Insomniac Nerd

A patron came in to the library a few weeks ago looking for a copy of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit". She said she wanted to replicate Peter's coat for her daughter's rabbit. Library staff found her the book thinking she meant a stuffed rabbit. But, lo and behold, it was a real rabbit! Introducing... Melvin Rabbit!

I understand the appeal of wanting every adult hero to instinctively adopt teenage Peter Parker, but can it really beat the hilarity of acknowledging that at 15 Peter was 5'10", unusually buff, went by a moniker with Man in it, wore a creepy full face mask, and had a tightly guarded secret identity and probably a Queens accent thick enough to have come out of a jello mold, and adult heroes reasonably responded to him by going, “Wow, this grown man is an immature asshole for no reason.”

Way funnier to me than adult heroes finding out Peter is a teenager and becoming Concerned is the idea of adult heroes Retroactively finding out Peter Was a teenager because he admits to being like. 22 and they’re like “Hang on you’ve been doing this for like. Seven years.” and he’s like “Haha crazy right? Anyway it’s too late for you to yell at me about that because the statue of limitations on that lecture ran out when I turned 18”

YEAH this trope is instantly more tolerable if it’s fully adult Peter being like, *listen up whippersnappers because I’ve been around the block voice* “I’m thirty, and—” and Tony Stark, who vaguely assumed Spider-Man is maybe two years older than him because he just has that energy and hasn’t reassessed this for four presidential terms, is like, *drunkenly doing math* “You’re how many”

Okay but…them trying to talk about Old People Stuff with him, not realizing that he wasn’t alive to remember xyz thing happening, never used xyz technology bc he didn’t exist yet, not expecting him to agree with the fact that some ppl were saying songs they grew up to were oldies, etc

The thing about Peter Parker is that he was raised by senior citizens the way other heroes are raised by wolves. He has the body of an Olympic gymnast and the soul of a malcontented geriatric. This likely contributed to the perpetuation of the accidental ruse.

It’s when he channels Aunt May so hard he makes it sound like he was personally and immediately affected by McCarthyism that the time traveler fringe theory starts really picking up bets.

Pal, I JUST SAID he was raised by AUNT MAY.

Also not to get real on a ha ha comic post but the elderly are not your enemy. There are old progressives.

Peter has a lot of feelings about the woman that discovered DNA and he strikes me as the kind of person that thinks that distancing yourself from notable figures of history by using their last names is stupid, so he’s going to say something like, “Rosalind worked so fucking hard to have that work snatched from her,” immediately followed by, “I woulda thumped him good,” and inspiring Tony and Banner to frantically look through the 1930s and 40s yearbooks at King’s College and theorize which one was Spider-Man. Captain America tries reminiscing about the good ole days with him. Peter, for his part, has been absently agreeing and making vague “I’m listening” noises about the Rolling Stones and Elton John for the majority of his life, so adding baseball, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald to the list wasn’t that much of a stretch.

There are only like three genuinely funny additions on this, but this is one of them.

captain america pushing a get out the vote campaign: ‘spiderman did you vote’

spider’man’ at 16: uhhhh so about that 

“I…can’t.” “I see. That’s why it’s so important to restore voting rights to felons.”

That’s made funnier by the fact that I feel like Steve’s natural assumption would be that Spiderman’s a non-citizen, so him jumping straight to felon is like, Peter just has such strong criminal vibes.

Steve: What’d you go in for?

Peter, panicking: Jaywalking!

Steve: This prison pipeline needs to stop.

why are cyberpunk tabletop things so obsessed with decency and personhood being tied to how many surgeries you haven’t had

“if you have a prosthetic it takes out a part of your soul” like thanks shadowrun

in early cyberpunk, the point was more along the lines of “if we integrate technology into our bodies we risk becoming dependent upon the people and institutions who control that technology, who would then use that to enrich themselves at our expense”

unfortunately that was too anti-corporate for American mainstream culture so as cyberpunk moved out of its niche it became “uhhh it eats your soul I guess”

tags by @rubyvroom: 

#this is important context #if you weren’t around at the time it is easy to miss but #anti-corporate sentiment was pretty much the lynchpin of cyberpunk until there were movies and games making money off it #it was the 1980s you guys #the entire point was that corporations are evil and technology should be used to circumvent them and escape their control over our lives #and not be used to make ourselves into another product #now that the internet is entirely monetized and corporate it’s harder to remember that originally it was synonymous w freedom & independence

Yes, exactly. Cyberpunk is anti-corporations, not anti-body-modification.

