#resident evil's story does not exist in a vacuum

[sapphire-weapon]

Hi! Sorry if this counts as shitstirring... But you got me thinking... Do you really think that someone really needs to play the games in order to fully understand the story? Or is watching them and reading up on them enough? Thanks, and sorry!!!

Don't be sorry. This is a valid question that deserves an honest answer.

There's nuance to this. This isn't just a simple "yes or no" question.

Do I think that you need to play the games to understand the story? No, I don't. Resident Evil's story is not difficult (though, you'd never know that, looking at the fandom). It's very easy to watch the games and movies, go "ok I got it", and move on.

Do I think that you need to play the games to be considered an authority on the canon? 100%, absolutely. And I'll tell you why.

We spend a lot of time talking about narrative direction and storytelling devices and the use of tropes and cinematography here on this blog, but the one thing that we really need to keep in mind at all times is that Resident Evil is a game first and a story second. This has been the design philosophy since the series's conception. This is why RE4 OG's story was slapped together in three weeks. This is why RE5 was the way that it was. This is why RE7 is what RE7 turned out to be.

The narrative of Resident Evil is not something that exists separately or divorced from its gameplay. In fact, the opposite is true. RE's story is not only influenced by its gameplay, it actually -- in some cases -- is directly written as a result of its gameplay.

I've talked about the story behind RE4's development before, but.

Was RE6's story borderline incomprehensible, and did it jump approximately sixteen sharks? Yes. Was that the main reason why RE6 failed? Absolutely fucking not. Not even close.

RE6 turned out the way that it did because RE6 was developed and released during a time in which the biggest moneymakers in the AAA game space were brown & bloom multiplayer shooters. Capcom wanted in on that gravy train.

RE5 sought to take the award-winning formula that RE4 developed and add a multiplayer element to it in order to initially chase that trend, and RE5 for a very long time was the highest-selling Resident Evil title ever made.

Capcom looked at that and took it to mean that it was RE5's added multiplayer element that made it so successful. They weren't exactly wrong, either. RE5, for a lot of people, was like a version of RE4 that you could play with your friends.

Wesker was not killed in RE5 because Capcom thought it was an appropriate time narratively to kill him. Wesker's death was a symbolic one -- it was the death of the "old" Resident Evil -- the death of the slow, plodding, single player experience that the entire AAA industry had convinced themselves was no longer viable monetarily and not what players wanted. This was especially true for RE, after the unprecedented success of the more action-focused RE4 changed the entire third person shooter genre forever.

By the time we reach RE6, Capcom is all on on this. Three campaigns, all with co-op, all of which play differently. Chris's story is what Chris's story is in RE6 because Capcom knew that most players were probably going to reach for his campaign first, considering he was the protagonist of the most recent release and, therefore, the most recognizable to players who maybe weren't necessarily super familiar with RE. They specifically wanted Chris's campaign to feel like a traditional third person shooter in order to get new players hooked, because Capcom was convinced that that's what a majority of gamers at the time in general wanted.

Leon's story is what Leon's story is in RE6 because it was designed specifically to cater to people who loved RE4 and would reach for him first over Chris. So, they gave Leon a female partner (Helena in place of Ashley) and a slower, more traditional horror setting (while still being action-oriented), and they tried to kill two birds with one stone by having Ada running around and also being the damsel in distress, so to speak, to replicate the "save the princess" plotline from RE4.

But the biggest issue with all of this was that it turned the design philosophy of the game into "how can we sell this?" over trying to just make a good horror game -- and it showed. Capcom cut a hell of a lot of corners in terms of pacing and level design and enemy design and enemy variety in favor of focusing on the combat system (which was never adequately explained and had its nuances lost on approximately 80% of the playerbase), the netcode, and making the game's story as easy to consume and digest as possible while chasing specific market trends.

RE6 didn't go super hard on Aeon because the writing staff was just so ~dedicated to the ship~. RE6 went hard on Aeon because they wanted Leon to look heroic and save the girl just like he did in RE4 but didn't want to create another Ashley after how universally hated she was. Knowing that is how I say so confidently that Remake is retconning Aeon -- it's because the ship itself was never the point. They used it as a gameplay contrivance that they thought would help sell RE6, and it blew up in their faces. So now they're trying something new.

The actual experience of playing Resident Evil 6 was downright miserable to a vast majority of the fanbase because it was a soulless, hackneyed mess that didn't even have the decency to bother giving itself a spooky atmosphere. It was an uninspired series of long hallways filled with bullet sponge enemies and literally nothing else.

So, when the story was stupid and fan favorites like Leon felt like they got screwed over on top of all of that because the same design philosophy of "make this as mass marketable as possible" bled into the story from the gameplay, that was just the shit icing on the shit cake.

People probably would have been much more forgiving of RE6's story if the game design itself was better. Or, conversely, people would've been much more forgiving of RE6's game design if the story was super compelling.

But RE6 was neither.

And so RE7 was Capcom's way of trying to re-learn how to do pacing, level design, and atmosphere. The gameplay was the most important thing. That's why they didn't even bother using the legacy characters and created Ethan and the Bakers. The legacy characters would've been a distraction. They had to fix things one step at a time: gameplay first, story second.

That's why RE7 is RE7 and why we have only seen Leon in CGI movies and not games since 6 (Remakes not withstanding). RE7 fixed the gameplay, and Vendetta, ID, and DI served to reconfigure and redefine Leon's character, and I'm more than sure that they're going to try to finally blend those things together in RE9.

And if you don't play the fucking games, and if you don't fucking understand how the games industry works, you're not going to have any of that fucking context going into your meta analysis.

That's why braindead motherfuckers in this fandom look at that stupid remark made about how the one director thought that Leon and Ashley holding hands during RE4make's gameplay made them look "too close" and they read way too much into it -- it's because the spoken words of the directors are all they have to go off of, and they don't realize what a bad gameplay decision having Leon and Ashley hold hands would have been.

