smidgeonink

Fortnite, are you sure about this? Did you think it through?

this made me laugh so hard

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

“why don’t they teleport back” because they’re not on the planet where everyone can teleport anymore. try to keep up dumbass

#this feels like a fable that would have some kind of moral but I’m not quite sure what#something about like hard work/effort/the need to be curious idk

the moral of the story is that a breathable atmosphere is important to one’s general well-being

Darcy’s introduction in Pride and Prejudice is really ‘what if you had just had the worst month of your life because your ex-bestie tried to lover boy scam your baby sister out of her share of your dad’s life insurance and your friend dragged you to a shitty party in a dive bar in the neighbourhood where he’d just signed a short term lease, and you decided to let your bad mood show because you were never going to see any of the assholes in this stupid shitty bar EVER again. And your friend ended up making out with a girl he’d just met there while you were stuck talking to her sister who was less cute and then her mother appeared and started trying to matchmake and started saying how if she was twenty years younger she’d clime you like a redwood and ooooh is that a black Amex, guess the next round is on you hahhahahahaha, while her other sister (how many fucking sisters does she have?!) flashed an obviously fake ID at the bar and ordered six vodka-diet red bulls and no one in her family except the less-cute sister even tried to stop her. And you went home and consoled yourself that you would never see any of these people again but then you met them over and over again because they live next door and your friend and the cute sister keep meeting up to make out but not actually date and then. You fall in love with the less-cute sister because it turns out she’s really witty and charismatic but she already knows and remembers and resents the fact that on a day when you were in a shitty mood you called her mid out loud in a dive bar.’

#there's already two Ls in fitzwilliam but clearly he wants a few more (by @muppetebbtide )

But it’s so accurate

official cephalopod post

so. my wife came downstairs just as i took a bite out of the remaining half red onion on the counter. literally within seconds of just getting away with it. i looked at her, and she looked at me, and we both sat there a moment, all frozen, beforeshe said babs, what the fuck. i tried to say i can explain but it came out as or corn explorn because such was the onion in my mouth that there was no room for words. its honestly a miracle that she understood me at all. at least, i'm assuming that she understood me because she did let me get my bearings for a few moments. a smarter man would've used that time to think up a good lie, but instead i just chewed as fast as i could because i knew i was gonna have to tell a whopper and i really wanted to be able to use big words again.

big words are instrumental to telling a whopper.

anyway, i totally ran out of time. i barely got my first swallow of onion in before she said well?, and i did at least have an empty mouth to match my empty head. but also i had no lies. so i looked her dead in the face, opened my mouth and waited, every bit as curious as her, to hear what excuse my mouth was gonna come up with.

im pregnant, said my mouth.

great job, mouth, said my brain.

mmmmm onion, said my mouth.

better you than me, said my wife. then she went upstairs. it has been two hours she still refuses to kiss me. im devastated. im shook. im crying a little, i think.

(but that might just be the onion.)

Okay but now I have to know

What was the truth??

Because it simply cannot be as obvious as “what, I like onions”

It can’t

Because that would not need a lie

I know people who eat onions like apples simply for pleasure

I don’t understand them, but they say “what, I like onions”, and we both shrug, and they carry on

Also. Was. Was the plan to eat the whole thing? Just no more half red onion? Because the alternative form of “getting away with it” was you were planning to put it back with a bite taken out of it before she came in and that is if anything more unhinged

okay so i do this thing that i call tummy tacos where i put all the ingredients to a taco in front of me, but like, separate. and then i take big bites of all of them. but just one at a time. like one big mouthful of taco chicken and then swallow and then a separate big mouthful of chopped cabbage and then swallow and then a corn tortilla and you get the idea.

(my wife considers it Barbaric. she does not approve of tummy tacos.)

but yesterday i had this idea for stomach pico de gallo there i was gonna eat an onion and then a tomato and then a jalapeno and then some cilantro. thud achieving salsa internally. but i underestimated the call of the onion. i really could give a damn about everything else after the onion. i felt the love of jesus in that onion.

and thus i fell into folly.

Babs, were you going to just rawdog a jalapeno?

no i was planning on just eating it

@charyou-tree

picky eaters fear the eaty picker.

@theshitpostcalligrapher

ognion

ink: custom blend, liquitex pyrole and diamine oxblood

when travis mcelroy said “what if you could just cut out the bullshit and do good recklessly?” and when marc evan jackson said “now go do something good” and when chidi anagonye said “i argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people” and when brennan lee mulligan said “you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares. if you choose to care, then the universe cares. and if you don’t, then it doesn’t”

a very good addition tbh

I wonder if people with hearing aids ever just go "yeah, that's enough. I'm done hearing today", and take them off. Just going "fuck it" and put your surroundings on mute.

As a hearing aid person now, I can say that yeah… it’s a somewhat positive element of an otherwise unpleasant situation (losing one’s hearing, even partially). I have a little over 80% hearing loss on the right side, and have a “bad side” for people to talk to me on.

That said, as long I sleep on my left side, it’s really useful for going to bed earlier than noisy housemates do, and blocking out conversations or the TV.

one of the kids woke up from nap furious to be awake screaming crying carrying on and she did this all through everyone else getting up and eating snack no matter what we did and REFUSED to leave the block center (where her cot goes when she naps) and finally another girl just sat down and started calmly methodically stacking blocks around her. montresored her

yes, the montresor method for early childhood education

"It's just getting repetitive is all," complained the young lawyer to his colleague. "my cases so far have all been the same."

The elder lawyer nodded sympathetically. "It's like that, especially early in your career."

