I have thousands of shitposts, rants, and essays sitting in notebooks, left over from decades of not using social media or having many friends. Hold on tight.
166 posts
Latest Posts by idrawtooslow - Page 4
I repeatedly spend an increasingly unnerved 10 dream-minutes trying to first turn off the clock radio, then unplug it, then trying to figure out where the annoying music is coming from... I don't actually stop dreaming and wake up until I'm fully panicking because I can't shut off the Eldritch Radio From Hell.
woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.
Him an angy boi, so, so angy!
"That bastard Liutprand, who I'm NOT done with" -OSP Blue, on the Overly Sarcastic Podcast.
Chibi portrait by OSP Red @comicaurora
Offbeat TTRPG adventure arc:
An adventurer NPC, who is known far and wide as an incorrigible chaos gremlin, has obtained a Ring of Wishing, and nobody in the known world trusts them with it. The players' heroes are just some of many people who are trying to stop this person and get the Ring of Wishing away from them before they blows up the entire world with it.
Image by Bharat S Raj, CC BY-SA 3.0
snack time!
If you already know that the game is rigged, then you have ragequit before you ever started playing.
"Stolas isn't wrong for choosing his own happiness for once after years of abuse and depression"
and
"Octavia isn't wrong for feeling betrayed by her father and fearing she's been only an obligation to him"
are two concepts that can and should coexist.
I have successfully resisted the urge to use the phrase "well-placed bazinga" suggestively. You're welcome.
they dont want you to acknowledge this, but a well-placed "bazinga" is actually the funniest and most lethal thing on eartj
wtf why isn't it @raccoonmilf who's reblogging this instead of you and me
Comics by Rose Anne Prevec.
Perhaps... perhaps Sauron could have become anything he wanted to, anything at all, with all that power, but he chose to become a gigantic glowing red eye simply because he couldn't comprehend that it looked ominous, he thought it looked great, he wasn't intentionally trying to scare or intimidate anyone. He was just that divorced from reality, and nobody dared to tell him otherwise.
Kind of like bureaucracies and corporations that commission terrifying and oppressive Brutalist architecture think it looks "rather nice, actually," because their aesthetics are skewed that far away from how ordinary people see the world... so far that "oppressive," "looming," and "unsettling" seem like positive traits.
This has been a major frustration of mine since I noticed it a few months back. I'm so glad OSP Red @comicaurora found such a clear and concise way to express it.
Every time I watch a Miniminuteman video, the comments are full of people just dunking on some random conspiracy theorist or fringe believer, just to make themselves feel better. I don't even think most of them are genuinely concerned, they just want to feel superior.
And I'm also noticing, more and more, that people who clearly consider themselves progressive seem to have forgotten that calling something "stupid" or "crazy," or calling the person saying it those things, doesn't refute or disprove it. All too often I see someone set out to "debunk" something, and wind up descending into a rant about how foolish or demented they think it is, or how mentally ill they think the person saying it is.
Not a good look if you're trying to be an advocate of science, logic, and tolerance.
Red's way is far better. Just focus on the truth, detail it out, and don't even bring up the post-consensus hypotheses, or the conspiracy theories which people build around them.
Begging the void I'm shouting into, to post pictures of lizards and reptiles edited to have external ears.
Worst kind of ears only, please
Brave Exkaiser 勇者エクスカイザー (1990 – 1991) "There’s a Lot of Santas" dir. Shinji Takamatsu
~*1ll3qi*1blE bUll$?Hi*t-~
I was going to design and market a bumper sticker or decorative sign that looked like something written in an extremely hard-to-read fake-cursive font, but was in fact not actually lettering at all, just a bunch of random loops and squiggles.
Then I remembered pareidolia exists, and that people would "discover" offensive statements in the squiggles, and would NOT believe that they weren't really there or not intentional.
Today we find out if the spirits of Adam Smith and John Galt have accepted the offerings of consumer goods we have purchased and laid before their shrine.
I wish I could work that fast
'I wonder if you'll recognise the feeling.'
Panel redraw!!!! (but collage and paint)
( @comicaurora )
A Christmas Pop Song Rant
You see, the thing I hate isn't Christmas music as a whole. I adore carols and Christmas hymns. It's the Christmas-themed popular music I can't stand.
Maybe I should explain the difference, although I expect a lot of folks already know: while we all use the terms indiscriminately, a "Christmas carol" is technically a song that's worded and structured as either a lullaby for the newborn Jesus, or a joyous announcement of His arrival. Most carols are very old traditional songs, or started out that way, but there are a few notable modern compositions that achieve a similar feel to the traditional carols, notably "Silent Night."
A "Christmas hymn" is generally addressed to God the Father instead of Jesus, but deals with Christmas themes. It's a hymn for the Christmas season. This does overlap quite a bit with the definition of "carol," especially if you want to bring Holy Trinity semantics into it, but I think calling "O Holy Night" a Christmas hymn is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The fact that it's a great song to sing while caroling doesn't disqualify it.
