never forget vernon losing his fucking mind when harry was getting his hogwarts letters
Tags:
#long post #Harry Potter #comic #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
#Harry Potter #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #body horror?
40% of Detroiters have no internet access. The Detroit Community Technology Project and similar projects across the city are skipping over the telcos altogether and wiring up their own mesh broadband networks, where gigabit connections are transmitted by line-of-site wireless across neighborhoods from the tops of tall buildings; it’s called the Equitable Internet Initiative.
This is possible in part because of the ubiquitous abandoned dark fiber, which runs under the streets of Detroit, as it does across many US cities, unused and dormant. The project relies on “digital stewards” who undergo a 20-week training program that teaches them to pull fiber, configure routers, and install and service microwave antennas, as well as teaching their communities to use the services delivered over the internet.
Each local mesh is designed to wire together a neighborhood on an intranet that would continue to function even in the event of internet outages, providing a resilient hub for organizing responses to extreme weather, natural disasters, and other crises.
#I feel like this is relevant #the resiliency of the Internet #the more you know #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(it seemed fitting)
so i made and account on tv tropes and it asked for my relationship status
i went over and was about to put in “single” or “it’s complicated” and, well..
i can’t deal anymore
this is beautiful
Amazing.
Also, that youtube link at the bottom is exactly what you think it is.
Tags:
#long post #oh my god #rickrolling #(I did check) #(and when I got most of the way through typing out the video ID) #(”Never Gonna Give You Up” popped up in the URL-history section) #(apparently I’ve listened to that exact video of it before) #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #(don’t get me wrong a lot of the other ones are amusing too) #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
“So the rules thus far are ‘don’t be late’ and ‘don’t be absent from class,’ unless you are absent because of circumstances outside your control. In that case, notify me before class. If I walk in here and you are not in your seat, and I don’t already know why that is the case… I will assume that you are dead. We will hold a brief service in your memory and then continue on, as we know you would want.”
“Yeah I mean if you don’t know the answer that’s fine, but I’m gonna make you pick the next person I call on. It’s a social experiment I run. I like to see if people pick their friends or their enemies. Wildly amusing. Anyway, be prepared for that.”
“So as the plaintiff’s counsel, you review all the possible venues and pick the one that’s the fairest to everyone….. haaaaahahaha I’m just kidding. You rig the court in your favor as much as you possibly can.”
“You’re supposed to go to a basement during a tornado. Why don’t y’all have basements?” “Can’t watch from a basement” “You’re going to die”
“My own law professor once described admiralty jurisdiction as ‘shit that happens on boats’ so [writes ‘boat shit’ on the board]”
“So then Congress gave itself a raise and America shouted, ‘Give it back you evil bastards!!!’ so loudly that they did.”
“I will provide you with pizza. For beverages, you’re on your own, but please abide by Baylor policy. Which is that we can’t have FUN.”
“And WHAT do we find outside the cities????? C O W S”
“All the desks on the third floor are reserved for 3Ls in practice court. Since you’re dying like, 100% of the time, they kindly give you a place to die. Sometimes you can see the lost souls wandering past the balconies….”
[makes a list of twenty-four things that could go wrong] [writes TRUMP in all caps as number twenty-five]
Round two:
“You don’t want conservatives! You want someone that will redistribute a little wealth! Get some commies! But don’t ask for them out loud, or it won’t end well.”
“Occasionally someone will walk into your office and start with ‘well just as a matter of principle…’ and that right there? That’s when you pull out your extra-strength Advil, because it will be a long day.”
“You can walk into a restaurant and just say, ‘I want tea.’ Sweet is implied! If you don’t want it sweet, it’s ‘tea, hold the sugar,’ and I like that!”
“My biggest goal is to die in Texas. When Gabriel’s trumpet blows, I will be resurrected from Texas dirt… if at all. Depends on his standards.”
“And I say, ‘How much will you pay me?’ and they say ‘a shitload!’ And I say, ‘how much is a shitload?’ and what do you know? Our definitions match”
“So you see that it’s an unincorporated association, and your reaction to that should be ‘shit!’ That is absolutely the proper reaction. That’s a good reaction.”
“You know it’s not perjury if you cross your fingers, right?”
“I would definitely shank someone for pizza.”
“Right now you’re… you’re lawyer larvae. I have a sense for these things.”
“So obviously Congress sprang into action. Why are you laughing? Oh yeah, BECAUSE IT’S BEEN A QUARTER CENTURY”
Round three:
“And by that I mean CRAC, the acronym, not c-r-a-c-k as in crack. Although I was a defense attorney for a long time, so if you want to know how to make crack, we can cover that in a side session. It’s good information. Very interesting.”