#the real horror is medical debt ( tag via @bronanlynch )

And they (the original message, not Shadowrun) were right. So many people with prosthetics and sensory aids and insulin pumps and so forth are at the mercy of the bloodthirsty corporations who own the rights to their devices.

COOL GUY ALERT

People always say: "Not everyone is gonna like you, and that's ok, nothing to take personally, it doesn't matter" yet it still sucks. It sucks when it's your teacher, it sucks when it's your boss or co-worker or family member. It even sucks when it's a friends friend or someone we barely know. It hurts. And you do not have to gaslight yourself into thinking that it doesn't hurt when it does. You're allowed to be upset when life is hard. You're allowed to feel an emotion, even more when it makes perfect logical sense. We talk to a friend about our feelings, journal, reflect, use coping skills. We find peace after a while, that's a more realistic solution. You got this. It will be ok.

I'm sorry but it's way too sketchy to have to "sign up" for a protest. There's no reason you should have to give anyone your full name, email, phone number, and/or address in order to march in the streets. People are getting arrested left and right because cops have access to information that connects people to the protests they were at. If an organization is having people "sign up to join the fight," all the cops need to do is access that list.

Just go. Don't leave a fucking paper trail.

I need to be taken to the seaside for hysteria

You know, I think American capitalism kinda destroyed the concept of vacation. That we've turned our vacations into stress generators in their own right. And I think a lot of that is because we have so very little of it, we're desperate to get as much use out of it as possible.

The first thing is, we just plain don't get very much of it. The legally mandated amount of vacation in most European countries is more than I can reasonably expect to have even when I reach the end of my career. A full month off? Months? Plural??? Not gonna happen. And that's been the case for quite a while. It's always in my lifetime been "I'm saving up my vacation to take two weeks off". I recall back in the 80s, about half the time our family vacation was only 10 days because my father couldn't take two entire weeks off.

The second thing I've had to explain to non-Americans is, for most of us our vacation days and our sick days are rolled into one "Paid Time Off" pool. That if I get sick and have to take time to recover, that cuts into my vacation. Which really incentivizes people to go into the office and spread disease. It also means that even if we actually have plenty of PTO, we're reluctant to use it, since we might get sick and then not have enough PTO to use.

Which brings to the 3rd thing - rolling over PTO. Let us suppose I'm very diligent and health; a hard worker. At the end of the year, I can't have more than 400 hours of PTO available to use. Anything past that is going to be gone. They take it away. Oh, wait, isn't that cold and flu season? And when people want to take time off to be with family? For which we're given pretty scant holiday time?

Of course, that almost doesn't matter because my PTO is capped at 480 hours anyway. If I have that much banked, I can't accrue any more than that. No matter what, I can't take that six month sabbatical to learn chado in Japan.

Lastly, we get punished for using our PTO. Not directly. But if I'm out for more than a day or two, even my company is sufficiently understaffed that large amounts of my work will simply build up. If I take two weeks off, I'm going to spend two months digging out from under the backlog. And other places are even worse.

This means we all take our vacation in furtive snippets - a four day weekend here, maybe three days in the middle of the week there - and we're always in a rush to get to our destination, have as much FUN as possible, and then skid back in home at 1am, planning to be in the office at 7:30 am.

You can't relax that way. You can't unwind. You need time to sit and watch the waves, to have the opportunity to just get up when you feel like it, to go to bed when you feel like it, and for a while simply not have any worries.

And our current approach to the economy absolutely denies us that.

fiddleford hadron “medically concerning posture” mcgucket

[ID: a Gravity Falls comic.

Mabel: Grunkle Stan, if you guys are identical, then why is Grunkle Ford's hair so much curlier?

Ford, leaning into frame out of nowhere: It's actually not! I just take better care of mine.

Stan, shoving him away: That's a funny way to say you don't shampoo or brush it. End ID.]

new headcanon

Bonus:

[ID: Mabel says "Ohhhh! Like Dad!" End ID.]

Curly hair runs in the Pines family but Grunkle Stan missed this particular memo

peepaw........

yknow i think they really got along (disoriented ass doodle cuz my meds fucking me up)

mini art dump

blind eye fiddleford

the angsty sillies

ok that’s all

more random doodles

I've never posted here before but hi have this

Sea Grunk Stanley growing out his hair always has a soft spot in my heart 💚 Even more so if it's a lazy mullet so he can pony tail it

9 October 2024

This is a great post to promote that you can donate to Wikipedia at any time, with almost any amount of money! You can even set up a reoccurring donation, like I did.