If you don't play the fucking game, you don't know that the half-second it takes for Leon to switch from his knife to his gun can mean the difference between taking a hit or not -- and so you would have no reason to think of how annoying it would be to add yet another half-second delay to Leon drawing his gun if he had to disengage from Ashley first. If you fuck with the normal gameplay loop with something that only happens when Ashley is with you, it will make the player start to resent Ashley, and that's the opposite of what the devs wanted to do -- which is what the fucking conversation in the interview was about in the first place!

That is far more likely the reason why the handholding was cut. And while that decision was being made, it was probably pointed out that having them hold hands made it look like they were on a date -- and that's absolutely not the tone/atmosphere that this game was going for. That is far more likely what was meant by "too close."

It had nothing to do with ensuring that the players perceived Leon and Ashley's relationship as platonic. It had everything to do with tone and atmosphere and the pacing of the normal gameplay loop. It's just that "*juts a thumb in his direction* This guy thought it made them look too close" was a way fucking easier explanation of what they probably thought was a really fucking unimportant anecdote about a character animation that didn't matter.

But if you don't play the games, you won't know that.

If you don't play the games, Word of God is all you have to go on. That's why people who don't play the games insist on all Word of God being explicit canon. It's because they can't use the games themselves as a baseline -- and that gives them a skewed, fucked up perspective of what Resident Evil is trying to do and be and accomplish.

This kind of shit is constantly in my head when I'm writing my meta and trying to predict where a game's story will go next.

I pull my meta directly from the games, because that is what Resident Evil is. It is a series of games that are trying to be good games first and interesting stories second.

And if you don't understand that, you have no business calling yourself an authority on the canon.

[the-pink-baphomet1861]

Alfred Ashford and queerness, an analysis 

So, Resident Evil Code Veronica. It’s a game that has the community split on whether it’s one of the best or one of the worst games in the series. I personally love it, but there is a point to be made that it does have quite a few flaws in how its story and gameplay was handled, and with the newer RE remakes that have all been widely praised by pretty much everyone (some more than others,) many people have been clamouring for Code Veronica to get a similar treatment to the others, giving it another chance to show off its potential.

In all of these discussions of a remake, one thing that I see as being ignored is the character of Alfred Ashford and his rather tragic story. In a nutshell, it is a story about a child who is born of a heinous eugenics experiment and is neglected by his father for not being born with what he was looking for, becoming obsessed with the only person who ever showed him any sort of affection, and eventually losing his mind after she leaves, developing a separate personality to cope, and becoming a monster. 

However, this is not what we see in game.

In game, Alfred is a walking queer stereotype who’s entire character is based around an incredibly transphobic reveal of him dressing as Alexia in her absence and being a source of horror not because of his circumstances, but because he was, *gasp*, dressing as a woman! How disgusting!

Now, I probably shouldn’t need to explain why this is a problem. It’s both incredibly transphobic and ableist and utterly destroys anything else that this character could say.

It’s also something that I’ve never really seen people talking about in any Code Veronica remake, only a few actually talk about this issue in a constructive way. Most are more along the lines of “Oh yeah, that’s a problem, capcom better do something about it.” Which isn’t really all that helpful considering the subject matter, but here’s the thing.

I believe that Alfred’s story can be reworked into something that doesn’t just get rid of these unfortunate implications, but turns them on their head to make it a story about queerness rather than discriminating against it.

First, the crossdressing isn’t the only place where you can put Alfred’s queerness on display. Consider: Alfred was neglected and ignored by his father for his lack of intelligence, sure, but what if that wasn’t the only thing. What if it was also because he began displaying some form of queer behaviour and, as part of a horrible eugenics conspiracy, didn’t take it too kindly, maybe even full on physical abuse against him for displaying it. This not only could emphasise why he latched onto Alexia like he did, but also show why he also displays such an obsession with the military as well, choosing a ‘masculine’ career in order to avoid more harassment from his father, but this doesn’t work because Alexander just doesn’t care. Alfred was born wrong and as such he has no love for his son, only scorn. It also makes their experiment on him not just horrific for what they're doing to him, but also triumphant for getting rid of his abuser, but this is not the end for this story.

Soon after, Alexia leaves in her cryostasis and Alfred is not only alone, but in a system that also hates him for existing. Umbrella is probably also just as queerphobic as Alexander, if not even more so, but they can’t just get rid of him due to his status in the company. So they stick him on Rockfort and keep him there in order to stop him from ruining their plans or reputation, which causes Alfred’s mind to shatter under the stress and isolation, leaving him a broken, monstrous wreck of a man.

(They also shouldn’t make Alfred any less of a villain due to this, in fact, having him be even more cruel and sadistic could also make his story even sadder.)

However, Alfred cannot exist in a metaphorical vacuum of queerness. In order for this to work and work well, the rest of the game must work to emphasise this theme with the other characters. Have Claire and Steve empathise with him not just due to his madness, but also because of what caused him to break in such a way, have Alexia’s love come from not just his praise, but also because he’s the only person who truly understands her. Have all the other Umbrella employees look down on him and hate him for it. If Capcom wants Alfred’s story to work, then queerness has to be up there in this game’s themes along with ‘family bonds’ and ‘shooting zombies and big monsters in the face’

In conclusion, I believe that the only way to make Code Veronica’s story not queerphobic besides just cutting it (which would be boring,) is to make it about queerness rather than treating it like it’s disgusting and unnatural. Besides, if done well, then Code Veronica could go down as one of the best stories in gaming.

[adofom1]

Rejecting and Ejecting the Poor: The Victimization and Criminalization of Poor Black People in the Most "Radical" City on the Planet

Project Eject is More Than What Meets the Ear

On a cold, gray and dreary day in Jackson, Mike Hurst, the man appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi by the Trump administration, stood in front of the United States courthouse flanked by various law enforcement agencies, politicians and community "leaders" to announce a new crime prevention initiative called Project Eject.

