theungrumpablegrinch

[theungrumpablegrinch]

Yes.

We watched the cartoon version of the How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the old one, and when laying out his problems with Grinch, 95% of his complaints are that people are making too much noise.

And you know, I've always been a bit of a Grinch myself, but this is a crazy small scope for Christmas complaints. In his whole opening list of complaints, it's 18 lines about sounds, and 4 lines about the feast, and ... what, no trenchant observations on consumerism and waste? No skewering of the frankly hideous Christmas aesthetic? The light pollution draped over every house? The way the holiday has ballooned past an inflation fetishist's wild dreams to start fill the entire month of December and most of November?

But no, for the Grinch it's all about the sounds. Does the Grinch maybe just have misophonia?

[theungrumpablegrinch]

just one more reboot boys. one more crisis will fix it i promise please just ONE more reboot

[theungrumpablegrinch]

[theungrumpablegrinch]

What's the process if you're a superhero and you come out as trans

Do you tell your villains?

Do you keep it a secret so no one can connect Spider-Man with your secret identity for a while? Or do you pop a pronouns pin on your costume and the next time you web up Doctor Octopus and he goes "I'LL GET YOU NEXT TIME SPIDER-MAN" you go "Spider-Girl actually! I've been figuring out some shit"

[theungrumpablegrinch]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[theungrumpablegrinch]

Putting the term "male gaze" on top of the fridge until everyone remembers that it refers to a cinematographic trend and not the act of looking at things while being a man

[theungrumpablegrinch]

the natural human lifespan is actually less than 2 days, but many have taken to artificially extending their lives via substances such as food/water

[theungrumpablegrinch]

Thinking about playing some Minecraft again and was looking though some QoL mods when I found this:

Literally the perfect mod concept, I don't think this can ever be beaten.

[theungrumpablegrinch]

I like how there’s a category of careers (cowboy, pirate, spy, princess) that have a very specific historical and political context that they get stripped of for the entertainment of children

[theungrumpablegrinch]

On another note It’s interesting to think about the gray area of Bronze Age Marvel where "comic book time" was only barely starting to be necessary. Spider-Man aged in real time for a while, through high school and then out of college. When the All-New -All-Different X-Men debuted, the members of the original lineup who stuck around were mentioned to be.... about as old as they'd have been if they'd been aging in real time from their first debut, maybe with a little compression? Ten to twelve years or so, which roughly works- 1963 to 1975. In issue 97, set in what I think is supposed to be December of 1975, Jean Grey mentions last having fought the Sentinels in 1969- it would eventually become extremely rare for them to nail their own asses down with a specific date like that. This leads to an interesting thing early in Claremont's run, I'm talking really early, like Banshee is still a full-time member of the team early- there was one arc where the ANAD lineup, from an outside perspective, just drops off the face of the earth for a year. They get brainwashed and abducted and put in a carnival, then Magneto abducts them from there and drags them to a facility in Antarctica, and then they get stuck in the Savage Land for a few months, and then they get waylaid and stuck in Japan when their boat crashes and then they have to deal with a bunch of bullshit in Japan before they can finagle a way back to the States. By the time they get back they're all missing persons cases and the Professor thinks that they were killed.

This arc is fascinating to me because it was told more-or-less in real time, taking the better part of a year with the monthly releases, and apparently taking the same amount of time in-universe. Moreover it's a storyline that's incredibly dependent on the political and technological situation in the late 70s when it was being published. It's a conflict that vanishes the second they get to Japan if the internet exists, if cell-phones exist, if 24 hour news cycles exist. (To say nothing of the datedness of the now-rarely deployed supervillain Moses Magnum.) But it's still technically in continuity, unless someone's said something to the contrary that I missed. It's still the arc where Banshee got permanently benched from the A-list X-Men Roster due to blowing out his vocal cords countering a Japan-wrecking Earthquake machine. They still spent like a year dealing with all that bullshit. One year out of the supposed 15 or 20 that they've all been at this- and it has to be roughly in the middle, to accommodate the veteran hero status of the O5 team members that were involved. That was actually a reasonable time allocation when this came out, when the setting was still pushing forward from the outer edges of realtime. It's so much weirder now.

[theungrumpablegrinch]

I don't think it was permanent, because by ASM #361 Spidey was dealing with more cocaine shenanigans and this vulnerability never came up.

For those wondering - Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1 #338 (Hobgoblin sprays Spider-man with poison) and #339 (Doc Ock reveals the poison only becomes lethal when combined with cocaine).

[theungrumpablegrinch]

dnd campaign where everyone plays a different murderous narrator of a decemberists song

[theungrumpablegrinch]

[theungrumpablegrinch]

a professor told his class “consciousness doesnt exist. there are only neurons”

a student stood up “would you eat a raw egg and then drink oil and vinegar?”

“no” the professor replied.

“would you eat mayonnaise? perhaps on a sandwich or with some fries”

“of course” the professor replied, unsure of the purpose of this inquiry.

“mayonnaise is made from these very things and yet when combined, new properties arise.”

the professor was astounded. “what is your name?” he demanded

“shadow the hedgehog” said the student

[theungrumpablegrinch]

Back when I played WoW I'd sometimes momentarily neglect the time it would take to return from an errand because I could just hearthstone back.

(The specific definition of the Tetris Effect I am referring to here is when you play so much of a video game that you instinctively apply the logic of that game while doing something in real life. Like thinking about how well two objects would stack together because you've been playing a lot of Tetris, or having the impulse to vault a counter instead of walking around it after playing a lot of Assassin's Creed. Personally I have, I had the impulse to quick save before starting a hard conversation after playing an ungodly amount of Skyrim.)

[theungrumpablegrinch]

A complete list of Worm characters who had personal happy endings:

-

I like how in Worm, what was considered a happy ending was that not quite everybody died

[theungrumpablegrinch]

Star Wars is Greek; Star Trek is Roman.