#I hope it’s still usable

[maybeitsalivescribbles]

For your random heroes and villains prompts, cna you please do the word "Knight"? 🛡️⚔️👀

Love,

@heroes-villains-side-blog

Hmm, a tricky one because I can’t think of knights without thinking about these Going Medieval articles, but let’s see:

Knight

“Hero, you make me think of a knight of the ancient times.” “Really?” “Yes, really. You’re a mercenary lapdog used by some authority to control the masses by force.”

Henchman has accidentally set up a trap in the evil lair and is now stuck in the dark tower. Villain has to come to their rescue and the only way is to...climb it? Aw, come on.

Hero doesn’t live in a peculiar town. They go wherever there’s trouble, accepts every quest on their way, then leaves and never looks back. This time, someone wants to convince them to stay.

By mistake, Villain has given life to some old windmills. Only a brave knight can save us now, maybe with a sidekick on a donkey.

Following time hijinks, hero’s idol has come straight from the past, a noble knight who has won countless battles. However, there’s one hell of a generation gap between them.

Hero and Villain are both skilled horse riders. However, Villain’s horse is white and Hero’s horse is black. Who has ever heard of a dark knight as a Hero? Confusion ensues. Public is dissatisfied. They have to make an exchange.

“A sword? You fight with a sword? You are so dead. Do you know what country this is?” “I have holy hand grenades, too. You’re welcome to try them.”

In this world, heroes has one person assigned that they have to protect before all. Of course, Hero has to protect Citizen, Villain’s secret identity.

To be one day a full hero, sidekicks have to obey them faithfully, to follow them in their quests and be at their constant service. Sidekick is...not okay with this.

Supervillain has released a dragon that wrecks the city. Hero is supposed to fight and kill it. Villain wants to adopt it. It’s on.

*

More prompts like this under this tag.

Back to Hero x Villain Masterlist

[taffywabbit]

"why not just make your own website?"

with the announcement of cohost's death and amidst all the other tumultuous shit currently going on with social media as a concept (i am AMAZED twitter has survived this long given the circumstances), one suggestion that i've been hearing a lot is "we should just go back to the good old days of personal websites. let's all just make neocities pages!!"

(this is gonna be a long one sorry)

and like. idk! it's certainly something i've considered, i think it would be a fun thing to have, but it also feels like the equivalent of "capitalism sucks so let's all just run off into the woods and live in a cabin outside of society" to me. like it would be nice, it would be fun, but it doesn't ultimately solve the actual problems that are present with the modern internet, it just evades them. more importantly in my case and many others, it does not really help people who rely on the modern internet and the connections they're able to make there for their income. sure i can make a website and host my art and blog posts there, but who's going to see it? i can't build a consistent audience and make a living off of random passersby who peek at my website once, say "huh, neat!" and MAYBE add it to an RSS feed or whatever if they really like it. there's minimal potential for meeting and impressing new people outside my existing circles if i don't ALSO still have some manner of social media platform to promote the website on.

a lot of the "solutions" i see people proposing for the slow, painful decline of social media as a user experience keep coming back to old-fashioned, more isolated/insular systems. we miss forums, we miss personal webpages, we miss newsletters, etc etc. but like... those things were ideal in the "old web" because the old web was more about sharing hobbies and interests with whoever happened to pass by and check them out, and even just USING the internet was a niche hobby in and of itself for a lot of people. if you wanna be kinda cynical about it (and not unjustifiably so), web 2.0 is much more blatantly business-oriented, and its algorithms and carefully crafted UX's are primarily meant to funnel you towards viewing ads and spending money on products. looking at it that way, it sure does suck and Everything Was Better Before! but the modern web is ALSO more powerful than anything before it for just like. connecting people. spreading information and news. showing your art/music/writing/thoughts/etc to strangers who never knew you existed an hour ago. putting the tools to reach out to someone and tell them you think they're cool right there on the same website where their art is hosted, just a comment or a message away.

