Just found out my facebook birding group is public because my cousin (a lawyer who is not into birds) casually said to me “saw you couldn’t identify a willet the other day… pretty embarrassing”

im letting the days go by and i dont even have a beautiful house or a beautiful wife

gordon ramsey: is the food good here?

underpaid server: 

My favourite thing about that show is how he treats servers. It was also the source of some very intense fantasies when I was a barista of him busting into my cafe, calling my boss a fucking idiot, then taking me against the broken dishwasher.

Another tiefling to add to my roster >:3

Her name is Invidia (Invi for short) and she's a monastery drop out - but not before they taught her how to kick ass.

whenever my program freezes

I sat with a crying second grader today. (The age range is outside my wheelhouse but I was the most convenient adult.) He was crying, the other adults said, because his brother took a phone he was playing on. “Phone addicted,” everybody said. “If he would get up and play games with the other kids he wouldn’t be crying.”

He told me everyone lets his brother take things from him because his brother is younger, and doesn’t know better. He told me he doesn’t want to play because he’s tired, he has too many extracurriculars this summer and can’t get good sleep because “everyone in my camper is so loud when I’m trying to sleep.” He’s exhausted and only eight. His mom’s an acquaintance and told me she and the kid’s father are going through a separation — mom and four kids left the house to stay in a camper.

But people will seriously not listen to kids crying over seemingly minor things because on the surface it looks like a tantrum. If kids are given the space to articulate themselves they often will.

I’ve found that if a child is capable of having a conversation (that is, old enough to speak and express themselves, not injured or upset so badly that they literally cannot stop crying, and not behaving violently), then 90% of the time their reason for being upset is legitimate, or at least understandable.

Please remember that this also applies to teenagers and preteens, they might be acting like a knowitall who doesn’t give a shit, or a first class jerk, but chances are fair they feel like shit for one reason or another and adults just chalk it up to teenage angst instead

Almost every time you see someone, child, teen, or adult, who is having some emotional meltdown over something minor, it's a "straw that broke the camels back" situation.

Kids and teens may have bigger reactions or it may take less to overwhelm them, but it's important to remember that they are still people and it's hard being a people.

we need a universal grocery classification system like the dewey decimal to aid in shelving, so i don’t have to figure out whether you think maple syrup goes with the sauces, breakfast foods, jams, or condiments

#the chewy decimal system (via @crafty-butch)

Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.

Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.

Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.

You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.

As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.

Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.

This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.

A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.

you gotta be as gay as possible on the computer otherwise alan turing died for nothing

I'm sorry Alan I'll do better

It's 2023 and this joke is still somehow even funnier than ever.

personally i think there should have been at least one episode where sokka collects aang and zuko and is like, “looks like we’re running low on supplies.  time for a GUYS-ONLY field trip.  three days of hunting and fishing and polishing our swords.  y’know, manly warrior stuff.  (aang, sotto voce: actually sokka i’m a vegetarian as you know–)  you girls have fun sitting around braiding your hair and talking about your crushes” and then the entire episode is just zuko and sokka lying around by a river, plucking blades of grass and staring up at the stars confiding in each other their deepest feelings and most secret insecurities while aang braids flower crowns, and whenever the screen cuts back to katara and toph and suki, they’re fighting and screaming and hacking away at river pirates and evil spirits and legions of assassins and hired mercenaries with swords.  you know, as girls do.

and when the boys finally drag themselves back to camp (they stayed up way too late discussing what true leadership really means and whether or not power always corrupts)  they find suki and toph and katara lounging around with black eyes and fresh bruises and bloodstained weapons and sokka shrieks, “what were you guys DOING while we were gone???”  and karata just shugs innocently and says in her sweetest voice, “oh, you know.  just girly things”

they are absolutely still wearing the crowns and they don’t have a single fish to show for their efforts

i did it

by the way, it’s real bold of hollywood to be like “the writers and actors have unrealistic expectations, but WE know what we’re doing” when they got tricked into releasing morbius in theaters a second time.