In his remarks to the media, Hurst claimed to "...want to empower Jackson and its citizens, expel crime from our communities, and work together to make our Capital City safe for everyone."  We should all be aware that the implications of Project Eject are  much deeper and more sinister and can and should be counted as part of a  long line of legalized  victimization of poor Black people in Mississippi.

A Critical Analysis of Project Eject and The Impact It will Have on Poor Black People

Project Eject is a racially bigoted and elitist program that gives expression to Donald Trump's and U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Sessions' national tough on crime agenda.  It is harsh, punitive and extremely short sighted. It is designed to criminalize poor Black people and other social forces in Jackson that the Trump administration has deemed a threat to its hegemony.  Project Eject will begin the process of ethnically cleansing Jackson of poor Black people so that capital and capitalists can operate more comfortably in Mississippi’s  Capital City.

If capital is allowed to further entrench itself in  Jackson, poor and working class Black people will be herded out of Jackson through a number of economic and political maneuvers that have been employed in cities like Detroit, MI, Washington, D.C. and Oakland, CA to name a few.  Hurst promised that those prosecuted under Project Eject will be sent out of state to serve federal sentences without parole.  Should more capital-friendly policies like this one go unchallenged, the likelihood of people incarcerated under Project Eject being able to come home to Jackson will drop precipitously, as the communities they left will have been destroyed; priced out and pushed out to make room for those deemed more desirable by capital and capitalists.  .

The Lumumba administration has already set the stage for the implementation of this brand of policies by declaring Jackson “open for business” and “business friendly”. .  Mayor Lumumba's has stated repeatedly n that he wants people (read: corporations because the law views corporations as people)  to come to Jackson to make a lot of money and become rich. These overtures to capital and capitalist development will make the  ethnic cleansing of poor Black people from Jackson inevitable.  Despite the Mayor’s stipulation that these corporations must invest back into the people of Jackson to do business here, capital cannot and will not respect this request. That is simply not how capitalism works.  Capitalist corporations exploit people. They do not invest in them. It must be understood that whatever "investment" that might be interpreted as going into residents is really an investment into their bottom line.

Project Eject will sever those convicted from the  support systems that are proven to increase the likelihood of successful rehabilitation and reentry. Furthermore, the forced relocation of those incarcerated will place a tremendous  economic, psychological and emotional burden on poor and working class black families, many of whom will undoubtedly want to make attempts to visit and support their loved ones who are being housed in prisons that are hundreds of miles away from Mississippi.

The supporters of Project Eject are sending a message of disdain for poor and working class Black people in the city of Jackson while disguising it with a disingenuous desire to help the city of Jackson with what they view as the problem of crime and violence. They are, in effect, saying that poor Black people  in Jackson are irredeemable and  should be discarded from the city like yesterday's trash. This line of thinking negates  the humanity of people charged and convicted of crimes and looks to brand them as  sub-human and worthy of inhumane treatment.

An Emphasis on Effects While Ignoring Causes

The narrative around Project Eject is that crime and violence in Jackson is out of control and that criminals must be brought to heel by whatever legal or extralegal means possible. Tough on crime proponents love  to point out effects, but if we are serious about ending crime and violence in the city of Jackson and in Mississippi, we must also investigate the causes of the anti-social behaviors that we see and the systems and individuals that are at the root of them.

State Violence and Criminality Begets Community Violence and Criminality

Poor Black people who engage in antisocial and criminal behavior are the victims of unjust and evil social, political and economic orders. Every time we see a homeless person, families living in abject poverty, human beings being caged like animals, or a mentally ill person walking down Capitol Street eating out of trash cans, we should be reminded of the type of violence that is being heaped upon poor people and Black people everyday in this city. We should be mindful of how this descending violence coming down on the people from the highest echelons of this society fuels the lateral violence we see in our communities.

The government on the federal, state or local level do not want to deal with this reality. Because to talk about the reality of how the violence that is perpetuated against poor and Black people begets the violence that we see in our communities would call into question the way the economic, political and social systems are failing people. More people would be forced to interrogate and ultimately see the high levels of exploitation seen in this capitalist economic system as incompatible with a just and humane society.

Deny, Cover Up, and Eject

It is easy to condemn individuals and throw them away by labeling them  as deviant, violent aberrations. It is easy for the State to deny the central role it plays and has always played in fomenting and maintaining a certain homeostasis of crime, violence and dysfunction. Upholding this false narrative ensures that poor and working class Black people can not sustain long term resistance to our oppression. If we allow those in power to do this, we lend legitimacy to this story  and we allow the State to cover up the vast amount crimes it has and continues to perpetuate against poor and working class Black people. To allow law enforcement to eject poor Black people from Jackson is allowing them to bury the evidence of this state's civil and human rights abuses against Black people.

The Current System Produces Violence and Criminality

The truth of the matter is that  this society produces, then profits from violence and criminality. As evidence, the United States has over 2 million people, more than any other country in the world, who are currently  locked in cages. Most of these people are locked away for crimes of violence. We have to come to grips with the reality that violence and criminality is what this society produces because this is what this country was founded upon.

The perpetuation of violence and crime does not develop in a social vacuum and contrary to what many may want to believe, there is no such thing as a criminal or violence gene that predisposes certain people to being more violent and criminal than others. Criminality and violence develops within a larger context.

The larger social and cultural context of America is violent. American culture celebrates dominance, violence, and the total annihilation of adversaries in popular culture, sports and the propaganda of the U.S. Military industrial complex.

Black people have been subjected to untold amounts of physical violence, surveillance and economic reprisals because we have always been viewed as a threat to the established hegemonic order of the United States. Violence  is how this country maintains its stature and power in the world. Violence is how it exacts control over its subjects. This country is criminogenic and cannot and would not exist without violence. Therefore, it is hypocritical for the State to act surprised that the people who they have violently oppressed in perpetuity would commit acts of violence among themselves and others.

