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💪🏾🏆💐.

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Even Weird Al has had that™ experience with Tony Hawk

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chinese fashion by 秘密花园Lolita

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start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret

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“We’re asked to believe that conservative Christians care so much about children that, when they are slightly misguided in their assessment of sexual politics, they go wildly astray. That just isn’t true, it has never been true, and it will never be true. Their contempt for smaller and weaker people is very much a part of their theology. I don’t have to say this about them. They declare it without shame.”

— Sam Thielman, At War With the Pedophile Knowers

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I love articles like this.

The real wisdom of Solomon, however, came from user’s complaints that Skag Gully, one of the game’s earliest areas, had too many eponymous Skags. Players reported that they were running into too many clusters of enemies while moving through the Gully, offering feedback like, “this isn’t fun, this is boring.” Gearbox, as a result, tripled the number of Skags in the area. “All of a sudden, it wasn’t a travel area that had too many enemies getting in the way,” Armstrong said. “It was a combat area.”

The absolute madness to respond to feedback by just doing the opposite, and yet it works!! There's lessons to be learned here.

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Why do people believe that medical professionals are necessarily good people? They're sometimes helpful (sometimes), but there's little about the field that filters on moral feeling, any more than, say, becoming a mechanic.

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Literal creepypasta horror I just experienced.

Boxes of pasta were on sale two for one, and they had some deliciously shaped Campanelle!

So I grabbed two boxes. A box of Campanelle and the box behind it, surely also campanelle!

I got home

I put water on the boil

I took the boxes out of the grocery bag and opened them up

This was the content of that second box:

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#did a sex world setting once where sex demons engineered a contagious upper respiratory infection#but no raging boners instead it made peoples' mouths tongues and throats erogenous

Please, do tell.

My tags on this post.

Haha, I'm trying to wrack my poor old brain for the details. It's actually been a minor fascination of mine for a long time, long enough that I earnestly can't remember if I was inspired by this famous early porn movie or came up with it on my own.

I'm not 100% but I think I first used the idea in a fanfic¹. It all comes together really naturally, actually. "Sex pollen"² cuts the Gordian knot of "will they or won't they", but a direct impulse to have sex or "mate or die" felt bad to me on multiple levels, too much like coercion. Instead, just strongly incentivize a bit of "skinship". And a mild infection gives a character a fuzzy head, physical heat, swollen and sensitive mouth tissues, extra moisture, and an itch that felt really, really (just incredibly, elaborately) good to scratch, and hey boy, what's that in your pocket something that's the exact right shape and texture to hit those deep places. (A toothbrush was too rough, she tried.)

I may or may not have finished with the guy getting off again by performing oral sex, because his tongue is so sensitive. (These days I'd write it as 69 with a strap, to satisfy my sense of balance, but that would've been esoteric to me at the time.)

(1: I'd wager it was Akane with Ranma, but it could've been Ayeka and/or Ryoko with Tenchi, and there's an outside chance it was Breath of Fire II's Nina or Katt with Ryu.) (2: Amusingly, 75% sure I hadn't actually heard the literal term "sex pollen" by then, which would've dovetailed even more neatly.)

The aforementioned setting would've been at least ten years ago, maybe fifteen, made for the "after dark roleplaying" board of one of the fantasy/anime/video games forums I frequented back then. I know it never actually saw the light of day, I think because the forum closed; but also because of my nature, I sit on projects for years at a time. I may have considered reviving it for some corner of 4chan (I loved the "quests" they did on /tg/, 2nd person, popular vote Choose Your Own Adventure stories), but I think that was around when they started getting huffy about adult content on blue boards, and none of the orange ones were hosting that sort of thing.

It was approximately an ISO standard fantasy setting except that people sought the mysterious ExoPrima energy (XP, naturally), which allowed them to improve their bodies or gain supernatural powers. People got a little from productive living, exercise, meditation, and a bit more from having good sex or from fighting somebody as strong or stronger than them, but they'd get the most from fighting a monster: creatures born of the raw flow of energy in the planet itself: EctoPrima. (I feel like I had some kind of pun on "mob" for them.)

But watch out! Lose to a monster (or a human with the Prima Manipulation power, which includes all strong XP hunters) and the winner can, for a time, influence the loser in order to harvest-generate a bit more XP (three guesses as to what form this mostly took), which frequently left the loser with a mutation or curse, sometimes a very durable one. A lot of hunters ended up with exotic features like horns, fur, glowing patterns and such. Also bad because a monster that gets too much XP from a human evolves. Opportunities to domesticate monsters were severely constrained: you can't limit one too much or it's cut off from the flow of raw energy, causing it to weaken and eventually dissolve into ectoplasm.

