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BREAKING UPDATE ON THE PLUMOCALYPSE!!!

When I got home the neighbor kids were hanging around the parking lot as they usually do. I saw an adult making the rounds and popped out of my car hoping to snag her and ask if she’d like plums. I didn’t see her when I got out. But I saw a little girl and I said, “Is that your mom walking around?”

No, I was informed.

“Well can you ask your mom if she wants plums?”

She ran off. I looked over and saw two slightly older girls lounging. “Do you want plums?” I called.

Yes.

I grabbed my enormous box of plums and brought it outside. All three girls were waiting and the first kid said, “She’ll take them.”

I told them I had been given 106 plums. They were suitably impressed. I held out the box to let them pick out plums but the first girl confidently took the box. “You don’t have to take them all if you don’t want…” I offered dubiously.

“We want them.”

So I handed her the whole damn box, at this point somewhere close to 87 plums. And just like that, I was free. Her mom might be upset at receiving 87 plums or maybe her daughter gauged correctly that they could actually use them but either way. I am blissfully free.

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they say you can't pour from an empty cup but i've been doing it my whole life and aside from all of these mysterious ailments it's working out great for me

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hey so anyone else just, feel thin. sort of stretched. like butter scraped over too much bread. like you need a holiday. a very long holiday. and you don't expect you shall return? or is that just me and bilbo baggins

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There’s either no sexting on Discworld because all faster-than-postal communication must be manually encoded by a human (or other species) person, or there IS sexting and some poor clacks operator midway to Pseudopolis is out here Suffering like, broo...not again bro... just send her a letter, bro... a letter in the —ing mail...

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@ Jewish people and real feminists: I'm very sorry that violent bigots have co-opted your movements online so much so that it makes talking about the issues of actual sexism/misogyny and antisemitism near impossible

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WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

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Random story I remember reading online but couldn't now find if I tried:

The guy telling the story got bored and decided to Educate Himself by watching older, classic anime that he hadn't seen before. I can't recall what the name of the anime was, but he picked up one that was somewhat of a classic from the 80s. It wasn't perfect by anyone's standards but refreshingly lacking in the most annoying and stereotypical clichés and tropes of more modern anime. It did have the Standard Anime Tropes of the time, but being completely unfamiliar with most them, it was a breath of fresh air.

Until he got to the end credits of the first episode and suddenly something triggered a wave of extremely ambiguous Emotion. While there are cultural components to this, I have been on testosterone for long enough to attest that it is also physically simply harder for a man to cry from emotion alone, and something just now had kicked him in the chest hard enough for him to tear up.

It was the end credits song. For no clearly apparent reason this song overwhelmed him with a strange longing, nostalgia for an era that he had literally never lived in, stabbing right through him like an ice pick, powerless to do anything about it. While he had previously intended to spend the whole night watching this show, he went to do something else instead.

Later on he was talking with his mother about something else, and mentioned trying to watch this anime but not getting past the first episode - he didn't elaborate why. His mother was delighted and encouraged him to keep watching it if he can just get over the initial weirdness - she used to watch it Back In The Day and loved it when she was younger. She then started humming the end credit song, and the stabbing of emotion came back with an epiphany.

She had hummed the melody as a lullaby to him, vocalising over the japanese lyrics that she hadn't known then and didn't understand now. And that's how this guy discovered that his mom is a weeb.

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“should tumblr have a cut off age” i think we should be recruiting from nursing homes and senior citizen centers actually

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Stupid, chauvinist misogyny: Men are X, which is good, while Women are Y, which is bad

Woke, Feminist Take: Men are X, which is reactionary, while women are Y, which is enlightened

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*screams internally for several minutes*

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nah

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y'all wanting alternative lawns just PLANT CLOVER

there are species native to every continent except Antarctica, it's a nitrogen fixer so it's good for the soil, pollinators love it, it only reaches a certain height so you don't even have to mow it, it's soft underfoot, and the flowers smell wonderful in the summertime

the only reason it's not a popular lawn plant is that Big Lawn or whatever the fuck couldn't make a weedkiller that didn't also kill clover, so they just convinced people clover was a weed and bad and that they didn't want it

plant clover!!!!!

help im trying to relax by looking at gardening posts on pinterest but half of the things they say are wrong

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you wanted the Behr paint rant, @say-duhnellee and I hate those fuckers.