if you're able to avoid patterns of engagement-bait and obsessing over follower counts as a measure of self-worth (a big "if", i realize, but i view it like installing an adblocker - it's just kind of a basic prerequisite for modern internet safety and survival), a lot of these systems can genuinely be really positive and life-changing in ways that were simply not possible 20 years ago! almost all of my current closest friends are people I met through sharing our art on platforms like Twitter who were complete strangers at the time. all of the art clients that regularly pay my bills and support my work came from places like that too! the "social" part of "social media" is really what makes it ultimately worth keeping around in any form, and makes the pursuit of a Good social media platform still valuable.

there's a lot to love about the old web - its aesthetics, simplicity and freedom for personal expression - but every time someone says "just delete your socials and make a personal website" i am forced to confront the fact that i could never do what i currently do or be the person i am on the old web. if i was stuck hanging out in my own little space and only ever interacting with people who openly and loudly share my interests, i couldn't support myself with art full-time, i probably would never have met the kind and quiet strangers who are now my best friends and have made me who i am, and i'd just generally get a lot less insight into the vast range of experiences and perspectives that exist outside of my own. my life would be on a fundamentally different trajectory in countless ways without the advent of web 2.0.

and that's not to say "well twitter and facebook and tumblr all suck but you kinda still have to hand it to them" cuz you don't, obviously. they're corporations, and their job is to take the personalities and thoughts and art of the people who use their products and try to scrunch it all into something uninform and marketable that generates profit and pleases their shareholders. but like, you CAN still make a good thing out of them! these websites are tools just as much as geocities or myspace or IRC used to be. and the one thing these newer tools are pretty much all REALLY good at is discoverability. if you're just a hobbyist at the things you wanna share on the internet, then you likely don't have a lot of use for those tools, and perhaps you WOULD genuinely be happier just keeping a personal blog site or hanging out in private groupchats or sticking to specialized federated Mastodon instances or whatever. it just isn't feasible for me, and there are a LOT of people in my same situation. my entire industry of online freelance artists barely existed 20 years ago, and the web culture of that era is largely incompatible with my continued survival in the mid-2020s. i would LOVE to run off and live in the woods in concept, but all my survival skills are adapted for city living and i would just eat the wrong berry and die out there. i want- i NEED people to try and improve the spaces we're in, and support better forms of social media (like what cohost was trying and largely succeeding to do!) instead of just complaining that it all sucks, everything was better when we were kids, and digging ourselves little holes to hide in. much like all the other problems and frustrations and systemic issues of the world we live in, the modern web isn't going to go away if you just ignore it, so we may as well try to make it better for everyone.

anyways tl;dr i probably WILL make a neocities at some point. it could be fun, even if it doesn't help my career stability or whatever. but i do also need ALL THE SOCIAL PLATFORMS I USE FOR MY JOB TO STOP EXPLODING PRETTY PLEASE, and failing that, some actual half-decent alternatives that aren't going to fizzle out in a month would also be great thanks ✌

[laserbread]

Energon universe spoilers ahead!!!

Me: I should go to bed

Also me: What if I drew something intensely difficult for a meme

[wool-string]

[choking-on-roses]

Ordered a new backpack! I'm going to make my old one into a disaster emergency kit

[aihaloos]

OH GOD OH LORD DO WE HAVE TO FIGHT OUR OWN IDs WHAT

I CAN'T DO THIS. I CAN'T. I ONLY HAVE HALF OF THE SINNERS WITH GOOD/USABLE IDS. I CAN'T BRING ANY GOOD BACKUP FOR SLOT 7-12 FOR THE RAILWAY. HELP.

[exculis]

i like knitting way more than crocheting and yet i own way more crochet hooks. fascinating.

[amtrak12]

Me: Oh yeah, Can We Keep Her will be shorter than the inspiration fic Unwritten. Absolutely.