Christmas popular music, on the other hand… is popular music with a secular-Christmas theme. By "popular music," though, I mean any commercial music product that was originally produced to make money, whether it's "Jingle Bells" or a modern pop megastar's latest charity-fundraiser Christmas album. These songs almost exclusively shy away from older religious elements of Christmas in favor of celebrating secularized versions like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, or generic winter traditions like snowmen, coziness, and winter sports. And, yes, there are a few weird, cursed things like "Deck the Halls" (a traditional Welsh tune repurposed in the 19th century as a Christmas pop song), and there's probably some contemporary-praise artist who tried creating a new, contemporary-praise, Christmas song instead of making pepped-up versions of old Christmas carols and hymns… almost certainly equally cursed.
I should probably clarify that I'm not denouncing the secularization of Christmas. Midwinter celebrations are far, far older than Christianity, and the modern Christmas shopping season is not only a crucial element of late-stage Capitalist society, but also a highly visible example of consumers acting neither rationally nor in their own "enlightened" self-interest, and as such, I'm not going to knock it.
What I object to is the nature of most Christmas pop music. Almost without exception, there's a strong "I heard you like Christmas, so I made you some Christmas with a Christmas, so you can Christmas your Christmas with Christmas while you Christmas the Christmas this Christmas" vibe to this music, and worse, a sense of forced cheerfulness and jollity. It reaches deep down to my hindbrain and makes all my social anxieties say, "Oh, crap, here we go again." Much of it also is obvously just thrown together with minimal effort, expense, or artistic expression, simply as shovelware for a jingle-bell-addled consumer market.
The most heinous Christmas pop songs are formulated specifically to target children. Little children, Mandrake! And despite this, we are all subjected to these songs for up to four months prior to Christmas. Can you imagine what would happen to a sporting-goods store if they habitually played "Baby Shark" and the Barney theme on their Muzak?
While I can say that most of it "just isn't very good," that's a personal opinion and I refuse to claim it's relevant. But I theorize that one more reason I find so much Christmas pop music tedious and irritating is because the concept of a safely non-religious, uncontroversial "holiday season," based almost entirely on subjective feelings and concepts, is too vague, confused, and artificial to truly inspire either artist or audience.
By contrast, most Christmas carols and Christmas hymns were products of the old Christendom society, and the creators and intended audience were shaped their whole lives by European Christendom, whether they believed or not. The subject matter and relevance were powerful to them in a way that it's hard for us to understand today.
There are some anti-Christmas songs I enjoy, but anti-Christmas songs occupy a very precarious niche in the popular music ecology. A song can only be "anti-Christmas" until the Monolithic Secular Christmas Music Juggernaut adopts and assimilates it. We need to learn from what happened to "Fairytale of New York."
Cracktheories About the Vanessaverse
Last year, @strange-aeons released a YouTube video about what she calls the Vanessaverse: the seemingly half-intentional alternate reality in which Netflix's Vanessa Hudgens Christmas movies are set. It is a deeply hilarious and fascinating video and you should watch it, if for no other reason that this long post will not make much sense otherwise.
Because, you see, I've been crack-theorizing about the Vanessaverse, and what I've come up with feels sound enough to share, at least on Tumblr.
I have two separate cracktheories, so let's establish some terminology and some common elements, first.
The Vanessaverse differs from our own in that much of Eastern Europe is controlled by an incredibly powerful, reality-warping entity that I call the Eldritch Master of Secular Christmas, or EMOSC for short. Who or what this entity is, and what its purpose is, differs between cracktheories. I call EMOSC's domain the Christmas Realm.
The Christmas Realm extends across southeastern Europe and possibly parts of western Asia. Outside this area, EMOSC's power to warp reality is severely limited. This is why Scotland and the US are (relatively) similar to the way they are in the real world. Montenero is a special case, it seems: an independent country on the fringe of EMOSC's influence, highly analogous to real-life Montenegro, and the location of choice for diplomats from the Vatican, or the rest of the world, to interact with EMOSC.
Native subjects of the Christmas Realm, however, and those around them, may be influenced by EMOSC wherever they are. This is one explanation for why seemingly unaffiliated protagonists and other characters wind up experiencing effects and narratives that should only occur within the Christmas Realm (but that commonly occur in highly sentimental straight-to-video movies). It's possible that EMOSC is able to psychically influence people whose ancestors came from the Christmas Realm, and those close to them.
So much for commonality. Let's get into the individual cracktheories about what's actually going on in these narratives.
Cracktheory 1: The characters of the Gaffer and the Crone are both aspects of the Eldritch Master of Secular Christmas, which manipulates its subjects according to strange and inscrutable whims, mostly revolving around matchmaking and the concept of secularized Christmas. Within the Christmas Realm, it is considered taboo to speak of Them or Their powers. Instead, one should pretend that events are entirely ordinary. It's possible that the Gaffer and the Crone are able to alter people's perceptions, so that they don't notice any contradictions. The latter would explain how the Gaffer and the Crone are able to create bizarre secular-Christmas situations ouside the Christmas Realm.
This version of EMOSC is fairly benign, actually, at least as far as we know. It seems to be managing Its own affairs, for the most part, occasionally calling a child of former subjects home, but little more. It seems to just like to mash the action figures together and make everything Christmassy.