So first, you gotta understand that all paint has three necessary ingredients. Pigment - the part that makes it a color; Binder - the part that makes it stick to stuff; Solvent - the part that makes it liquid/not a solid

Pigment is the most important part for this rant. And the most expensive part in almost any paint. There are pigments that are very opaque by default, and pigments that are very translucent. The most expensive, and tbh, gorgeous, colors are single transparent pigments. Alizarin crimson and quinacridone and the pthalos, for instance. So, when you buy a student grade tube of quinacridone violet paint, it has (making it up) 15% pigment by volume. And when you buy an artist grade tube of the same color, from the same company, it has 50% pigment by volume. That means the color is richer, covers better, extends farther. It's just superior in every way. Here's winsor newton heavy body acrylics in their professional line and their student line. The stripes are Heavy application, single streak, and mixed with white.

It's why student paints either take a ton of layers to get full coverage, or the colors are weaker, there's just not enough pigment in there to be opaque or to overpower an opaque you mix it into

Even something cheaper and easier like a raw sienna shows it

Or, Mars Black, which is consistently opaque, but you can still seen the weakness in the pigmentation when you cut it into white

But Strife! you're saying! that's artist paint, not house paint. I know, but you needed the primer and you asked for the rant.

One of the preferred paints used by scenic artists, aka, halfway between fine art and house paint, is Rosco Off Broadway, it has a ton of pigment in it. It's gorgeous, pure pigments. You can extend it crazy far.

A gallon of Fire-red is 100$ :)

I'm using red as the example because red is notoriously hard to get opaque in a pure hue. You can get opaque earthy reds, or if you skew towards orange to get more opaque, but true reds are hard. Its why that barn red color you can imagine? That's pretty neutralized, it isn't a true deep tone.

But in house painting, one of the things they like to market is how quickly it covers, right? 'one coat coverage' shows up a lot. And next to it is a price tag for like, 60 bucks. The upsell for why you should get that one, and not the 30/gal option is that Oh! You''d need multiple coats with that one, so this is actually cheaper overall! That's not untrue.

But there's always a little asterisk next to the One Coat Coverage. It has to be in one of the colors they have on cards for their brand, and for that exact type of paint. None of this scan to match stuff. And the colors available are all fairly neutralized. You're not getting a Behr Dynasty can of fire red.

Look at this shit:

Those are the ones they show as being one coat. They can do other colors, but it won't be one coat.

For instance, here's the 'purest' options of those same colors

Those are 1, not going to be One Coat, and 2, are not actually going to look like they do on your screen. They'll be duller.

However. All that is just business sense, right? The people want one coat, they offer one coat things, and they cover their ass on not claiming a purer tone will do that too. Business.

So. Why was I talking about plumbing?

There are three necessary parts of Paint.

Pigment. Binder. Solvent.

But pigment is the only thing in there that would make it opaque. And pigment is expensive. Thus.

Filler.

Sometimes called 'solids' sometimes lamp shaded as 'additives to prevent mold/stain/whatever' but still. It's extra stuff they tossed in there so the paint has better coverage in a single coat. It fucks up the color saturation, which is why those guaranteed ones are all so fucking dull, but yes. it does make for better coverage. As you go to their cheaper brands, they use the same amount of pigment, but there's less filler, which is why it takes multiple coats, but, you can get more intense colors from it.

hOwEvEr

You, random person painting a room, wash up after you paint, right? You wash your hands, the brushes, the tray, the roller cover (btw don't bother doing that ever, just your hands) And that washes the excess paint down the drain. And yeah, yeah, you know its not great, so if you have a wash room, or a work sink in the garage you use that instead.