"I can't take it anymore! My current case is a guy suing a ghost for taking over his body. My last case was a demon suing a living woman for getting a tattoo--this was a breach of their contract for the demon to take over her body--and the case before that was a custody battle between the human who was born in the body and the changeling who had spent his life in it. I'm sick of it!"

The elder lawyer sighed. "Didn't I warn you that possession is nine-tenths of law?"

@callmebliss

I stg I read that last line in my whole ass soul left my body

please stop writing "viscous" when you mean "vicious", it produces the weirdest mental images ever

"a viscous murder" yeah i don't want to know what that could look like

it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919

#and vice versa btw#i don’t know what a vicious fluid would be like#and i don’t want to find out

it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919

A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song

Other shit:

Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.

Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid

Why were you falling into the toilet?

I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL

I’m with you here! I fully remember some of that list, some of it I’ve trauma-blocked, and the rest just came rushing back with a brutal suddenness.

Like I was likely on the spectrum, and that knowledge makes a lot of what I remember make way more sense now. I’m sure my folks didn’t want to label me and put me in 1970’s era special education, but it might have made it make more sense to them then that I COULD NOT wear shoes without socks and that I didn’t hate skiing per se, but my toes were always painfully cold and I hated THAT but I couldn’t communicate it.

I vividly recall the forest of adult legs. I also (no matter how hard I try to block it out) remember the absolute embarrassment of grabbing the hand of an adult I THOUGHT was my parent and it WASN’T. Looking waaaaay up at the heat of a stranger’s disapproval that I’d been Wrong.

At the same time… I remember being able to fit under chairs and inside clothes racks and needing a stool to see the bathroom mirror. And the elation I felt when I realized I could walk into the bathroom and just… see the bathroom mirror.

I had an imaginary friend who was an astromech droid.

I also remember what art was like then - a means to start telling a story, which wasn’t even pictured on the page. When I took Pictorial Composition in college, I was the only one to ace the unit on Child Drawing because I remembered what everyone else in the room didn’t. I was proud of that.

And sitting on toilets is terrifying when you’re small enough to fit into them.

Sigh. I wanted to be friends with everyone, but I was probably the Weird Kid in any given playpen.

Bro wake up 116 new genders just dropped

My gender

ah, yes

never gets old.

Even without words, we communicate through our eyes.

And some highlights from the notes:

Now we’re communicating in slices of hieroglyphics.

my dumb? founded. my flabbers? gasted. my gob??? smacked

my ass???? tonished

GET GRUFFALO'D, BITCH

If you haven't heard of Julia Donaldson, she's primarily a picture book author, who we can thank for extremely popular Halloween classic Room on the Broom as well as the Gruffalo.

Let this be a testament to the power of picture books.

I'm living for these jokes.

Also I need "GET GRUFFALO'D, BITCH" on a T-shirt.

“Some years ago, I was stuck on a crosstown bus in New York City during rush hour. Traffic was barely moving. The bus was filled with cold, tired people who were deeply irritated—with one another; with the rainy, sleety weather; with the world itself. Two men barked at each other about a shove that might or might not have been intentional. A pregnant woman got on, and nobody offered her a seat. Rage was in the air; no mercy would be found here.

But as the bus approached Seventh Avenue, the driver got on the intercom. “Folks,” he said, “I know you’ve had a rough day and you’re frustrated. I can’t do anything about the weather or traffic, but here’s what I can do. As each one of you gets off the bus, I will reach out my hand to you. As you walk by, drop your troubles into the palm of my hand, okay? Don’t take your problems home to your families tonight—just leave ‘em with me. My route goes right by the Hudson River, and when I drive by there later, I’ll open the window and throw your troubles in the water. Sound good?”

It was as if a spell had lifted. Everyone burst out laughing. Faces gleamed with surprised delight. People who’d been pretending for the past hour not to notice each other’s existence were suddenly grinning at each other like, is this guy serious?

Oh, he was serious.

At the next stop—just as promised—the driver reached out his hand, palm up, and waited. One by one, all the exiting commuters placed their hand just above his and mimed the gesture of dropping something into his palm. Some people laughed as they did this, some teared up—but everyone did it. The driver repeated the same lovely ritual at the next stop, too. And the next. All the way to the river.

We live in a hard world, my friends. Sometimes it’s extra difficult to be a human being. Sometimes you have a bad day. Sometimes you have a bad day that lasts for several years. You struggle and fail. You lose jobs, money, friends, faith, and love. You witness horrible events unfolding in the news, and you become fearful and withdrawn. There are times when everything seems cloaked in darkness. You long for the light but don’t know where to find it.

But what if you are the light? What if you’re the very agent of illumination that a dark situation begs for?

That’s what this bus driver taught me—that anyone can be the light, at any moment. This guy wasn’t some big power player. He wasn’t a spiritual leader. He wasn’t some media-savvy “influencer.” He was a bus driver—one of society’s most invisible workers. But he possessed real power, and he used it beautifully for our benefit.

When life feels especially grim, or when I feel particularly powerless in the face of the world’s troubles, I think of this man and ask myself, What can I do, right now, to be the light? Of course, I can’t personally end all wars, or solve global warming, or transform vexing people into entirely different creatures. I definitely can’t control traffic. But I do have some influence on everyone I brush up against, even if we never speak or learn each other’s name. How we behave matters because within human society everything is contagious—sadness and anger, yes, but also patience and generosity. Which means we all have more influence than we realize.

No matter who you are, or where you are, or how mundane or tough your situation may seem, I believe you can illuminate your world. In fact, I believe this is the only way the world will ever be illuminated—one bright act of grace at a time, all the way to the river.“

–Elizabeth Gilbert

I think it’s time this got another airing.

the artist is Sarah Ritchie!

if you’re a fan of insects, slip trailing or skeletons, definitely check out her instagram