The inspiration fic:

Words: 181,322 Chapters: 35/35

My published fic:

Words: 64,293 Chapters: 9/30

My fic at 13 chapters (midpoint) drafted: 95k words (projected final count: 190,000 words)

My fic at the average word count of published chapters if my 30 chapter estimate is accurate: 214,310 Words

Me:

[willowcrowned]

Suffering writing buddieeeees TTuTT I wrote a 6.2k chapter in the last two days and have realized I can't use at least 4k of it!!! But it was good practice for the first time I've written another character's POV in 4 years so the next draft will be better (ง'̀-'́)ง

the next draft WILL be better (ง'̀-'́)ง

[sonknuxadow]

ughh none of the so called solutions im finding for my joycon problems are actually doing anything idk what else to do

[istherewifiinhell]

clothes hanger thinggy. constucted. 👍🏻[dead on the floor]

see tags i had a thought journey. anyway family photo

[ID: Awkwardly cropped image of desk, with partially visible office chair and single metal tube from a clothes rack. The top two desk draws are painted the same shade of teal as the metal tube. The chair as a white seat and chrome arm rest. The desk top is black, theres some papers, two mugs, one teal one red, and hair elastics on the paper, also blue. END ID]

Too recap. Free curb chair. Desk from someone who got a better desk. The clothes hanger is the most expensive thing in the photo. the SECOND most expensive thing? the paint.

weird dog

[ID: The base of the clothes hanger, taken from above. Against a dark carpet. END ID]

[tenpintsofsundrop]

The horror of Tumblr Live has finally breached containment and it's available outside of the US now. (Tbh I thought the third party hosting app that they are using for it was illegal in other places, but oh well.)

Friendly reminder that you can turn it off in content settings - but it only "snoozes" for a week and you can't permanently turn it off.

I have always said that I will go down with this ship and I will stick around tumblr forever, but like damn. They are making it really difficult to want to

[theabstruseone]

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.

The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.

The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.

The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.

Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.

The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.

Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".

He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.

Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.

The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.

The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.

The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.

TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).

This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".

This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")

X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.

Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.

The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.

One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.

Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

[aztr0punk]

my backggouggggg my back. from rollerblading. and yet i want to go again.good morning

[mcmansionhell]

2007-core nostalgia extravaganza

Quick PSA: someone on Facebook is apparently impersonating me using an account called "McMansion Hell 2.0" -- If you see it, please report! Thanks!

Howdy folks! I hope if you were born between 1995 and 2001 you're ready for some indelible pre-recession vibes because I think this entire house, including the photos have not been touched since that time.

This Wake County, NC house, built in 2007, currently boasts a price tag of 1.7 million smackaroos. Its buxom 4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths brings the total size to a completely reasonable and not at all housing-bubble-spurred 5,000 square feet.

I know everyone (at least on TikTok) thinks 2007 and goes immediately to the Tuscan theming trend that was super popular at the time (along with lots of other pseudo-euro looks, e.g. "french country" "tudor" etc). In reality, a lot of decor wasn't particularly themed at all but more "transitional" which is to say, neither contemporary nor super traditional. This can be pulled off (in fact, it's where the old-school Joanna Gaines excelled) but it's usually, well, bland. Overwhelmingly neutral. Still, these interiors stir up fond memories of the last few months before mommy was on the phone with the bank crying.

I think I've seen these red/navy/beige rugs in literally every mid-2000s time capsule house. I want to know where they came from first and how they came to be everywhere. My mom got one from Kirkland's Home back in the day. I guess the 2010s equivalent would be those fake distressed overdyed rugs.

I hate the kitchen bench trend. Literally the most uncomfortable seating imaginable for the house's most sociable room. You are not at a 19th century soda fountain!!! You are a salesforce employee in Ohio!!!

You could take every window treatment in this house and create a sampler. A field guide to dust traps.

Before I demanded privacy, my parents had a completely beige spare bedroom. Truly random stuff on the walls. An oversized Monet poster they should have kept tbh. Also putting the rug on the beige carpet here is diabolical.

FYI the term "Global Village Coffeehouse" originates with the design historian Evan Collins whose work with the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute!!!!

This photo smells like a Yankee Candle.

Ok, now onto the last usable photo in the set:

No but WHY is the house a different COLOR??????? WHAT?????

Alright, I hope you enjoyed this special trip down memory lane! Happy (American) Labor Day Weekend! (Don't forget that labor is entitled to all it creates!)

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

[tanadrin]

I hope there’s an afterlife so that whoever made this pot 2,000 years ago can brag that their cookware is so good it’s still usable literally millennia later. Something about this object being lost for centuries and then rediscovered, and being put (successfully) to its original purpose again is so pleasing to me.