You know what we have in full scene shops?

A Paint Trap.

Same principal as a grease trap. It's a bonus section that lts the water from the sink that you're unnecessarily scrubbing a roller cover in flow down into. The outlet is up higher, so the water and solids can separate, and the water that flows out is cleaner. You have to occassionally open up the trap, which will smell like death, and scoop all the accumulated gunk out of the bottom and properly dispose of it. It sucks, it can clog, I've cleaned these dozens of times, it never gets better, but I still throw a tantrum if there isn't one installed. This is actually a picture of a grease trap, but its the same system

Your house doesn't have that. Your apartment building? the initial pipes bringing water to the sewer? they don't have that. Depending where you live and how you dump paint water, there might be nothing like a paint trap between you and the ocean/river/drinking water.

Now, this is true of basically all house paint, I'll admit. After they got rid of VOCs and started bragging about opacity, everyone does some version of this.

Behr is the worst offender. (I have not directly checked if they're using exactly the thing I'm about to describe, but they did for a decade)

When you buy paint, you choose the type, you give them the paint swatch, and you may have noticed they grab different gallons for different colors. White, deep base, medium base, etc. Those are saying how much pre-added Dark Opaque Stuff is in the gallon before they add the tint (that's the color goo the machine squirts into the gallon, its made of just pigment and solvent and if it gets on your clothes, just throw them out bc it will stain everything forever)

You know what's a really good, solid, opaque thing that is naturally available in different neutral colors, is cheap, and is already made of very very fine particles

Fucking Clay.

Clay.

They use goddamn fucking clay as filler in their goddamn paint that is specifically marketed to DIY folk who don't know shit about paint. They literally have you washing clay down your goddamn sink, and since most DIY folk are idiots, I have watched folk straight up pour the rest of the gallon down a house sink. At best, they're cleaning things in a bucket, and then dumping the bucket in the sink. That's clay. You're pouring clay down your sink.

You don't have a paint trap. You have an S trap or a P trap under your sink, neither of which can stand up to that kind of bullshit. Look at these poor babies, they can't handle this

And then they have the aboslute nerve to act like its this decadant goddamn product and you should feel so luxuruious about it. They are out here convincing people that all the actual stylish colors are neutral, they aren't those gaudy intense colors, how gauche. Cause then, you're cool with it being the ugly ass neutral fucking green bc you want to be stylish, so you think hey, i'll buy the expensive paint. But also, you're a DIY guy so you're an idiot, and probably have to do multiple coats anyway, so now! Now you're washing goddamn clay down the sink Twice! Which is actually worse! Because the bit of clay that settled during the first one is still fucking there. and it's not going to easily wash away, its going to just pick up another fucking layer.

They also use chalk btw, but clay is the one that makes me insane because!

That paint trap I mentioned? We had a 30 gallon one. And the show budgets were tiny, so you had to base out with house paint a lot, or a project was entirely house paint, so the trap would absolutely fill up. I'm talking 3 cubic feet of paint goo, filler, and whatever grossness got washed down with it. And they first few inches on top are squishy, its actively rotting, but its soft. You dig that out. Then you get into the heavier stuff. Then. at the bottom, We'd straight up have trowels, bc the clay had sedimented down and was compacted by the weight above because its goddamn clay that's what it does.

'oh look at me, my behr paint on the roller feels so heavy and its super opaque and expensive so it must be high quality and luxurious, just look at how fancy the labelling is' fuck yourself Behr, you added clay dust to it and you're making worse colors for more money and you're fucking up everyones plumbing.

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went for a walk the other day and there were apples and blackberries growing along the trail and i walked past some teenagers smoking weed in a ditch and overheard one of them point to the fruits and say "bro that shit is bountiful"