thenerdyindividual:

creoparametric:

creoparametric:

creoparametric:

experiment goal: to determine whether smarties are an effective tea sweetener

hypothesis: smarties will sweeten the tea, but also introduce unwelcome flavor profiles due to their flavoring

procedure: procured one cup (≈12 fl oz) of Barry’s Tea Gold Blend black tea, hot. added 2/3 of a single roll of smarties candy (10 candies). wait for candies to dissolve, then stir well. tea will be sampled after stirring concludes.

addendum: control group was used. control sample consisted of one cup of the same type of tea, sweetened with white sugar. results will depend on the relative tastes of the control and smarties tea

results: smarties tea was significantly more bitter and less sweet than sugar tea. additionally, the smarties failed to dissolve in the expected manner, and when stirred, ended up breaking down into particulates that refused to dissolve. 

conclusions: because of the chemical/structural makeup of smarties, they do not function well as an ad hoc tea sweetener because of their reluctance to break down. it may be the case that crushed smarties would work better, but this experiment was intended to study how normal, uncrushed smarties would work as a sweetener

prokopetz:

sarkos:

asymbina:

designatedheckingadult:

Since it’s Black History Month, I’m making sure you folks know about Mike Pondsmith.

Mike designed, amongst other things, Cyberpunk 2020 and its wonderful spin-off Cybergeneration. He designed the critically-acclaimed Castle Falkenstein. A black man kicked off interest in two incredibly white-dominated genres in a white-dominated hobby is a remarkable achievement.

Which is why it bugs me that I didn’t know he was black until a couple of years ago. I figure the least I can do is make sure other folks know too.

I’m actually kinda angry at the collective hobby for never communicating this to me before now. I recognized his name and of course immediately recognized the games he’s designed — Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 and Castle Falkenstein are profoundly important and influential works. I don’t think there was much at all in the way of steampunk in the TTRPG world prior to the latter’s introduction (and after it came out I remember arguments over whether or not it “counted” as steampunk).

Mekton 2 was the first time i remember seeing a black dude on a RPG cover

If anything, the OP’s description is underselling Mike Pondsmith’s influence.
The guy is single-handedly responsible for creating enormous chunks of the tabletop roleplaying hobby: from Mekton, the first giant robot RPG; to the Urusei Yatsura-inspired Teenagers from Outer Space, the first anime style slice-of-life RPG; to the above-cited Cyberpunk, the first cyberpunk RPG; and even to Castle Falkenstein,
which is often labeled a steampunk RPG, but is more properly considered as one of the foundational works of the then-nascent gaslamp fantasy genre.

In a just world, the name Pondsmith would be spoken in the same breath as Gygax and Arneson – he’s Kind of a Big Deal!

clairidryl:

gothiclolitapl:

kaylapocalypse:

envymyblackness:

hufflepuffskeepmovingforward:

kaijutegu:

proteusolm:

There’s something really terrifying about the concept of being pursued by something that can only walk slowly after. Just slooowly following. You can chill for a while if you get far enough away but it’s still coming.

That’s called “persistence hunting” and it’s how humans hunted all sorts of megafauna to extinction, as well as what let our species become so disperse and so numerous. Our existence is a horror story told from the monster’s perspective.

So you’re telling me zombie is absolutely a valid career path

Watch the movie on Netflix called “ It Follows” lol

Basically our hunting super power is that we are really smart, good at tools and can walk/run forever. 

My roommate Kait runs 20 miles 4 times a week.
Horses can only travel about 32 miles a day.

If my roommate ran 20 miles twice in one day (possible if she does one in the morning and one in the afternoon) she would out travel a horse.

 She is not FASTER than a horse, but if a horse was walking away from her for 8 solid hours,  Kait could catch up to it.  She could probably also walk after it for an additional 5-10 miles after the run and then stab it when it got too tired to go on.

But kait’s athletic. 

 I, on the other hand, am a fatty fat who weighs 210 and never exercises ever.