Instead of talking about how the various forms of violence perpetrated against poor and Black people in this country and specifically in Mississippi begets the violence we see on an interpersonal level in our communities, we have federal, county and city officials who want to lay the blame at the feet of people who have suffered under the extreme oppression and violence of the social, economic and political order they have been forced to exist under.

Black people have been rendered disposable by a perpetually inadequately funded and failed education system, an economy that has no use for us outside of slave labor in public and private prisons, and systematic and unrelenting racial oppression. It is not surprising that many poor Black people engage in violence and other antisocial behaviors. In fact, it is surprising that in light of the trauma that Black people have been subjected to, that more Black people don't engage in these types of behavior.

Project Eject Continues Ethnic Cleansing in Mississippi

From the nineteen teens until the early 1970s millions of Black people left the south for northern urban cities. The dominant historical narrative is that Black people left their homes, familiarity and families to find greater economic opportunities in the factories and steel and textiles mills of the north. To some degree this is true, but not all Black people left the only homes they had ever known of their own volition. In many instances, Black people were forcibly removed from southern cities and towns in Mississippi. Project Eject plans to continue this type of forcible removal.

Historically, Black people have also been run out of Mississippi through outright violence, terroristic threats, land theft and economic exploitation. This was not voluntary migration. This was forced migration and ethnic cleansing carried out in the southern United States.

One of the reasons that some Black people were run out of places like Mississippi is because white people created a narrative that they were lazy, criminal vagrants who did not want to work. The reality was that poor Black people who had seen their parents and great grandparents economically exploited and subjected to slavery by another name did not want to continue to allow their labor to be exploited by the racist white families that had previously owned their fore parents. That is why it was quite disturbing to hear U.S. Attorney Hurst refer to some people as nothing more than criminals that he does not want to be in the city. Criminal is a code word for poor Black people who do not fit into the plans that the ruling class has for the Capital city.Since Black people can no longer  be outright killed or run out of town without some outcry, Project Eject is a legal way of ethnically cleansing this undesirable class of people from the population of Jackson to make way for people who they deem more valuable to the future of Jackson.

Both individuals like Hurst and many from the Black political class  in Jackson are unwilling to attempt to solve the problems that produce poverty, crime and violence so shipping them off is an easy fix. By the time they spend a decade or more in prison, they will not be able to come back to Jackson because the likelihood that there families will be priced out of their homes and moved to the outside of Jackson are great.

Black Collaborators

The saddest, but not surprising part of the Project Eject press conference was the sea of Black faces surrounding Hurst as he made the announcement that he planned to eject Black people from the city. As a human defense lawyer, I see the people who Hurst's message was directed toward on a daily basis. Most of them are young Black men who have been either miseducated or not educated at all. These young men could be the children or grandchildren of the Black elected officials  and community "leaders" who stood with Hurst as he laid out his plan to Eject them from the city.

The sad reality is that in addition to being failed by the dominant society, the Black political class and the Black community at large has failed them too. As it stands, there are no viable options or opportunities for poor Black youth in the city of Jackson. On the one hand, this vacuum exists because we have not invested enough in our own children in terms of building the necessary independent economic, political or social institutions necessary to speak to the unique needs of Black children and young adults and prepare them for a racist and hostile society. On the other hand, this vacuum exists because Black elected officials year after year have merely talked about what Black youth need instead of using to the city's resources to meet those needs.

Real Solutions 

For the misguided, Project Eject represents the opportunity for a respite from crime and violence. However, the problem of crime and violence cannot be solved through over policing and tough on crime policies.

Crime in Jackson must be treated as a public health crisis. People must be provided mental health services, substance abuse treatment and economic democracy through control of the means of production. Ultimately, if we are serious about bringing crime and violence to a minimum in Jackson, we must prepare ourselves to dismantle the current political, economic and social order. It is this order that keeps poor people generally and poor Black people specifically going through a cycle of crime and violence as both perpetrators and victims. This cyclical process benefits the ruling elite's agenda to have poor Black people trapped inside of the prison industrial complex and locked outside of the city.

[drautcs-blog]

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.

TAGGED BY: Took this from my ancient Hanzo blog because it was invaluable for getting a lot of ideas down on paper. I tagged myself, fight me.

━━ FULL NAME: Titus Drautos ( also known as General Glauca ) ━━ GENDER & SEXUALITY: Male / Demiromantic / Pansexual ━━ ETHNICITY & SPECIES: Cavaughnian, Human.  ━━ BIRTHPLACE & BIRTHDATE: “Scylla”, Cavaugh Region, Lucis ( Before being assimilated into the Niflheim Empire ). He was never given a canon DoB, but I’ve taken to January 1st since he displays the typical traits of a Capricorn male considerably well. ━ GUILTY PLEASURES: There aren’t many activities that Titus would be particularly embarrassed about to be honest. He is private about how he spends his time anyway, regardless of if it’s something others would consider embarrassing. Titus is a pretty mild dude-- Glauca moonlighting aside. He’s fond of exotic cars, fishing, and fencing. If he cares enough to share his hobbies, he isn’t really concerned with how it’s interpreted. 

━ PHOBIAS: I can honestly say that I am hard-pressed to find something that Titus fears in a capacity significant enough to warrant being called a phobia. I suppose dæmons make him uncomfortable, yes, and he would prefer not to be around them, but not enough to actively fear them. I guess something more worthwhile is pointing out the fact that Titus has no fear of death. He doesn’t hope for death, nor would he commit suicide unless it kept someone significant alive, but he will walk into dire situations ( with as much planning as possible still. He would be remiss to throw his life away for glory or fruitless passion. ) without hesitation if the benefit of victory outweighed the cost of failure. Titus understands that it is unlikely that he will grow old enough to lament his age, considering the mantle that he’s taken up.