“And then I file a complaint against my employer for discriminating against me as a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant. You know… [sarcastically] the historically discriminated against crew”
“Listen, I like money. It’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil. You can like it just fine.”
“With the well-pleaded complaint rule, we take a scalpel and we carve out the cause of action. We lift it out of the body, bleeding! It is BLEEDING in your hands! You hold it in front of your face and you ask it, ‘WHO CREATED YOU?’ [groaning] ‘A federal law.’ ‘THEN YOU ARE A FEDERAL CASE!’ If it’s a state case, you cast it, still-beating, aside. And stomp on it.”
[with deep respect] “You would make a really good anarchist”
“Beaumont? How’s your family doing?” “Pretty well. I mean, everything is underwater, but it’s fine.”
“Your argument is what? ‘You can’t make that much money because it isn’t fair?’ This is America. Fair doesn’t matter.”
“We need ONLY one more thing: someone rich to sue. Can she help us?? We don’t know… until she describes one word on the side of that truck…. ‘Walmart.’ CHA C H I N G (don’t say that part out loud)! What’s forty percent of thirty million?? TWELVE MILLION. Forty percent is the ONLY math I can do in my head, because that is PRIVATE JET MONEY, BABY! The ONLY POINT of being rich is to HAVE A PRIVATE JET, because THOSE THAT DO can MANIPULATE TIME. As you can see, I am passionate on this point.”
“See this is a tough question because legislators are supposed to make laws, but how would you know that? They haven’t done it in YEARS.”
“Listen I don’t condone murder-suicide, but like… I feel it.”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
After unleashing one too many buried evils, the dwarves said “bugger this” and moved as far away from the Underdark as possible. Their entire civilisation now occupies a swarm of small space stations in high Earth orbit. 90% of them work in material science and telecommunications.
Gnome society has become steadily more obsessed with concealment and illusions until, in the present day, most gnomes use illusory disguises full-time to masquerade as members of other races. Almost everyone knows at least one gnome; almost no-one is aware of it.
Though halflings have a reputation as drugged-out savants, the truth of the matter is that their pharmacological science is incredibly advanced, particularly in the area of cognitive and empathic performance enhancement. At any given time, your average halfling is under the influence of a complex brew of brain-boosting drugs (which only work for halflings); there are fewer side effects than you’d think.
Orcish culture’s preoccupation with violent spectacle has evolved into an unstoppable entertainment industry. The largest orcish nation is also the global centre of production for big-budget summer blockbusters; orcish martial arts musicals are particularly popular among other races. Most orcs at least casually practice some sort of performance art, though some resent the expectation that they should.
Elves are hardcore gamers. All of them. It’s the cornerstone of their civilisation. Elvish video games tend to be unfathomably abstruse, unimaginably difficult, or both; being into “elf games” is regarded as a mark of refinement, though in truth most non-elves don’t really understand them.
I love the idea that younger elves love video games, but the older ones remember prefer the old fashioned games. These are not chess or Go, but are more like stupidly complex Euro boardgames or complex trading card games like Magic but worse.
There’s a bit of that, yeah, though most old-timers were totally on board with the transition to electronic media. Elves don’t have the same relationship with physical artefacts that humans do. The real intergenerational pissing contest these days is about whether speed-running is a legitimate art form, or just screwing around.
(It’s exacerbated by the fact that speed-running as an organised practice actually originated among humans, so a lot of older elves regard it with suspicion on that basis alone.)
Elf streamer: Hey, this is Valuriagod420 with another any percent speed run of The Doom of Karum Dul Run. I know Entmaster beat my previous time but I’m gonna get it back. This game is mine!
[Several minutes later]
Streamer: OK so we are still looking good to hit the 38 minute and 23 second mark right on schedule. Now here we can slip past a lot of dudes by back rolling into this corner 12 times and then using an orcish…
Elf Dad (from upstairs): Are you speed running down there! I told you no son of the Everleaf house will partake in any of that nonsense! If you’re not in a 1v1 comp match by the time I get down there, then goddesses help me I’ll throw you out into the dark hallow to face the 5 trials by YOURSELF!
Since the notes seem to be stuck on the gaming thing, let’s expand on that:
The dwarven obsession with dating sims is proverbial. The orbital colonies are both the largest consumers of dating sims – dwarf-made or otherwise – and among the most prolific producers, playing host to several major publishers and a thriving indie scene. Dwarven dating sims typically feature complex crafting and engineering subgames alongside relationship-building gameplay; the two sides often share the same basic mechanics, thus framing relationship-building as a process of literal social engineering.
