saw a post on bluesky that boiled down to saying the trans flag was ugly and some reply was like “it’s not even nice colors it’s fluorescent teal and hot pink” and like. i’m sorry but neither of those colors are present in the trans flag. are we looking at the same flag
how is this not “pastel”
decided to make whatever twisted dimension flag this person sees int9o a real flag
The entitlement of US Vietnam vets is so fucking wild because, like, on top of everything else they lost the war! These people will stand tall and demand you recognize the “sacrifices” they made for your “freedom,” as though they didn’t suffer a humiliating military defeat. Talk about participation trophies!
The nature of service work in the US is that someone will frequently walk up to you and say “Hello, I shot every Vietnamese child I could see and still lost the war. Please give me everything for free now? 🥺” and if you do the decent thing and tell them to kill themselves you get fired
Speaking of porn logistics, another personal favourite bit of fuckery is when an artist draws a picture containing multiple dicks, then produces a separate alt for every possible ejaculatory configuration, like there are four dicks and sixteen alts such that there’s a version where only dick A is jizzing, a version where only dick B is jizzing, a version where dicks A and B but not C are jizzing, and so forth. I’m imagining some high-class dick connoisseur with exquisitely rarefied tastes out there like “yes, I want to see this character getting jizzed on, but only by the dick on the far left – the other dicks can wait their turn”.
Some day I’m going to write a spy thriller where it turns out that the conspirators are sending coded messages via those E-Hentai galleries full of endless microscopically differing jizz alts, where each image contains four dicks and each dick serves as a one-bit component of a hexadecimal encoding.
Brb gotta encode national secrets into my hentai art
Hey fun facts that are fun together :
* as a reverse engineer, I have worked on extracting these sorts of arts from hentai games.
* the game art does this sort of thing so that the story can toggle between different versions. Maybe you didn’t get enough Friendship Points with Tgirl Jessica, so she’s not ejaculating in this picture.
* the games are often smarter about this than the galleries: instead of storing every combination of ejaculating/not-ejaculating, they store 1 base image, then separate per-dick ejaculatory overlays. So if you’ve got 4 dicks, this means they have 5 images instead of all 16 possibilities. But this makes no sense in an image gallery, so you have to compose the images together. You’d think all-off and all-on are the only options you need, but some people are content maximalists. (it’s possible site policies regarding quotas and stuff is encouraging this behavior).
* around the same time I was working on tools to extract images from hentai games, I also was working on tools to steganographically hide files inside images, in several ways. This was in part because I was working with 4chan at the time and helping them catch files hidden inside images, because channers were turning 4chan into an arbitrary file sharing site (is it a jpeg or a neutral milk hotel album? It’s both!), using it to bypass filtering/moderation (you put an image inside an image and now you can’t see the internal image unless you extract it. Maybe it breaks the rules. Breaking the rules on /b/ is very bad), or hiding viruses in there (viruses that then post themselves back to 4chan and the cycle continues!)
* This is also when I worked for the US government
So all those facts put together, I’ll just say that IF it turns out secret government agents were hiding confidential information encoded into the images of hentai game ejaculations galleries, then… it was me, and I did it back in 2009.
Foone Turing, the trans Ian Fleming for the digital age.
A group of far-future linguists and archeologists suddenly *poof* into existence in front of me. One is holding a tablet. “What is the difference between ‘red sauce’ and 'tomato sauce?’” they ask me. “The distinction is not clear in extant texts from this time and place.”
“Uh, they’re the same thing,” I tell them. “Who are you?”
“Yes!” the being with the tablet exclaims.
One of the other researchers groans. “No! My thesis…months of writing wasted…” One of the others comforts them.
“Now, what is this object for?” The first researcher holds up a discolored, dinged-up plastic object. It’s clearly been buried in the ground for quite some time, but the two holes and the scuffed plastic window are distinctive.
“That’s a cassette tape. You record music with it.”
“Interesting, interesting.” The being enters something on the tablet.
“How are you speaking English?”
“Sophisticated translation technology,” one of the researchers confides. “We are students of your society. From the future.”
“What does this pictogram represent?” The researcher with the tablet turns it around so that the screen faces me.
It’s the eggplant emoji.
“Sex,” I say. “Why do you need to ask me this if you can time travel or whatever? Can’t you just go wherever you want to go and look around and see how these things are being used?”
The beings shift guiltily and look at each other. “Technically, travel to times and places prior the advent of time travel is strictly prohibited. Paradoxes, you know.”