Otherwise like any other person, he avoids uncomfortable social situations, he feels guilt, and works through stress.

━ WHAT THEY WOULD BE FAMOUS / INFAMOUS FOR: Drautos had already been infamous as General Glauca for at least 12 years since killing Sylva Nox Fleuret, the late queen of Tenebrae, and having a fairly close shot at assassinating Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum and King Regis Lucis Caelum ( whom he succeeded in murdering on his subsequent attempt. ). That alone ( to say nothing of his accomplishments as a formidable Niflheim tactician and his prowess as a master swordsman, known for cutting massive swaths into the opposition from the front-lines ) has cemented his name in Lucian infamy for as long as the tale of Insomnia's downfall is told. 

After the events of Kingsglaive, it is possible he will be known as turncoat when his true identity as Titus Drautos becomes common knowledge and therefore regarded as the lowest of the low to those still unshakably loyal to the Crown.

━ WHAT HAVE THEY / WOULD THEY HAVE GOTTEN ARRESTED FOR: So we’re going to start this list off strong with two counts of regicide. No, but the laundry list of Glauca antics aside, Titus did his best to stay out of situations that would attract negative scrutiny of any kind. As a teenager ( around ages 14-17, the three years following the Niflheim siege of his village ), however, he did have significant issues of excessive aggression that luckily only resulted in having to be reprimanded by his superiors.

After the events of Insomnia, I could imagine Titus eventually being arrested by Crown loyalists for the assassination of Regis. Even after the long night ends. If he isn’t outright killed/transformed into a daemon, I can also picture Titus in a situation where he is arrested for acting against Chancellor Izunia.

━ A SHAPE YOU SHIP THEM WITH: I still don’t understand what this question means??? Would the shape of a kukri count? Because boy does he love them with all his heart. His heart is practically bursting at the seams at the prospect of being reunited with them. Too soon, I know.  I dunno, does angst count as a shape?

━ CHARACTER MOST LIKELY TO MURDER THEM: I mean-- as it just so happens to turn out, his subordinate Nyx Ulric is heavily implied to have murdered him pretty hard at the end of Kingsglaive ( with a kukri to either the heart or the lung ). Besides the most obvious answer being Lucii-powered Nyx, I would surmise that Cor the Immortal would have been an actual problem to handle as Glauca. He is regarded as one of the greatest living swordsmen in Lucis--bar none. I’ve had a few discussions about this, and I’ve already got this minor headcanon that Titus played an active hand ( not direct, mind you. Maybe by suggestion somehow in the proper ears, or presented as demands from the Empire ) in encouraging Cor to be reassigned on the day of the treaty-signing in order to avoid having to fight him in a direct confrontation. Cor is the one person-- over the magic wielding king of Lucis and Crownsguard Clarus Amicitia combined-- that Titus was not certain enough in defeating in a timely manner to take a chance in fighting during the events of Insomnia’s downfall.

Aside from those two, I’m pretty sure a lot of people would be gunning for his head post-Insomnia. Prince Noctis, Ravus Nox Fleuret, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, Iris Amicitia, and Gladiolus Amicitia would especially be justified in wanting wrathful retribution for his actions. 

━ FAVORITE BOOK GENRE: Epic Poetry, is the go-to when Titus has actual free time to read ( Which is pretty damned rare, let me tell you. Between having to wrangle snot-nosed recruits, seeing to drills, paperwork, mobilizing the Glaives on behalf of his Grace, and staying updated with his ‘second job’ he doesn’t have much leisure time.  ) however it isn’t uncommon for him to be found pouring over treatise regarding military science, economics, or philosophy. He doesn’t actively seek out narrative-driven prose for his own enjoyment, but he doesn’t explicitly dislike it. He would take the time to read them if it was a gift or something.  

━ LEAST FAVORITE BOOK CLICHE: One-dimensional representations of the dichotomy between good and evil. It’s childish and has been beaten to death in most fiction. In his eyes, good and bad do not exist in a black and white vacuum. The intentions of actions may be tinged in varying shades of altruism and egoism. Stories that paint conflicts as simply being between good and bad tend to bore him to tears. 

━ TALENTS AND / OR POWERS: Titus is a highly proficient swordsman, as seen when he manages to succinctly dispose of both the King and a member of his elite Crownsguard singlehandedly. He is highly knowledgeable in multiple forms of swordsmanship ( with experience in iaido, kendo, and sabre fencing )  although his forte resides within the use of both the bastard sword ( the iconic weapon of choice as General Glauca and honed by way of Kunst des Fechtens ) and the shortsword ( the weapon of choice while masquerading in uniform as the Glaive captain. ).

His skill is further amplified by the Magitek armor Titus is able to summon at will, which multiplies his formidable strength beyond superhuman levels ( at one point, granting him the ability to eat the force of a speeding car (about 128 k joules of kinetic energy) and toss it to the wayside. ) while providing propulsion which allows him to perform massive leaps as well as allowing him to slow the descent of a massive fall.

I suppose another skill that bears mentioning is Titus’ dangerous talent for detail observation and pattern recognition, which goes hand in hand with his ability to think tactically. This observance extends not only to his surroundings, but to people and their interpersonal relationships; Titus is extremely good at reading others if given enough time to do so and has little hesitation in using said information ( including grief ) to manipulate people and situations into working in favor of his end-goals.

━ WHY SOMEONE MIGHT LOVE THEM: Idk why someone would do that to themselves but alright. He’s a walking neon sign flashing ‘bad idea’. Despite all his flaws as a person, Titus has no trace of the concept of quit in his body. If he decides to genuinely pursue a cause, he has every intention of following through until the end as a matter of honor. 

Titus also has a bit of a fatherly streak, in that he is willing to take souls in need of guidance under his wing if they are willing to receive help and improve. He takes his role as mentor to younger glaive members fairly seriously and makes corrections in a rather straight-forward manner. I guess he abides by the ‘tough love’ regimen of mentorship. 

