You Are NOT Fucking Living This Down, Gaud.

shhhhh guys be quiet we need to be quiet or else the bears will hear us. as long as we all keep quiet (everyone liking this post) we will be fine just don't do anything to alert the bears okay?

Spotted Towhees (Pipilo maculatus) look like someone took an American Robin (Turdus migratorius) and tried to make it "edgy."

By Pranav Tadepalli, CC BY-SA 4.0

And they really are edgy little fuckers, too. They'll pull up every single shoot that pokes its head above ground in your garden, and are very clever at getting through barriers. They do not fear humans, not further than you could lightly toss one.

If you find a roadkill or mysteriously-dead towhee in Spring, it's worth its weight in gold, because they are deterred by a corpse of their own species. The next problem is putting it somewhere these ground-feeding birds will notice it, without making it a free snack for the first scavenger that comes along.

Oh, right.

I watched this a couple weeks before I came up with the bit about a triple-A publisher launching a video game that "plays itself for you," because they're that out of touch.

Must have still been kicking around my skull when I watched that Oxbox video about disturbing trends in the video game industry. The cringey XBox reveal in it prompted several pointed, well-reasoned comments, that was the other seed.

GAMES NEED AN EASY MODE.

Or maybe they don't. Today we look into it.

The adhd modes of food

1. You ate that burger so fast. You ate that burger so fucking fast and now the whole Red Robin is staring at you god what the fuck

2. You started eating like a normal person, but then you started talking or daydreaming and now the waitress is handing you the check but you’ve still got half a plate of cold fettuccine

3. You were going to go out to eat, but then you saw a video in your YouTube recommendation that drew you towards it like moth to a flame, and now it’s 10 pm and you’ve got an empty bag of tortilla chips in your hand and shame in your heart

4. Mac And Cheese

This Spring, I reserved a room online, at a Best Western motel, and received a pop-up message that said, "Thank you for submitting."

My apologies for not getting a screenshot.

@glitzbot

Revisiting the drow, playing some more with uncanny bird anatomy.

There are books now that are specifically used as status symbols: people use them to appear to be the person they want others to see them as.

Consumer culture has the distressing effect of enhancing the human tendency to convince oneself that one liked something, for the sake of conformity and peace of mind. People tell themselves that they liked what they were told they should like.

Reviewers often wind up with extreme biases for and against certain types of works, for similar reasons to the above. It's also not too crazy to consider there may be some corruption in the literary review community.

Marketing is now a powerful discipline with cutting-edge psychology behind it. When used by trained professionals instead of incompetent corporate outcasts, it can essentially function as mind control, even for the well-informed.

Also, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

TL; DR: Don't feel bad about hating something everyone else seemed to love. There are many reasons why terrible books can get good reviews. And your own opinion is still a valid opinion, even if it's contradictory.

the sense of horror when you finish a book that was Ass Bad and you go to see what fellow haters are saying but all the reviews say it is the best thing they've ever read. feel like i just saw my reflection in the mirror move all by itself or something

I imagined a dyscalculic child, who isn't getting any help or support in learning math, nobody understands that they just don't get it...

Nobody understands that the child tries to solve math problems by making up stories about the numbers and operational symbols, fascinating, beautiful mythical or fairy-tale stories, and "drawing" the ending of the stories where the solutions should go.

Every math problem is a hypothetical situation involving stock characters, and the child believes they have to parse exactly what the situation is supposed to be, given the limited "shorthand" consisting of numbers and operational symbols and the arithmetical frameworks, and work out what the result would be.

And nobody, or almost nobody, ever gets to hear the stories.

I kind of doubt that Vivaldi's student orchestra at the girls' school was full of incredibly talented instrumentalists, who could toss off his fast bravura passages without a hitch.

I can't help but imagine them as an ordinary school orchestra, most of whom aren't particularly good or talented... and they all dread orchestra practice, because Fra Antoni refuses to either simplify his masterworks for beginner players, or accept the results. Concerts always sound utterly horrible, everyone slogging through music they barely can play, at various tempos that are all less than Vivaldi is beating, and he's always purple and hyperventilating by the end.

Offbeat TTRPG adventure arc:

An adventurer NPC, who is known far and wide as an incorrigible chaos gremlin, has obtained a Ring of Wishing, and nobody in the known world trusts them with it. The players' heroes are just some of many people who are trying to stop this person and get the Ring of Wishing away from them before they blows up the entire world with it.