To finally wrap around to the subject, Demons were intelligent humanoid monsters. And they immediately saw the potential in humans (ie, giant bags of renewable XP). But they couldn't directly domesticate the humans either; weaken one too much and it's no longer a worthwhile source. But like fuck were they going to accept an even fight, so they had to find some way to make humans biddable and submissive. Cue using their own powers to create contagious sexual disease/curses, with the pretends-to-be-a-normal-cold tonsils-become-gspots disease as the most prominent. Get a human hot and bothered enough and demons get their ideal: a foe willing to start a fight, but is distracted and might half-way consciously throw it to get their needs met. And if the turns tabled sometimes, that'd just weed out the weaklings.

(I started one story in this setting. A hunter had managed for years with a demon curse that made most sex painful: Masochist's Dream. She's managed alright though, hunting and casually looking for a cure. But she's slipped up one day and got hit with "Heat": four days a moon of irresistible libido combined with an aura that attracts monsters. And now it's fused with the curse. Just going through it once made her go nearly insane with the contradictory urges, so she's desperate to find a treatment before it hits again.)

Thanks for the ask, I haven't thought about this in a long ass-time!

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Cookie Review: Selena Gomez Oreos

There is something about the way in which the words SELENA GOMEZ are emblazoned on this package, larger and more important than OREO.

It's a little bit of a joke to say that these cookies have the flavor of Selena Gomez, but I do think that's how they're positioned, as otherwise, what is it? Selena Gomez is known as an actress and singer. You don't buy these cookies because you think that she makes great cookies which is then somehow distilled by the food scientists at Oreo, or that she has good taste as a culinary expert, no, the important thing is that they are a totem of the cultural artifact of Selena Gomez, a way to have a piece of her in cookie form. There is something of the Eucharist in it, a mystical communion with a transcendent figure.

There is, in small print, a concession to the idea that these have a specific taste that can be divorced from Selena Gomez herself. They're cinnamon and chocolate. But not just cinnamon and chocolate: Selena's cinnamon and chocolate.

Somewhere, there is a real Selena Gomez, but we are now so many steps removed from her that her name is a simple signifier, pointing not to the real physical woman, but to the concept of the woman. In the same way, the flavor of the cookies is one of the least important things about them, positioned in small print at the bottom of the labeling. The text sits there embarrassed, ashamed to admit that it is not simply the flavor of the abstract concept of Selena Gomez.

I read Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation and kind of hated it, mostly because it said with many words what could have been said with few. But one of the things that stuck with me was the idea that we have entered an era of hyperreality, one in which traditional distinctions between reality and representation have collapsed entirely, a world where we have symbols which refer only to themselves. The symbol of Selena Gomez still does point to a person and her body of work, but when looking at this package of cookies we can see how the symbol spills out beyond the bounds of reality. We are left to grapple with the fact that some things are implied to have Selena Gomez nature. This is the promise of the cookies.

And this raises the question: does the real, actual, living person Selena Gomez possess Selena Gomez nature? A part, certainly: this is the wellspring of the symbol, as managed and curated as she's been since her early days as a child actor. But we must expect that there are parts of Selena Gomez that don't have Selena Gomez nature, and in some sense we could call this authenticity, but in another sense, inauthenticity.

And even those elements of Selena Gomez that are known and presented to the public in this carefully curated way might not have Selena Gomez nature. The modern memetic cluster that defines Selena Gomez, the Selena Gomez referred to on the package of Oreos, has little to do with her childhood performances, and in some sense they are alien to the symbol now.

The most striking part of this packaging, for me, is that Selena Gomez appears to us only in letters, only in a monogram on the face of a cookie, a pair of headphones with Selena Gomez nature, a specifically chosen metallic red color that must also have Selena Gomez nature. But there's no image of Selena herself, the flesh and blood person, all that is merely implied, but also unimportant. You are meant to recognize the name, or possibly the aura.

They taste about how you'd expect a chocolate-cinnamon Oreo to taste.

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the only way to find anything good on the nsfw alt now that tagging is blocked/useless is to interact with horny posts and look at what shows up on my 'for you', but that really makes it extra-devastating when i fuck it up somehow and it's nothing but winx club fanart

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one thing about me is i'm always going to need #mynothing. sometimes I do just want to lay in bed curled up and not speak for a few hours.