I Put My Good News On

i’m worried this hasn’t been posted here yet

Chronic pain is like: I'm in pain. "Well, you really shouldn't let that stop you from doing things." Ok, I guess I'll keep doing this even though I'm in pain. "Well, if the pain was really that bad, then it would stop you from doing things, so it's probably not that bad." Actually, it got worse because I kept doing things. "Well, why would you overdo it and hurt yourself? You should know your limits." Ok, fine. I know my limit, and I have reached it. I need to rest. "Okay, but last week you did all this other stuff, so I know you CAN do more, so I think you're just making excuses?" Ok.

i like that the maned wolf and the bush dog are each other's closest living relatives. they're like cartoon henchmen

i would have been mutuals with him

yearning is a science 🌌

the Protector of the Small quartet is so good because it does the thing that stories and orchestras sometimes do where it starts chapter 1 with A Theme and then it just layers and layers that, with complimentary variations, until it's an entire symphonic orchestra playing, You have to look out for those who have less power than you. You HAVE to. You have to do it when they scratch and bite you, you have to do it when they're shy and avoid you, you have to do it when you're tired and when you're terrified. You have to do it when it's not at all urgent and as petty as birdseed, and when doing so means the loss of everything you have ever tried to build for yourself, or your death at the hands of those who should be your closest allies in this exact cause. You can't stop working toward it for a single moment ever. You have to look out for your half-drowned kitten, your birds, your ugly dog, your asshole of a horse, your even bigger asshole of a baby griffin. Your servants and your siblings, your classmates who kind of suck and your classmates who will become your best friends. You have to protect them with your sword and your shield, you have to use magic to heal and fight and keep off the rain, you have to hunt bandits and build houses and bridges and communities. You HAVE to. You have to look out for the soldiers under your command - which includes commanding them well, knowing their strengths and limitations, and never giving an order that they cannot obey. This, too, is your responsibility. You have to look out for your civilians, your refugees who are proud and obstreperous, for your bandits and farmers and children. You can arm them and teach them to look out for themselves, but you still have to look out for them. You may have true allies, but you can still never stop. You can never stop. You have to look out for them.

would mamdani be supportive of krakoa

notes are frying meeeeeee

"Peggle make phone calls" has become shorthand for "fuck it, whatever" for me but no one ever knows what im talkingabout and it's also longer (longhand?)

peggle make phone calls

dracula's son, alucard, and frankenstein's son, nietsneknarf

swordfish/marlins/sailfish FREAK me out. those beasts are alive and real and on the same planet as me

I'm a scuba certified marine ecologist I fear

"You hear that? They're saying The Odyssey doesn't even have nobody!"

"They've got nobody in the Odyssey?"

"No I'm saying they don't got nobody."

"Nobody's there?"

"Nobody's not there!"

"So everyone's there?"

"Everybody but nobody!"

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

And thus, the Mad Dad Hour was born.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

Sometimes there are memes that are so important to the culture of this site that you would swear they started in 2014 or something but you look it up and its like

when the blackberry bushes have thorns to discourage mammals from monopolizing the consumption of their fruits and encourage birds to spread their seeds but they don’t know that the mammal in question is ME #notdiscouraged

#ow

#stuck

BDSM is an acronym for the members of the beatles. don't believe me? why

Bingo, Dingo, Singo, and Maul

It's them!