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maamlet:

gimmickbird:

gunsandfireandshit:

thepleasuregoblin:

thepleasuregoblin:

thepleasuregoblin:

Week after week I become more tempted to try the white gilgamesh

TWO THIRDS BEER AND ONE THIRD MILK

FROM A GOAT OR OF ITS ILK

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Ok getting people asking for a review in the notes so here we go.

FLAVOR: Actually not bad at all. I used a wheat beer as sort of the closest modern approximation to sumerian beer, and mixed it 2/3 to 1/3 with goat milk. The flavors complemented each other well.

TEXTURE: Unusual, but not necessarily unpleasant. Creamy yet lightly carbonated from the beer. Definitely gonna bother some people.

AFTEREFFECTS: Sat in my stomach like a rock, and the alcohol hit me like I had had 3 beers instead of one. It does in fact make you feel you’re made of wood

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@maamlet

you are opening gates that were not meant to be opened

caustic-apologist:

ot3:

ot3:

pulled over to give a homeless guy some cash on the side of the road today and he pointed to my bigfoot air freshener and asked if i believed in ‘that guy’ and no, i don’t, i have the air freshener because my last car before this one (the pt cruiser) belonged to a woman named tracy who loved bigfoot and had a whole collection of bigfoot stuff including the air freshener and she died of cancer which is why her husband was selling me her car and i figured, hey, might as well keep the air freshener in her honor. and then when i had to junk the last car i couldnt bring myself to get rid of it. so now it’s just hanging off my rear view mirror again. which is probably a worse reason to have an air freshener than believing in bigfoot.

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This is the meanest shit you’ve ever said to me Bob

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milk5:

Twinks Be High Key Delusional For Thinking They Will Get Off Easy When The Neo Sultan Comes Around To Revive The Old Empire 😂😂 They Thinking They Will Be A Palace Concubine Being Spoiled And Shit 😂😂😂😂 Bitch Please!!! You Gonna Be A Janissary!!!!!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

weaselle:

spiribia:

Dandelions have a symbiotic relationship with little kids who make wishes

this is… not entirely false, actually 

remind me to tell you about “the phantom empire” someday

bourtange:

none of you chumps reminded me but here we go anyway nearly a decade later. the phantom empire is a film serial from 1935 (a film serial is basically kind of like a tv show with weekly episodes but they released it in a movie theater before the main feature) with gene autry in his first starring role. gene autry was a popular country singer in the 1930s, and this role is what cemented him as cinema’s “singing cowboy”. he plays a version of himself as the owner of the “radio ranch”, which he runs as a dude ranch but is also where he sings for his radio show. for reasons i don’t remember, if he ever misses a single episode of the radio show he will lose the ranch. enter the badguys, who try to make this happen so they can get control of the ranch, which they want because it’s built above a giant deposit of radium, which they want to get rich off of. what they don’t know is that underneath the radium is a secret, super-advanced civilization that has flourished underground for 10,000 years. there’s also some teen sidekicks and a bunch of side business i don’t remember because it was close to 20 years ago that i watched it. anyway my main point is that

  1. movies have always been made as a product and the final quality of that product is irrelevant to the money people behind the scenes 95% of the time as long as they’re able to get theater owners to buy them, so given that framework i prefer movies that are stupid and bonkers because they were just churning out whatever they could as cheaply and quickly as possible in order to have something to sell, rather than bloated expensive horseshit that somehow costs $250 billion despite looking like dogshit and is all just the same dumb focus-tested superhero crap over and over and over again; and
  2. the robots in the underground civilization have hat brims built into their heads:
robots with hat brims built into their heads

supreme-leader-stoat:

“This story is a tragedy because it didn’t have to end this way.”

vs

“This story is a tragedy because it was always going to end this way.”

sanctuary-angel:

sagechanoafterdark:

astraltrickster:

aspex-t:

zachsanomaiy:

i-wear-the-cheese:

demigodsavvy:

“Your art isn’t valued by the number of notes you get” okay but. If you spent 6 hours baking a cake for a party, but no one at the party eats your cake, it’s still disappointing.