Gnomish games, conversely, usually aren’t simulating anything at all, being purely abstract puzzle-solving affairs with a heavy emphasis on spatial manipulation and pattern matching. When gnomish gamers get into more mainstream titles, they tend not to recognise a distinction between “playing” and “breaking”; a gameplay video put together by a gnome is more likely to be a glitch exhibition or a thirty-five-minute lecture on the finer points of terrain collision detection than it is to be a demonstration of the game being played as intended.
It’s perhaps unsurprising that halflings are often drawn to twitch games. Indeed, one of the latest controversies in competitive gaming revolves around whether halfling nootropics ought to be banned as performance-enhancing drugs. Critics point out that human gamers routinely compete while juiced up on caffeine; responses have ranged from insisting that it’s different (though one can quite agree how) to proposals to ban caffeine from competitive gaming as well. The latter have historically been poorly received.
Some might expect orcish video games to be plotless gore-fests. Those who do badly misunderstand orcish culture’s relationship with violence. Sure, it all comes down to ass-kicking in the end, but first the protagonist and the final boss are going to have a ten-minute conversation about their feelings in order to properly contextualise it. One of the most popular orcish video games in recent years concerns a young hero who achieves enlightenment and saves a lost kingdom by coming to the realisation that all communication is violence.
Honestly my favorite part of this is the idea of Orcish culture evolving into the entertainment capital of the world. I picture that centuries ago there was some Dark Lord type or another who was overthrown not by a rag-tag band of adventurers of the more classically heroic races but by the orcs themselves, who were tired of being exploited and slaughtered meaninglessly, who then looked at one another when the rubble settled and wondered, collectively, “What now?”
And then apparently deciding that the answer to this was channeling a history of nonstop violence into art, sports and theater.
Orcs killed their gods, then wrote a musical about it.
(This is also a big part of the reason that most orcish polities are at least moderate socialists. “No gods, no masters” carries a lot more punch when you can physically point to the decapitated skull of your former chief deity on display in your legislative assembly’s foyer.)
So you’re telling me that orcs have a culture that channels violent aggression into art and that they’re socialists? I think I have a new favorite race.
I wonder if there’s a particular way in which their gods are ‘traditionally’ depicted in performance. Depending on the genre of the work I could see them as anything from aloof and inimical to bombastically awful to bumbling and self-important.
(Headcanon: one of the more influential early works had the chief of the gods portrayed by an actor standing on a high platform out of the view of the audience, with lighting above and behind him in such a way that he appears as a shadow cast on the backdrop, looming over the heroine of the piece.)
And bringing it back around to video games, orcish CRPGs often depict the gods as controlling and abusive parental figures. There’s a popular meme where you describe an orcish CRPG as “the one where you kill God at the end”. The joke is that’s all of them.
This world’s equivalent of Square-Enix is a collaboration between orcish and dwarven game developers, initially conceived of as an overture of cultural reconciliation. Opinions regarding the outcome are… mixed.
Anyway, we’ve done elves and orcs – let’s do dwarves!
The reasons why the bulk of the dwarven population now lives in orbital habitats – or “habs”, as they’re colloquially known – are complex, ranging from resource exhaustion in ancestral delves to political tension with human neighbours, and only partly involve the increasing incidence of demons of shadow and flame from before the dawn of time. “We did it to get away from all the damn balrogs” lies somewhere between an oversimplification and a private joke.
(Incidentally, many dwarves will seriously side-eye any non-dwarf who brings up the balrog thing, even in jest, owing to the fact that dwarven greed being responsible for unleashing evil upon a previously pristine world is a once-popular racist canard. Elves in particular receive very little benefit of the doubt.)
One surprising factor behind the move, however, is biological: dwarven resistance to magic and poison also applies to cosmic rays. Most habs have no radiation shielding whatsoever, which enormously simplifies their construction compared to general-purpose space stations, at the cost of rendering them unsuitable for long-term residence by non-dwarves. This suits most dwarves just fine.
The move to orbit didn’t mean an end to mining: captured comets and asteroids are towed into high orbit for processing by specialised resource extraction habs. Bringing the whole asteroid home is much more convenient than trying to process it on-site, and unmanaged de-orbiting events almost never happen.
(Just don’t ask a dwarf about about what happened to their former terrestrial capital – it’s a touchy subject.)
Also, it turns out that about one in twenty asteroids contains unhatched space-demon eggs. This is widely regarded as proof of the dwarven cultural conviction that the universe is out to get them. (Thanks to @perfectly-ultimate-great-shoofle for this one!)