As far as romantic love, Titus is surprisingly charismatic in a non-professional setting, almost to the point of seeming laid back-- or as laid back as his reticence would allow, however getting to that point takes a significant amount of time because of his penchant for keeping others at arm’s length. And in the event that he does have genuine romantic feelings, chances are that he will not verbalize any of those feelings until he’s either a) on his death bed, or b) put in a position where there is no confusion about whether his feelings are reciprocated ( ie: obvious mutual flirting, or he didn’t make the first move. ). Titus has an acute dislike for discussing his own feelings and he’s mastered the art of putting a cork on his personal desires to avoid rocking the boat.

━ WHY SOMEONE MIGHT HATE THEM: Well.

If the rest of what I’ve written so far hasn’t sold you juuust yet.

If we’re going to start on his personality, honestly Drautos isn’t really unpleasant when it comes to face-to-face conversation unless he’s obviously displeased. He does, however have a tendency to be fairly blunt and unambiguous in conversations that don’t pertain to him personally ( his feelings/ talking about himself in general. In situations centered around particularly personal questions, he straight up avoids the question or talks his way out of having to give an in-depth answer. Titus dislikes having to talk about himself. ).In that regard, he’s take-no-nonsense and will speak freely.  Because of this, it’s possible that he comes off as unfriendly and aloof to those unaccustomed to straight-talk and unfamiliar with him personally. 

In regards to morality-- Titus is a good liar. He’s a really good liar in the sense that he rarely tells lies, if that makes sense?? His untruths come in the form of omitted information, and neglecting to share secrets rather than outright telling someone a lie. And situations requiring him to lie outright are usually few and far in between ( if he and his accomplices have been playing their roles without issue ). This is more or less how he continues to operate undetected under the crown for so long. He avoids having to spin an elaborate web of lies so that they are unlikely to backfire on him. Of course that would be a massive source of contention if it ever gets found out.

TL;DR: Watch Kingsglaive. Most of the things he does to those who trusted him is bullshit.

━ HOW THEY CHANGE: Throughout Kingsglaive, Titus doesn’t change fundamentally. Sure, there’s the big reveal in the final quarter of the movie that he was a massive traitor, but every action Titus takes plays some role in furthering his cause and right up until Nyx stabbed him, he had no regrets for why he did the things he’s done. I do have character arcs planned for my portrayal and headcanon regarding his past and the future, but those are all essentially canon-divergent because we don’t hear shit from Titus after like the first 5 minutes of Final Fantasy XV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

━ WHY YOU LOVE THEM: I adore Titus for a myriad of reasons, despite the fact that he could have been handled way better from a development/writing standpoint by SE, but my absolute favorite thing about him is the fact that he is a collection of contradictions: he is is simultaneously loyal and disloyal; he is both truthful and a deceiver; he is both selfish and selfless. He is a well-intentioned anti-villain who sells out his king for the sake of his people and anyone that knows me, knows that generally I am a slut for exploring the philosophical duality of morally ambiguous characters like Titus. Also, I’m not going to lie, he’s got a pretty cool uniform and a cool face, so who am I to not instantly want to poke around and see what makes him tick?

TAGGING: @glaiv @cafveinated @amiiciitia @codeprint @regalialover @wareign @valorguard @arvious & whoever else wants to swoop in from the dashboard. Put me in your tagged by.

[adambstingus]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182592126672

[allofbeercom]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/

[samanthasroberts]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-3/

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

The Tyranny of Convenience – The New York Times

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.

Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.

However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.

Continue reading the main story

This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or making one’s own clothes. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.

You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.

Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.

So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort.

We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.

Continue reading the main story

As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).

The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.

An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.

We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.

Continue reading the main story

So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.

Continue reading the main story

TIM WU

The post The Tyranny of Convenience – The New York Times appeared first on dailygate.

[sapphire-weapon]

Why is he your favorite VA for Wesker?

Tbh the first time I heard him in game I thought he was Krauser. Like he’s just been stripped of personality in every aspect, voice, appearance, acting, etc.

He sounds like every other wannabe Batman video game character. I’ve heard the whole ‘well he sounded like a bond villain in 5’ and yes he might’ve but it was funny and memorable and now his voice just sounds so forgetful and generic.

but im curious to hear your opinions

i've been asked this question like five different times (almost as many times as i've been asked about lily gao), and i'm just. tired of the question because i'm tired of people looking at wesker in a vacuum. wesker doesn't exist in a vacuum. wesker exists in a series called resident evil.

idk if you've noticed, but RE isn't going for "funny" in the Remakes anymore. bond villain wesker worked in OG because that was the tone that the series was trying to strike to begin with. it's not trying to strike that tone anymore. so anyone who wants him to go back to being a bond villain wants him to stick out among the cast in a really bad way and feel out of place.

i've said this before, but when i first heard craig's voice come in over ada's radio, i got hit really fucking hard with HOLY SHIT THAT'S WESKER. THAT'S THE MOST WESKER THAT WESKER HAS EVER BEEN HOLY FUCK.

you thought he sounded like krauser for the same reason that i immediately knew he was wesker:

menace.

krauser always had a menace factor to him, but wesker didn't. this goes back to the whole "wesker shouldn't be funny anymore" thing. wesker is The Big Villain of the series. he should be menacing. we should feel scared of him -- or, at the very least, he should make us anxious and/or uncomfortable. he's not a morally gray "hero of someone else's story" villain. he is a menacing villain who gets off on psychologically torturing the heroes.

and that's why i always didn't like the bond villain approach to him in the first place. there was always something very sinister about wesker that got lost in translation because he sounded so fucking goofy.

it's not lost anymore.

craig carries a level of tension through his performance that makes it sound like he's always five seconds from snapping, and he does it in a very calm way, so you really have no way of knowing when he's going to pop off and raise his voice. you have no way of knowing when he's going to get violent, because he sounds like he's constantly skirting right along the edge of it.

