stop eating gruel with the fools and come eat a leek with a freak

this post got me laid

there are some internet friends where eventually you start calling them by their real name and then there’s times where its like nah son your name is crispy forever

I remember sci-fi/hacker media from the late 80s - early 2000s, full of people with names like Hagbard and Cereal and Hiro Protagonist. My response was always “aw man, so in the future we not only get to choose our names, but we can make our own cool unique ones that are related to the activities and identities we actually care about? This is awesome! I wish I had friends who had cool names based on their self identities. I wanna hang out with people named Y.T. and Whistler, but I’m stuck here in the suburbs with my friends Bob and Doug. So lame.” Flash forward twenty five years, I’ve transitioned to male and I’ve started writing under the pen name Idal Waves. I’m talking to a family member about my friends and contemporaries and as I discuss people with names like Shoe and Fork and Evac, I realize that modern-day queer names and modern-day online handles are just the same as those dream hacker names of the early days of cyberpunk fantasy. They’re the identifiers that are chosen so you can do something cool, something so cool that you get a whole new name that you choose to describe yourself. A name for the world we choose to inhabit, not the one we’re stuck with.

Congratulations, pre-teen me. We made it. We’re cool as fuck and we got to choose our names and define ourselves and hang around with other people who do the same. The cyberpunk adults were right. It’s fucking awesome, just like you thought it would be.

Sorry about the name though, I know you were hoping for something you thought was awesome like Shadow or Goremaster.

my actual friends and lovers call me roach, like the bug. family and coworkers call me ray, a compromise name for the most boring parts of my life. once my mom asked me if my friend ‘lizard’ had a real name and was amused when i said that *was* her real name. ‘her mom named her lizard?’ my mom asked, as though a mother’s name for a baby would have anything to do with who that person really is.

i learned this lesson from a deadhead in the late 80s or so, guy by the name of wharf rat, and i asked him once what his real name was, and he said “wharf rat”. like, yeah, there’s a name on his ID that isn’t that but no one calls him anything else. okay you know what, you have convinced me. thanks, wharf rat. you were 100% right.

"why is EVERY song about love" I'm begging you to dig just a tiny bit deeper, there's literally thousands of songs that aren't love songs. You don't even have to look for the most obscure underground artists ever, the fucking Beatles of all people have a song about a guy who kills people with a hammer

There is genuine conservation potential in this type of cloning and genetics work but like,, at some point you have to decide whether the potential benefits of Colossal's real conservation work are worth the absolute tornado of misinformation that they create for their publicity stunt "de-extinction" work. And I don't know where that line is, but the way they present this "dire wolf" stuff just leaves a terrible taste in my mouth.

I'm sorry I'm going fucking insane over trans people in sports issues the anti trans crowd has lost the fucking plot and then has the audacity to act like its the trannies who are ridiculous

I used to be of the "well the sports issue isn't really important to me its w/e I just don't want it to be a gateway into other transphobia" but oh my fucking god we are so far gone. The fencing shit is sending me over the edge. What the fuck.

I can't even articulate my words so I'm just going to tell a story in screenshots

I am so fucking tired of being gaslit about this

I'm also still so fucking pissed that we have to include "ooo the trans fencer only finished in X place" because its a reminder that trans women will never be allowed to excel at anything in the public eye without being cut down. Fuck OFF

Urban Legend (1998) dir. Jamie Blanks

i am really not looking forward to tumblr pretending that JK Rowling posting one mean (and yes obviously bigoted) tweet about asexual people is the same thing as spending the last ten years of her life (& millions of pounds) dedicated to stripping trans women specifically of all of our rights.

literally. when i see people say “oh she’s working her way up through the queer community” all i can hear is “first they came for the trans women, but I did nothing because I am not a trans woman”. the response has made it utterly clear that people don’t give a shit about transmisogyny.

huh. so i just found out "Torment Nexus" was invented for that one specific meme. i genuinely thought it was from an Orson Scott Welles novel. my ignorance is an unending source of surprise and delight

um. Orson Wells. H.G. Scott Welles. H. George Orson Orwell. Philip Bradbury. stop making me keep track of white men names

in my defense all of these are separate individuals famous within classic sci-fi circles:

at some point this is not my burden

Girl wearing a collar and leash with a big orange vest that reads "Therapy Dog" cheerfully ordering two cheeseburgers for herself and the socially anxious girl holding the other end of the leash

I've made viral posts before- hell, I've made more viral posts before. But judging from the three separate pieces of art in as many days, Therapy Dog has really struck a particular chord

the bar is underground

Poob has it for you

i'm going to become the joker

Okay

Yeah that’s

Yeah

#228 - #229. While male Houndoom are solitary, females often make pacts with herding pokémon, offering protection from other hunters. In trade, they choose a member of the herd to feast on when hungry and safety for their pups.

Sponsored by @freewingedwolf

I came across a xiaohongshu post that showed pictures of an abandoned traditional village in a mountainous region of China with very little surrounding greenery that had the captions: “so sad how traditional villages like these are empty and abandoned”

But the top comment was: “I am so happy for the villagers who finally made it out of the mountains and into new homes in prosperous cities. It often takes multiple generations of hard work to get the entire family out. Every family in this village achieved this. What you are looking at is the evidence of their success!”

And the second highest liked comment was: “You can tell this area has poor agricultural resources. The ancestors of the villagers were likely forced to settle here because more powerful villages have occupied the attractive fertile lands. Who knows how long they had been trapped here? I’m glad they finally made it out!”

Another comment with high likes: “My grandparents’ village was like this. Poor air quality from burning coal in poorly ventilated buildings. Bitterly cold in the winter. Dry and hot in the summer. Short growing seasons. And there was always a shortage of water. My parents got factory jobs in the city and after working and saving for years, they finally got all of us out.”

And it occurred to me how when we romanticize old fashioned villages and mourn the loss of the type of community they provided, we sometimes downplay and overlook the extraordinary liberation and agency that industrialization brought and brings to people who in previous generations had no option but to remain where they were born for most of their lives.

Love some miserable Elon in the morning

it’s even more miserable than I thought