Sword Guy oil lamp is nearly ready to dry out! I think I'm gonna name it "The Vigil." Unless I think of something better. Fire will be coming from the ground near the tip of the sword.

Got six more swords from the blacksmith!

2022-01-10

Having survived and escaped a truly horrible job has really changed my perspective on a lot of annoying workplace practices, to the point that I have to bite my tongue to stop me from being annoyingly positive at coworkers who are (not unreasonably and good-naturedly) grumping.

'We have too many staff meetings.' -> "OH MY GOD WE HAVE REGULAR STAFF MEETINGS. Where management tells us about things that are happening and we are encouraged to provide input!!!"

'We weren't given information on [important thing] until almost right before it happened.' -> "WE WERE GIVEN INFORMATION ON [IMPORTANT THING] BEFORE IT HAPPENED! And then management explained why it wasn't provided sooner, apologized, and committed to doing better!"

'We're required to do too many trainings.' -> "WE HAVE TRAININGS!! We are encouraged and given funding to go to trainings, even!!"

'We have too many over-written procedures for things, it needlessly clogs up the process and creates unnecessary work.' -> "WE HAVE FORMAL PROCEDURES FOR THINGS!!! Procedures that are actually followed!!!"

'This mental health exercise/training was cringy and annoying' -> "MENTAL HEALTH IS ACKNOWLEDGED AS A THING THAT EXISTS. And if we request accommodations (legally required or not), we aren't flatly denied and then have the request used against us!"

'This workplace conflict was not handled particularly well.' -> "I HAVEN'T SEEN A SINGLE STAFF MEMBER ASSAULT ANOTHER STAFF MEMBER! And it seems like there might actually be consequences if that happened!!!"

Look we all want a robo dog but if you kill someone with a sledgehammer to steal theirs, they are going to find you. There's no way a 75k$ dog doesn't have gps

we are killing the dog

its not a dog, its a machine used and designed for police surveillance and the entire reason they made it dog shaped is so idiots like you would go "awwww robot dog how precious" instead of seeing them as the oppressive tools they are.

we're killing the fucking dog

That's not a robot dog.

It's a four-legged robot spider.

It is not a dog, a spider, a chicken, a horse, a fish, a tick, a mosquito, a tapeworm or a baby

It is a weapon

There is nothing morally wrong about breaking weapons that are hurting people for any reason other than to prevent those people from hurting others worse

the dog robots are fully capable of hurting people, and badly. failsafes that would prevent that have not been installed. the police are deploying a thing out in public that can maim anyone who touches it wrong.

look, when i was a kid i was passionately in love with the idea of robots--that humans would one day create another sort of intelligence to share our world with-- and believed very firmly that we should respect and protect all our robot friends from the start, so there would be no violent humans-against-robots revolution or anything.

anyway it turns out that the people trying to keep end-stage capitalism running are really banking on us feeling more love for the robots than for the kind of people they're going to be using the robots to oppress.

so like. maybe lets all agree right now that if a robot is being used to hurt a person, you need to smash the fucking robot. they're going to make the robots really cute. they're going to show us so many movies about how much robots need to be loved. and then they are going to use robots to hurt people.

let's try not to fall for it, okay?

And don't forget that scary af episode of Black Mirror, Metalhead. Robot dogs can fuck right off.

They created a weapon, told you to call it a friend and watched as your empathy became their trap and tool. 

Real life dogs are oftentimes weapons as well

People who exploit animals will often exploit humans too. They’re exploiting the cuteness of animals to manipulate you and the potential danger of dogs to control you.

So if we’re being intersectional about this, also be cautious about people who use animals as tools.

If it ain’t three laws safe, it ain’t friend shaped.

Bludgeon it.

Sooooo the company I work for works with law enforcement. As in, they're our main customers. (Which I'm actually all for, because the amount of accountability we're loading into the back end while "making their jobs easier" is ASTONISHING. My very leftist old hippy Dad is excited about me working here.)

Anyway, I have seen these robot dogs in person at a conference, and it took under a minute for my brain to go "Doggo! Friend shaped!" When I stepped back and thought about it, it was unnerving as HELL.

