good for defiant Whumpees, Whumpees in transport, ones who can't learn the lesson not to speak. Just remember to take it off when you want to hear their screams.
Small rooms, holes in the ground, boxes: 8/10. Less about restraint, more containment, but still gets the point across. They cannot escape you, no matter how much they wish to.
I reiterate, leashes: 10/10. Hold their leash at all times, and you'll know when they try to run away.
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