In this theory, the self-referential Netflix Christmas movies are "based on a true story" or actually dramatized documentaries of some kind, made for an audience interested in EMOSC, but they respectfully obey the Christmas Realm's taboo and pretend EMOSC doesn't exist.
Cracktheory 2: EMOSC is, in fact, Vanessa Hudgens: a vast polydimensional, chrono-dynamic entity that can manifest a possibly infinite number of avatars of itself into multiple timelines broadly similar to our own. This is a more malevolent EMOSC, obsessed with stage-managing complex, WandaVision-like scenarios for its avatars and whoever catches its attention. It is even able to manifest avatars outside the Christmas Realm, although sometimes they end up looking a little less like EMOSC's chosen appearance as a human. The power and selfishness this implies makes this version of EMOSC seem like an incredibly dangerous entity to cross.
In this theory, the Gaffer and the Crone are avatars of a far older and more benevolent polydimensional entity, that is trying to contain Vanessa Hudgens and limit the damage It can cause to the Multiverse. This entity can't face EMOSC direcly, and has to resort to subterfuge and redirection in order to keep itself safe while still mitigating EMOSC's machinations. It seems to only be able to manifest one avatar at a time, although understanding how these entities interact with linear time is difficult for baseline humans.
Also in this theory, the self-referential Netflix Christmas movies are produced directly by EMOSC Itself, in furtherance of Its goals. They may actually have some sort of esoteric effect on baseline humans, but are also useful in reinforcing core Vanessa Hudgens characteristics on avatars that may be diverging from EMOSC's consciousness. It's also highly likely that they are EMOSC's way of creating an audience for the scenarios It likes to act out.
What are YOUR theories about the Vanessaverse?
This Spring, I reserved a room online, at a Best Western motel, and received a pop-up message that said, "Thank you for submitting."
My apologies for not getting a screenshot.
The nuclear war happened so fast, and destroyed so much, that nobody knows, nobody ever knew, whether it was the Russians, the Israelis, President Moncrieff, or Elon Musk who launched the first missiles. And while people may still argue about it, it doesn't matter. The world's irrevocably doomed.
Did I make @homunculus-argument block me, by sending a too-familiar ask, or is their blog actually gone?
This character is debonair and very attractive. Very sexily attractive, and has a sexy accent to top it off.
But their knowledge of the common language is worse than just having a shaky accent... they get idioms comically wrong, all the time, in their sexy accent, ruining the effect. They'll say "Boum, schockolat" instead of "boom, shakalaka," for example.
When other characters try to correct them, they just flip their hair sexily and say, "My vairsion is bettair."
I wonder if, after Azeroth's Second War, some of the humans running the internment camps for the orcs were frustrated by how placid the orcs had suddenly become... if, perhaps, their lack of aggression or hostility deprived them of their justification for keeping sapient beings in prison camps, and subjecting them to enslavement and abuse.
@is-it-a-man But... if Amaury Guichon makes himself a really, really good pair of wings out of chocolate...
I swear to god one of these days were going to see a video of Amaury Guichon and he's going to be making some wings and they are going to look dope as hell, the detail of each feather will be breathtaking, he'll spray paint them to perfection, but as the video goes on, he's not building any sort of winged creature, just the wings. And then there's a human-sized harness (also made of chocolate, somehow, he can do it). And he's attaching the wings to the harness. And he's putting the harness on and he demonstrates how he can flap the wings. And then he'll be off. Out the window and up and up and up. And we'll be looking at the livestream (it's a livestream now) and we'll scream "No, Amaury, the sun! It's going to melt the wings!". But he knows this already. And he is free.
Full disclosure, I've never actually seen Melancholia, but from your video, I arrived at a very different interpretation of Justine's character… it occurred to me that, if someone was used to hearing that the world was doomed, and had both ruined their own life with their actions and come to full acceptance of the fact that they had nobody to blame but themselves for their situation, that discovering that the entire planet genuinely IS doomed, in short order and quite demonstrably… wouldn't that come as a great relief? None of the guilt or crises would matter any more, because the advent of Melancholia would be so much more immediate… and since nobody can do anything about it, there would be no pressure to try, no pressure to be "productive."
It doesn't quite meet the definition of sanity in the ordinary sense, but when inevitable doom is rushing towards the entire planet, I kind of think the definition of "sanity" would shift, as values and priorities shift, because most of what we think matters… would suddenly no longer matter.
On a weirder note, I used cosmic bliss-horror when I put unicorns into my original high-fantasy worldbuilding project. In that world, unicorns are fearsome interdimensional incursions that cannot abide the impurity of the world's setting… Mesmerizingly beautiful, but lethal without exception. But they also contain a Mr. Toots reference, because I simply cannot help myself. Yes, my unicorn's ultimate ability is a discharge of superheated, rainbow-colored plasma (B308), shot out of its ass. But it's magical plasma, and when it burns you right to the bone, you fall under the Ecstasy spell (M139) as an affliction.
Who's afraid of the big bad eldritch horror?
And what happens when you're not? We made a video on it!