I once, completely spontaneously because i had no money for the train, walked 17 miles in the winter from one end of Chicago to the other. I had also not eaten and was wearing a backpack. It took me 3 hours, but I accomplished it with ease. If i wasn’t a chub goddess, and had eaten and it was summer and I wasn’t wearing a backpack with a laptop in it, imagine how far and fast I could have gone. 

Now. Horses can only sustain a run for about 15 miles ( at 8-10mph it takes them a little over an hour).

If my fat ass was walking towards a horse for 3 hours and it was literally running away from me. It would become exhausted after 15 miles and unless it can recover completely in 2 hours for another lengthy sprint, I can reasonably catch up to it and stab it. (not that i would ever stab a horse. horses are terrifying and should be regarded with suspicion, respect and fear)

The longest run ever was 350 miles over 80 hours without sleep.

We are endurance monsters. 

humans terrify me

“Our existence is a horror story told from the monsters perspective” is one of the coolest and most terrifying sentences I’ve ever thought about

gallusrostromegalus:

sirussly:

what the shit

tomorrow night, wednesday 31st jan is the night of a total lunar eclipse

not only that, it’s also the third in a series of super moons, where the moon is closest to the earth at that point in it’s orbit

not only that, it’s the second full moon we’ve had this month, known as a blue moon

not only that, when the moon passes under earth’s shadow it will take on a reddish tint known as a blood moon

WE HAVE A TRIPLE SUPER BLUE BLOOD MOON ECLIPSE ON OUR HANDS, PEOPLE!

#prayforthewerewolves

I’m kicking off the state-wide drive with this. Any entities that need to get to Durango better be at my house by 5 AM.

chrisisjustalie:

yoshthethird:

firebreathingeli:

Discuss.

This.

tumblr mobile won’t load but I bet it’s the fucking mirror lasers

shineburn:

(Not to be confused with ‘purity wankers’, those are an altogether different kind of headache-inducing persons).

I know I promised No Discourse on this blog, but I have to say the following, because it’s been the bane of my existence within fandoms, for the past 20+ years. It’s also not something widely discussed in fannish spaces, probably because it still is the dominant mindset, particularly in geeky / nerdy fandoms. This post is also partly a reaction to the level-headedness of one person, in the sea of rage-filled, perpetual gnashing of teeth that is any comments section related to the putative Lord of the Rings prequel TV series produced by Amazon:

I’ve been asking myself for years
what exactly is it about geeky
fanbases that make responses like the above ridiculously thin on the ground. My theory is that such fandoms have a higher than average ratio
of what I’ve come to term ‘purists’, a group of fans also dubbed ‘elitists’ by others who’ve noted their patterns of behavior. And here’s the interesting
thing – from silly Japanese shounen anime all the way to sprawling
Western fantasy epics, they manifest in remarkably similar ways, to the
point where I’ve come to recognize the patterns instantly, over the past
twenty years:

• refusal to accept almost any deviation from the Source Canon in
  later adaptations + intensely hostile and genuinely angry reactions not
  just toward the official content creators, but also toward fellow fans who
  have the temerity to enjoy the new material (dislike of canon changes in and of itself isn’t enough to make one a purist, every person has their own personal likes and dislikes);

• hold the entitled attitude that content creators are beholden to them and thus should only create the kind of content that the purist contingent finds the most enjoyable / that resonates most with their childhood nostalgia. If a content creator steps out of line (meaning create something different, while still following his or her own personal vision), then it’s perfectly acceptable to shout at them, mock them, drag their name through the mud and go on and on and on about how they ‘betrayed’ their fans (see the whole ‘The People Vs George Lucas’ debacle. How someone can create something with that title and not get laughed out of the room as gigantically entitled, but instead get hailed as a Passionate Fan^TM, is proof of how popular the purist viewpoint is in geeky fandoms).