“Oh.”
“We must get back before our advisor returns to the lab. Just don’t tell anyone you saw us, alright? The space-time continuity depends on it. Can you do that?”
“Uh, sure, I guess?”
One of them pats me on the head. “And don’t go to Mars.”
“Okay. Wait, why? Is it dangerous?”
“No. Just not worth it.”
The group disappears in a shimmering light.
The cassette clatters to the sidewalk behind them.
Out of befuddlement, mainly, I pick it up. It’s clearly old, discolored and scuffed, but it still has tape in it.
I carry the tape around in my pocket for a while. The curiosity builds. I want to know what’s on that tape. I don’t have a cassette player anymore, so I go to Goodwill and pick up the first one I can find, praying that it still works. I plug it in. It turns on.
I slide the tape inside. It’s dirty, but it still seems to be in decent shape. I snap the player closed and hit play. The wheels begin to turn. I hold my breath.
A familiar tune starts up. A wobbly voice comes out of the machine.
so. my wife came downstairs just as i took a bite out of the remaining half red onion on the counter. literally within seconds of just getting away with it. i looked at her, and she looked at me, and we both sat there a moment, all frozen, beforeshe said babs, what the fuck.
i tried to say i can explain but it came out as or corn explorn because such was the onion in my mouth that there was no room for words. its honestly a miracle that she understood me at all. at least, i’m assuming that she understood me because she did let me get my bearings for a few moments. a smarter man would’ve used that time to think up a good lie, but instead i just chewed as fast as i could because i knew i was gonna have to tell a whopper and i really wanted to be able to use big words again.
big words are instrumental to telling a whopper.
anyway, i totally ran out of time. i barely got my first swallow of onion in before she said well?, and i did at least have an empty mouth to match my empty head. but also i had no lies. so i looked her dead in the face, opened my mouth and waited, every bit as curious as her, to hear what excuse my mouth was gonna come up with.
im pregnant, said my mouth.
great job, mouth, said my brain.
mmmmm onion, said my mouth.
better you than me, said my wife.
then she went upstairs. it has been two hours she still refuses to kiss me. im devastated. im shook. im crying a little, i think.
(but that might just be the onion.)
Okay but now I have to know
What was the truth??
Because it simply cannot be as obvious as “what, I like onions”
It can’t
Because that would not need a lie
I know people who eat onions like apples simply for pleasure
I don’t understand them, but they say “what, I like onions”, and we both shrug, and they carry on
Also. Was. Was the plan to eat the whole thing? Just no more half red onion? Because the alternative form of “getting away with it” was you were planning to put it back with a bite taken out of it before she came in and that is if anything more unhinged
okay so i do this thing that i call tummy tacos where i put all the ingredients to a taco in front of me, but like, separate. and then i take big bites of all of them. but just one at a time. like one big mouthful of taco chicken and then swallow and then a separate big mouthful of chopped cabbage and then swallow and then a corn tortilla and you get the idea.
(my wife considers it Barbaric. she does not approve of tummy tacos.)
but yesterday i had this idea for stomach pico de gallo there i was gonna eat an onion and then a tomato and then a jalapeno and then some cilantro. thud achieving salsa internally. but i underestimated the call of the onion. i really could give a damn about everything else after the onion. i felt the love of jesus in that onion.
“It is said that, during the fantasy book in the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please… there is no need to go that far.
There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly ‘bad’ races, magic that works like electricity and horses that work like cars. It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart form all the other EFP.
Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock-making or the mail coach system. Read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees.
Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works.
I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local bird life and the need for people in heavily over-flown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.”
— “Notes from a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep It Real” (2007), Terry Pratchett. (via the-library-and-step-on-it)
When my brothers were younger I wanted to teach about misogynistic tropes in media without scaring them off by presenting the topic right out the gate as serious and aggressive and intimidating so I pointed out one day that movie dudes usually only ever have three motives- 1. Wife, 2. Daughter, 3. Dog.
And now whenever we watch a movie together and a dude character is about to reveal their angst backstory we take guesses if it’s gonna be 1, 2, or 3.
Which is specifically the most fun to do in bad B-list action movies because you can say “It’s a 1” as it starts and then ten minutes later the ham-fisted Macho Man Tough Guy quietly mentions being married once and you can put your hands in the air and go “AYYY IT WAS 1” like your team just scored a sportsball goal
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