Apart from resource extraction, dwarven habs play many other roles, from solar power collection to telecommunications to zero-G manufacturing to research and development. Most habs are small enough – a few hundred residents at most – that they’re effectively single-function, and all dwarves hailing from habs with the same function are considered to be members of the same clan, even if their respective orbits are nowhere near each other.
Dwarven gamers who live on telecommunications habs enjoy fantastic ping, and are justly reviled for it by their terrestrial opponents.
Halflings tho. What if they are the one who make music and advertisements? They know a lot about every races minds, so they can make super emotional music that makes you really sad or happy and stuff. And the advertisments are super convincing. Most halfings that do advertise are rich and are hard to hire.
Halflings have few independent nations, with most integrated into human communities. Their living arrangements are often quite different, though. It’s a matter of debate whether it’s cultural or biological, but whatever the reason, most halflings prefer to have housemates. Lots of housemates.
Their small size makes it easier than you might think: a human one-bedroom apartment, suitably refurbished, can comfortably accommodate 4-6 halflings, and a single-family dwelling can house well over a dozen.
Members of a given household are typically unrelated, and membership can be very fluid; some halflings regularly cycle between households, while closely aligned households may frequently trade members. In spite of this, friction is rare, thanks in large part to the judicious use of empathy-enhancing drugs to promote rapid group bonding.
The halfling penchant for doing things in groups extends to romantic pursuits. When two compatible households meet, double dates are not uncommon; nor are triple dates, quadruple dates, and occasionally duodecuple dates. A successful match may result in swapping members, though if they’re very well-aligned and suitable housing can be found, they may simple merge into a single, larger household instead.
Such romances are not always restricted to tidy pair-bonds; at least as often, they result in non-Euclidean polyamorous tangles that make perfect sense to halflings and are utterly incomprehensible to everyone else. This contributes in no small part to the halfling stereotype as a bunch of free-loving stoners, even among those who should know better.
The offspring of a household are expected to get together with their friends and strike out to found their own households once they come of age; halflings regard this practice as essential to preventing households from becoming too insular. They still keep in touch with their natal households via social media, though; a typical halfling’s contact list may require more than three spatial dimensions to adequately model.
None of this is to say that halfling introverts don’t exist, of course. Household-dwelling halflings are generally non-judgmental toward halflings who live alone, but there’s a definite expectation for them to be wildly eccentric. Many solitary halflings gleefully take advantage of the social latitude this expectation affords them.
Halfling gaming parties are a sight to behold. A party game that only supports eight simultaneous players is scarcely worthy of the name; the latest generation of party fighters routinely support 32-player free-for-alls. It’s a matter of some conjecture whether it’s the brain-boosting drugs or simply long practice that allows halflings to keep track of what’s going on, because certainly nobody else can!
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #long post #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
(Specifically, they flip which times are mid-peak and which are on-peak. Which means if you’ve been trying to move some of your on-peak electricity usage to mid-peak times, you need to change your strategy when the seasonal rate changes or you’ll end up making things *worse*.)
So the bad news is, my family’s been severely fucking up our attempts to reduce our electric bill for three and a half months, and moderately fucking it up for years. Good news is, now that we actually know what our cards are and how to play them, between that and the recent drops in electricity rates we can probably cut our electric bill to, like, $10 – $20/month (our 2016 average was ~$130/month; 2017’s been more like $100 so far, but they just dropped the rates again, so an equivalent amount of usage would now cost ~$80).
I don’t think I actually have any Ontarian readers, but the rest of you might want to check if anything analogous is going on in your area. That’s a lot of money that could be going towards food, shelter, etc.
Tags:
#shown above: an example of why I haven’t played Flight Rising since December #why play dragon capitalism when you’re playing *real* capitalism #(I suspect in the long run I’m going to end up with some serious miser issues) #(we’ve been bleeding savings to some extent or another for so long) #(I’ve gotten used to the idea that my future selves will always need my money more than I do) #(that the overall trajectory of one’s finances is always downward) #(but the sooner you start acting as if you’re already broke the longer it will take for you to become *actually* broke) #(and the softer a landing it will be when you inevitably get there) #(so if I ever end up in a position of true financial stability) #((rather than the one-time cash infusions that have kept us afloat so far)) #(I’m going to have a hell of a time convincing myself of it) #(I think part of me’s always going to believe that the good times are temporary and I need to be preparing for when they end) #anyway I’m glad I double-checked the electricity-price rules #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #oh look an original post #the more you know #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
I’m missing out on everyone else’s experiences of sexuality, but everyone else is missing out on mine.
Tags:
#the reasoning behind naming the kink tag #sexuality and lack thereof #(and now for some other category tags:) #reply via reblog #the wondrous variety of sapient life #asexuality #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 