• general disdain toward transformative fannish endeavors (fan-fiction in general, fan-art and cosplay when they involve whatever new canon content is rejected.
  Linked example used because it’s one of the many derapages of Tolkien
  fandom specifically, on top of providing good snippets of the particular
  brand of hostility and sneery contempt that I’ve come to associate with
  fandom purists);

• a seemingly obsessive fixation on constantly tearing down / railing at whatever one hates, rather than a focus on what one loves,
  sometimes even decades after the fact (this has the effect of turning
  entire fandoms into negativity binge-fests, or, to be far less polite
  about it, toxic fucking cesspits that become the very opposite of a place where someone can decompress and enjoy their preferred content in peace);

• to accompany above, sometimes the nonsense gets to the point
  where creating an atmosphere actively hostile toward the fans of the New
  Thing is precisely the intended effect (for example, fan-forum
  after fan-forum for all sorts of nerdy canons, that involved a certain
  subset of people constantly dogpiling, insulting and harassing the New
  Thing’s fans, with the tacit approval of the non-interventionist mods.
  The result has always been an exodus of generally non-purist fans,
  whereas the purists were left to openly crow and gloat about it. The
  assortment of insults over the years varied, but ‘idiot’ or ‘cretin with no taste’ were the most consistent); 

• a worldview that consistently turns the inherent subjectivity of personal taste into objective opinion + the view that purist-accepted opinions are inherently superior to all others.(take a shot every time you see a canon with a divided fanbase get termed ‘objectively horrible / awful’ by the usual suspects. You’ll die of liver failure).

And I could keep going. Some of the above might sound remarkably similar to the so-called Tumblr ‘Antis’ and that’s not surprising, given the cross-polination that happens in fandom. The fundamental difference is that antis are largely transformative fans who judge content on the basis of its moral value, whereas purists / elitists tend to be curative fans with a very rigid opinion of what counts as ‘canon’, who view themselves as stewards of said canon against any notable alterations / any alterations that they personally dislike.

To be clear, someone disliking The Hobbit films or the character of Tauriel isn’t anywhere near enough to make them a purist. Someone disliking the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy or the Sequel Trilogy or the Yu-Gi-Oh spin-offs or various Gundam series or anything with a big enough Hatedom isn’t enough to make them a purist. What is enough is consistently filling the comments sections of anything positive toward any of the above and more with thousand of posts on how ‘terrible’ they are, what a ‘shill’ the author is, how little taste he has. What is enough is the aforementioned fixation with building fandom up on a base of perpetual hate, instead of love for one’s preferred content. What is enough is going out of one’s way to make fandom miserable for others.

If asked to point out the root cause of all
the above, I’d say it’s an unfortunate combination of the strong emotional investment more typical of nerdy fandoms (and we have historical
examples of this, see the shit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got from his
fanbase, enough that it forced him to reverse course on an authorial
decision) + the divide between curative and transformative sides of
fandom + a fundamental disinclination of particular fans to give
even half a shit if fandom is as good a place to others as it is to
them.

The last part is bolded because it’s the key, I suspect. You can have 1
and 2 and (generally) not end up with someone who is a purist. 3 is
also needed, because constant expressions of negativity and hostility
require that one answer in the negative to the question ‘don’t you care that fans of the New Thing are walking into a fandom that is consistently hostile to them?’
Purists, at a fundamental level, have zero respect for the fans of the
New Thing / New Canon and thus don’t believe that their own
actions should be tempered, for the sake of fandom being enjoyable for all.

This becomes very clear when you see that people who reject constant purist-style negativity justify it precisely out of care for their fellow fans and what sort of fannish environment they’re creating.

Examples:

And:

And:

@freedom-of-fanfic I know this doesn’t directly concern Tumblr Antis, but outside of Tumblr (and even in some parts of Tumblr, before the antis became particularly strident) purists have been a consistent reason for people leaving fandoms entirely and some of their attitudes and actions have served as bluepirints for later fandom derapages (antis).