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i hesitate to say whether it’s inherently negative or positive but it is certain that reading homestuck permanently alters people’s brains. no other fandom have i witnessed or took part in has ever created that level of dedication and craziness, and definitely not with the same longevity. you STILL see involved homestuck cosplays at conventions and if you follow new people reading it it’s like watching a very entertaining descent into a specific type of madness

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if you spend your life bitching and complaining about the fact people are 'expected' to engage in the dreaded pointless banal '''small talk''' instead of learning to trade pleasantries with the people around you, you will never know the true and heady joy of doing a dumb bit with a complete stranger and as a result your soul will remain small

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i wish i could see this picture for the first time again

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no fucking way

the aliens are going to have questions about our world that absolutely no one will ever be able to answer

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TikTok live is such a waste of time there are no good….

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I am in tears

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With the hbomberguy plagiarism video on fire right now I want to share my favorite example of egregious plagiarism.

I’m a marine biologist. Currently getting my PhD. I’ve done a lot of scholarly writing. Many classes I took as an undergraduate had big writing components. I took limnology at one point as an elective. This course had one such big writing assignment.

The professor told us a story. He said he once got a student paper that absolutely blew him away. It was way beyond what he’d expected from the class. This was before we had online tools to check for plagiarism. The paper impressed him so much that he brought it home to show it to his wife. She began reading it and then set it down, looked at him, and said, “Dan, you wrote this.”

This student was dumb enough to not only copy a published paper verbatim, but to copy a paper published by the professor of the class.

AND HE NEARLY GOT AWAY WITH IT.

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I read Fat Face by Michael Shea last month and it was. Fine? It was a Cthulhu Mythos story written in the 80s, it was very edgy and it had a lot of tropes I’m not a fan of, I don’t really recommend it, but I have to talk about one detail I have not stopped thinking about since I read it.

So. I knew Fat Face through reputation because it was the story that inspired Shoggoth Lords from the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG, shoggoths that can control their cellular makeup to look like humans. And the twist in Fat Face is that shoggoths have been hiding amongst humans in Los Angeles, and at the end of the story one of them eats the protagonist.

The tone of the story is grit. It’s grime. It’s sleaze and sexual violence and drug abuse on top of cosmic horror. It wants to be taken seriously so bad.

But here’s the thing about the shoggoths: they have a business.

They have two businesses they run out of an office building in downtown Los Angeles. A shoggoth is a primordial blob of eyes and mouths and flesh and hunger, and the idea of one of them at the LA Office of Finance registering an LLC is already. Great. Perfect. No notes.

The business is a front — and again, that’s great, a shoggoth went, “I want to do some nefarious deeds and not get caught by humans; I know, I’ll register a fake business that’ll be a front, and no human will ever suspect” — because the actual interior of this office is a room of pools of water made from black and ancient Antarctic rocks so that shoggoths can relax in their original blobby forms and eat stray animals that they’ve caught.

So it’s basically just. A place for shoggoths to unwind after a long day of pretending to be human. It’s portrayed as cosmic horror, but it’s shoggoth Cheers. Sometimes you wanna go where nobody knows your shape.

Here’s the kicker. The front of the business is a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.

When they decided to make a front for their secret lair in an LA office building where they hang out in pools of water and eat stray animals — the front they prominently display and advertise — they decided to go with a hydrotherapy clinic and stray pet rescue.

That is Goosebumps shit. The rest of the story reads like a tone poem about the sleaze and violence of Los Angeles, and the main twist of the story reads like R.L. Stine.

But that’s not even the detail I can’t stop thinking about. Because the story reveals that this business — which again, is a front made by alien blobs to eat stray animals like an ALF-themed buffet and hang out in jacuzzi tubs of Antarctic rocks in an LA office — has a flyer.

Which means there’s a shoggoth with a passion for graphic design

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ADHD pro tip: Use psychological warfare on yourself.

For example, in order to do long tasks, like folding laundry, I put on the Mario Hat:

The main feature of the Mario hat is that my headset does not fit over it, so when The Bees™ try to put me back in front of the screen, the headset issue forces me to remember why I put the Mario hat on, and back to the task I go

As a bonus, the Mario hat is also a very clear indicator to my housemates that business is getting done, and they have learned not to distract me when I'm wearing the "goofy-ass cosplay hat"

It's not stupid if it works.

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If Drag Queens and Kings exist as hyper performances of gender, do Drag Jesters exist for people who Do Not Perform Gender Period. Like, can we show up to the gay club dressed as Mothman and Big Foot like is that a thing

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had a fight with a partner yesterday where I was completely in the wrong, so today when we met up again to discuss it, I bought flowers (one reddish rose, one white blossom, two blue blossoms) beforehand

and presented it with the rest of my apology, in an embarrassed monotone, because by all accounts this should not work to affect his emotions at all, and I was doing this in a kind of "hopefully this alien ritual works to convey my earnestness because I don't have a lot of additional vectors for it... sorry if you perceive it as a ridiculous and ineffective bit of bribery" way

the presence or absence of flowers seems orthogonal to my internal state (e.g. contrition, probability of future improvement). they're not a useful gift. they're not zero signal of caring, but it's a low barrier to entry signal. getting flowers is not difficult or very expensive

but he said it worked! I grilled him about it. here are my findings.

he said that the flowers reduced his anger to 60% of initial anger when he walked in through the door

I asked whether more flowers would have worked better. he said a full bouquet (probably 20 flowers?) would have been noticeably better, but the curve goes flat after that.

I asked him how much 20 flowers would have reduced his anger, and he said to 45%. so here's a graph extrapolation (that does not account for non-flower factors like the quality of the apology)

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Congratulations you softblocked a mutual of five years earning you the "Judas Kiss" badge!

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junji itō was so right when he said this

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Not a single monkey survived the Neuralink experiment. I’ll bet Elmo can’t wait to start torturing and murdering human beings with this.