So yeah. Go buy that hammer. Bet you can find similar ones at thrift stores, too.

no no no no, listen to me: remove smashing technology with a hammer from your mindset.

the type you'd need for this is heavy, expensive, unwieldy, without practice you are just as likely to hurt yourself more, and genuinely at the end of the day you are not going to break this with a hammer.

forget "hammer == best way break technology"

if you wanna fuck up technology you get a can of expanding foam. it's small, incredibly easy to carry/conceal and it WILL fuck up any technology WAY MORE than even an expertly wielded hammer hitting every weak point every single time.

you break something with a hammer and unless you know precisely what you're doing (and have the time to do it), that shits reusable anyway. but expanding foam? there is no coming back from that for anything.

Good news, it's even cheaper than the hammer

kia ora from madagascar

Franklin Booth.

pov you are wfh and willabee is there

Mainland She Oak Skink (Cyclodomorphus michaeli), mother with pups, family Scincidae, eastern Australia

photograph by Ken Griffiths

The paw on the window

service industry conditions

there should be a tax that youtubers pay where 1.5% of all of their revenue goes back to Kevin Macleod for basically supplying YouTube with it’s own soundtrack.

who is this man and what music did he make???

if you hear a royalty free song on youtube, there’s approximately an 80% chance Kevin Macleod wrote it.

here’s some you’ve almost definitely heard:

for those wondering, yes, he also made THE generic royalty free song that was EVERYWHERE in 2014.

He has a Patreon!

And he doesn’t even make a 1000$ per month!

also, his site incompetech.com also has graph paper generators, if you’re in need of that. It has any kind of graph paper - INCLUDING hex paper, you tabletop gamers out there! (or knitting paper if you’re into that)

HOHOHOHO?

Y'all, I’ve been a fan of Kevin MacLeod for YEARS. I can identify his music within two seconds. He’s a fucking genius and he deserves all the love and credit and money people can give.

He scored invader zim AND xiaolin showdown

I, personally, have been won over. Best in show, Mr. Peacock. 14/10

That is a hell of a fantastic color morph. Wow.

@elodieunderglass 4 u

"Being bi means all the attraction you feel is gay" NOT ME. All my attraction is not only hetero, it's hetero in the most off-putting way possible. I like men in the fetishistic yaoi fangirl way and I like women in the creepy mouth-breathing guy in your workplace way

actually kinda funny to me that fanfiction is known as a hobby for cringe 13 year olds because personally over half of the fanfic authors i know are married 30 year olds with mediocre admin jobs they attend to inbetween posting chapters of their latest gay sex epic adventure

And I am one of the 30 year olds 😁😁😁

Can confirm, office job in between planning raunchy fan art.

Listen, IT work has gotten pretty anodyne and these guys aren't gonna get into trouble themselves

what is THE worst thing you've ever drank. all liquids acceptable. please tell me what it was, bonus points for why

Hey whoa hi. Hello. I am looking directly into your ear canal. What do you mean you drank a tube of virus concentrate.

So, I was working in a lab, right? My job in the lab was preparing a pure, concentrated enough sample of virus. This is tricky since, y'know, viruses require hosts to replicate, but you then need to get the host cells (and the pieces of the host cells that died!) out of the sample while still keeping the viruses. Once I'd finished and the samples had been sent to the database for analysis as well as a second one sent to be frozen for future reference, there was still some left over that needed to be disposed of.

I, knowing that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, waited carefully for the lab director to be deep in conversation with someone else on the other side of the laboratory. And then I took my chance.

Test tubes, as it turns out, are really bad as shot glasses. Their shape turns any liquid inside into a stream, so you really can't knock it back quickly - it takes a couple seconds. Additionally, the best way I can describe the taste of virus concentrate was "sterile rot". A very unique kind of bad! Made worse by the test tube's inefficiency as a shot glass.

(by the way we were studying bacteriophages, not animal viruses. these viruses are too specialized on attacking prokaryotes to even recognize our cells as targets at all, according to studies.)

(but also like. if the viruses managed to successfully switch hosts and killed me with a violent infection, itd still be worth it.)

(for science.)

You have a fitting blog title

this post is getting 50k easy

a good DM is supposed to work with their players so that they can play whatever build they want, while a player can tune out anything the DM says about the world that they're not interested in, even if it's stuff about what classes, backgrounds, etc. are part of the setting's palette. in fact, a player should be able to treat the game as a single-player game starring their PC if they want to.

hey why are all our DMs burning out?

I'm seeing a lot of people tagging this "ttrpgs" and I wan to clarify that my use of the term "DM" is intentional here, because I haven't seen anywhere near this level of disrespect for people hosting games in anything but D&D