and it's a good choice for wesker because wesker's particular brand of sinister has always had a sexual component to it, and sex and violence are very closely related psychologically. like i said, wesker gets off on chris's angst and jill's suffering. he now finally sounds like someone who would.

and on top of all of that, craig also has a very... i like to say he has a "radio voice" in his performance of wesker. it's deep and smooth-sounding and very breathy at times; if he were to be given a radio show, people would listen to it just because they'd enjoy listening to him talk. that's also fitting for wesker, because we know that wesker lived a double life for about 20 years.

i can't see dc douglas wesker charming his way into jake's mom's panties, because he's such a ridiculous human being. he always has some snide lilt to his voice. he's just barely this side of snidely whiplash. if he told me i looked beautiful, i'd be like "lol so how much money do you need to borrow?" but if craig burnatowski wesker told me i looked beautiful, i'd probably get the dokis, just because his voice is smoother and he sounds more serious overall.

the same principle applies to him betraying STARS. peter jessop did a fairly good job with wesker, but i couldn't see dc douglas or richard waugh wesker as a leader to look up to, because, again, they're both skirting the line of snidely whiplash. it'd be like "oh, there's a traitor in STARS? couldn't be the guy who sounds like a fucking cartoon villain, could it?"

like. get dc douglas and richard waugh out of your head. stop thinking about them and just look at wesker's lines of dialogue written out on paper. craig captures the character's voice better. he just does. and if you think it makes him sound "generic" then chances are you don't like wesker as a character as much as you think you do.

and now i never want to answer this question again lmao

[adambstingus]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/176531947952

[samanthasroberts]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017-2/

[adambstingus]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/12/12/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9242017/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/168467925207

[samanthasroberts]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/12/12/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9242017/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/12/12/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9-24-2017/

[allofbeercom]

What Stupid Thing Is Trending Now? (9/24/2017)

What stupid thing is trending now? Well…

It’s unclear whether the jarring audio played during the emergency broadcast was a prank, or a bumbling intern who got “normal broadcast tone” with “alien apocalypse” mixed up. Either way, these broadcasts are no War of the Worlds in terms of quality. There are a few problems with the narrative that really need to be addressed.

First, there’s the alien plot arc, which honestly left me a bit underwhelmed. The script reads, “The space program made contact with… They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The disasters that are coming-the military-I’m sorry the government knows about them…” Aliens infiltrating the military is a solid premise, but one we’ve seen before. So there needs to be a bit of extra spice to really bring this hoax dish to life. Maybe the aliens look like human babies? Or it could turn out that we were the aliens all along? Just something a little extra. And I rolled my eyes at the “Area 51” comment. I mean really, do you think aliens would make a beeline for Area 51? No, their first steps would be to assume control of Tinder and the popular restaurant franchise Applebees. With the mating habits of the young, and the dining habits of the old squarely under their control, the aliens would be able to both stymy our ability to reproduce, and our ability to keep our elderly non-cranky and somewhat tolerable. We’d be doomed within hours.

The biblical apocalypse plot must also be addressed. First of all, you can’t just layer aliens and bible End Times on top of each other like some kind of misery parfait. You have to mix them together with skillful writing, such as “God was an alien all along.” Also you can’t just handwave the events of the apocalypse by saying, “in the last days extremely violent times will come.” That’s lazy writing. You’ve got to show, not tell, your audience. What kind of hell violence is this exactly? Everyone’s skin is now fire? Our skeletons come out of our bodies and attack us? You’ve got to use details to paint a scene. So the next time you startle Californians with hoax emergency broadcasts, put some effort into your art. And if you really want to scare Californians, tell us the end times means drought, and drought means no avocados.

I’m not some sort of fancy “historian.” But I’m almost 80% sure that Yoda did not meet with King Faisal at the UN. Maybe he’s be willing to chat foreign policy in some kind of foggy swamp area, but not the UN. That’s not Yoda’s scene at all. The man (alien?) can’t even stand to wear anything but the lone bathrobe in his possession, the one with all the cream of wheat stains. He’s an old, cranky, green retiree. He gave up being on the Jedi council just so he didn’t have to deal with the long speeches and underwhelming cafeteria food. Why would he come out of retirement just to sit and list to more long, boring speeches, when he could be giving whiny Jedi vague, indirect lessons? Also, I think Yoda died at some point or something, so that would make it hard to get in to the UN.

Maybe the editors of this textbook mistook Yoda for Alan Greenspan. But even then, why would Alan Greenspan be at the UN? He’s also a retiree who only hangs out in foggy swamps and gives indirect advice to young economists. “Adjust interest rates to all-time lows, you shall.”

I’m as big a fan of learning new vocab as any other pretentious dweeb. For instance, did you know “borborygmus” means that rumbling noise in your stomach (and it’s also probably a Pokemon)? But there’s a time and a place for everything. As president Trump and Kim Jong Un trade insults, it feels as if we creep ever closer to military escalation. Which really makes me want to borborygmus in my pants. But despite our perilous situation, the one fact we took away from all this was that Kim Jong Un used a funny word, “dotard,” which means “old an senile,” and is also probably a Pokemon.

It’s great we’re learning new vocabulary, but even the fanciest GRE words aren’t going to do much for us once we’re all a smoldering piles of ash. Here’s a neat word: internecine, which means “destruction on both sides of a conflict,” and used in a sentence is, “The potential internecine war between the U.S and North Korea means everyone is super duper boned.”

Money is objectively disgusting. And not just in the sense that greed is the root of all evil: the paper money itself is covered in inconceivable amounts of filth. It’s honestly better not to think about where your money has been, whose nose it’s been up to vacuum cocaine, whose g-string it’s been tucked into, what rich person has used it to wipe their ass while laughing about the poors. The only way our monetary system can go on is to maintain a flimsy veneer of willful ignorance about the dark places and unspeakable stygian horrors our paper bills have gone through.

That’s what makes the story of this liquor store’s problems all the more harrowing. Instead of using pockets, purses, or a folksy bindle, some customers insisted upon storing their cash in the sweaty crevices of their body. It’s an unspeakable crime against the social contract to reach into the dank recesses of your own body to fish out a slightly moist bill, and to hand that into the trembling hand of a hapless cashier. And as soon as one of these customers goes, “Oh hang on, I think I have exact change in my butt crack,” the cashier will let out a primal scream, the carefully maintained illusion of civil money will crumble, and all of society will soon follow.

Oh come on, what barely visible smudge in the background of a cartoon are parents complaining about now– oh. Oh dear. That is actually very clearly a drawing of a penis. And Snopes has confirmed it.

This was clearly done by the hands of a very disgruntled animator/texture artist. Day after day of slaving away in the animation mines has probably turned the culprit into a hardened, bitter individual, with no other tools to fight back against his corporate overlords but a pen and a vague understanding of what a penis looks like. Or perhaps this required the cooperation of multiple animators and graphic designers, who staged a coup in the only way they knew how. “Help, we’re being held for days on end while we must carefully render all these goddamn stupid cartoon bees,” would probably not get past QC, but a subtle penis would. This isn’t just any dick. This is a cry for help.

Have you ever seen an exposed, hairy man belly in public and thought to yourself, “If only I could surgically remove his gut and sew it into a pouch that can be used to hold my iPhone and keys?” First let me say, getting therapy is nothing to be ashamed of these days. Secondly, you need wish no more! You can now buy mass produced hairy man belly fanny packs. They come in a variety of flavors: first off, there’s “The Allen,” a tasteful, vanilla version that has a modest amount of hair and protrusion. “The Derek” is similar to “The Allen,” except it acknowledges that “pasty white” isn’t the only existing skin tone. “The Bobby” is completely hairless, somehow placing it squarely in the uncanny valley of beer bellies. In contrast, “The Sherman” is thickly forested with coarse, bear-like hair that surrounds a yawning abyssal belly button. “The Magnus” is a photoshopped cascade of belly folds that seem anatomically improbable.

So if you’d like to attain the mystical aura that is the “dad bod,” slap on one of these beauties. As an added bonus, you’ll have a handy pouch to store all the phone numbers you’re totally going to collect while wearing these.

Finally, a victory for the common man. If FedEx says they’ll do overnight delivery, and you trust in them that they’ll honor what they advertise and deliver your horse sperm to your doorstep within a timely manner, it’s critical that the courts hold them to their word. FedEx tried to weasel their way out of their sticky legal situation by arguing the fine print clarified they made no guarantee of overnight delivery, even though it’s called “priority overnight,” with a slogan of, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” And that promise is important when you order horse sperm.

It’s not like horse sperm grows on trees. High quality horse sperm does not run cheap, and you don’t want to impregnate your mare with low-grade budget horse sperm. You can’t hop down to Costco and get plus-sized gallons of horse sperm for $25, and black market horse sperm is often cut with glass and encourages cartels. So for many buyers of horse sperm, delivery is the only option. And by god, if you pay for your horse sperm to be delivered overnight, you should get that horse sperm delivered overnight.

Sure, you might be thinking, “Well I never have needed nor can see any possible reason I will ever need horse sperm delivered to me overnight,” but this court decision affects us all (as long as you happen to live in Nova Scotia, Canada). This is a win for the consumer, whether you’re trying to get priority shipping on a gift for your grandma, or a pint of fresh horse sperm.

There are many, ordinary reasons you might poop in someone’s yard. You could be drunk, there may be no public restrooms, you could have eaten 2 pounds of prunes, or you might be cosplaying as a dog. What makes this story so compelling is that none of these reasons seem to apply to the jogger serial-pooping in residents’ yards. The woman doesn’t appear to be mentally ill or unable to access public restrooms, and her actions seem calculated. She brings toilet paper and poops at the same houses, and shifts her schedule based on when she’s been caught in the act. It seems too coldly premeditated to be a result of a gastrointestinal medical issue. And when she is confronted she apologizes, but never stops, nor cleans up after herself.

It’s a crime spree that seems completely unsolvable. You could tie heroin to the end of a stick and set Sherlock to work, and he’d come away defeated. Is there a personal vendetta involved? Has this jogger finally snapped after dog owners have left countless poops in her yard? Perhaps she’s living by the timeless adage, “When life hands you lemons, you eat those lemons, turn them into poop, and leave those poops on the yards of the innocent.”

This is one of those cases where we just have to accept we’ll never know the definitive answer. Like the Chupacabra or Bigfoot, she will forever capture our imaginations, but we will never capture her.

Photoshop is like a hammer. When used delicately, it can be used to construct beautiful cabinets. But when abused it can pulverize a human body. In this instance, the Tomb Raider poster has been Photoshopped with such wanton abandon, Lara Croft’s neck has gained altitude and flexibility not found in the normal range of human anatomy. Due to this graphic designer’s overabundance of enthusiasm, the writers of the movie will have to change the plot to Lara Croft mixing her DNA with that of a giraffe and an owl, thus becoming the greatest artifact hunter in the history of archaeology.

Can’t see above a pile of rubble? No problem for Lara Giraowlff, she can use her seven extra vertebra to peer over obstacles like a periscope. Are there bad guys trying to ambush the protagonists? Lara Giraowlff’s uncannily perceptive hearing can pick up the sound of a mouse scurrying a mile away, she can definitely hear human footsteps. She can then swivel her head like a lazy Susan, much to the horror of anyone trying to sneak up behind her. “Hoo’s there?” she quips, before unloading her pistols into the body of some hapless henchman, her unblinking owl-giraffe hybrid eyes cold and uncaring as she watches the corpse fall to the ground. This remake is going to be awesome.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/12/12/what-stupid-thing-is-trending-now-9242017/