This articulates something about the different between value and validation that I didn’t previously register on a conscious level.

This is why I tell people I feel more like an entertainer than an artist.

I want to hear them laugh, chat, comment, speak, roar, cry, get irrationally angry, I need people to respond to my art and get inspired and need more.

I don’t want a note, I want a response.

Responses are very nice. I like reading over them. They make me feel fuzzy. Of course, likes and reblogs are also very appreciated, but responses make me feel a special kinda fuzzy.

That’s the thing about the “oh, create for yourself, don’t worry about other people!” attitude (that almost exclusively comes from non-artists and people who have tons of followers and routinely get tons of validation for SOME reason) that doesn’t quite work. I guarantee you, most of us already ARE creating for ourselves above all-

But we POST our creations for human connection, and that’s not a bad thing.

I’m not sure when we all got to the point where wanting validation for something you worked hard at is seen as a bad thing. That you’re pathetic for wanting.

If you think that way it’s not only toxic as hell it’s killing creators.

Creating isn’t easy. When there’s nobody to look at your work and say, “You did a good job. This was hard.” The drive and ambition disappears, then so does the work.

Give your content creators value.

Reblog content.

So much this!

pillsburysoyboy:

pillsburysoyboy:

basic-bamboo:

sassysnowperson:

mikkeneko:

pillsburysoyboy:

pillsburysoyboy:

pillsburysoyboy:

The more I read into reports about industrial and transportation accidents the less I feel like “operator error” actually exists

Ok so “doesn’t exist” may be a slight overstatement. A better way of phrasing it might be “operator error is often used as a way of warding off close examination of how systems fail.”

You read about airlines accidents attributed to pilot error, and almost universally you find overworked, overtired people who have to deal with inadequate training, and poorly maintained equipment. Often investigations uncover a pattern of management ignoring problems that pilots regularly have to deal with. Out-of-date terrain data, false sensor readings, confusing systems presentation, fatigue.

The cargo airline industry fights to keep its pilots exempt from crew rest requirements and a fatigued crew crashes a mile short of the runway. Only the two crew on board die, so really it’s no big deal, right?

Amtrak builds a new bypass to cut 10 minutes off the travel time from Portland to Seattle but doesn’t give the engineers enough training to prepare them for it, nor installs adequate signage to warn of a 30mph curve, so on the inaugural run the engineer hits the curve at 80 mph.

Construction on a nuclear power plant runs into trouble and so to make a key pressure-bearing component fit, they install an S-bend around a pipe, which causes falsely water level readings. Operators open a valve to reduce what they think is excessively high pressure in the reactor and it melts down.

And all of these get simplified, either initially, or in perpetuity, as operator error. Because operators are cheap and easy to replace. Firing someone and laying the blame on them is cheaper than reassessing and restructuring a management culture built on passing the buck.

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This is an extremely valuable addition thank you selky ❤️

was just pondering the other day how the push for accountability in business has largely just resulted in the generation of a class of employees whose job role is largely “take the fall for if we’re caught doing something awful”

If you want to get delightfully angry about this exact thing, I suggest reading There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer (ty to @wafflelate for pointing me at this book!). It pokes at who the structures and systems of the world actually benefit, and what it means when we dismiss those issues with “it was an accident”.

I also recommend the podcast “Well There’s Your Problem” (which I discovered here on Tumblr), which is a podcast about engineering disasters. I’m only 14 episodes in, but it’s a healthy mix between ‘the problem was caused by the person who wanted to build this thing deciding to go with the cheapest possible contractor and materials etc’ and 'this could have been prevented if the crew had been allowed to rest or had been properly trained’ and sometimes both

I believe @aliceavizandum is here on Tumblr, she is one of the hosts. Don’t know about the other two

You all just lost reblog privileges.

Alright so, instead of locking this post down and telling you all to go to hell, I have convinced myself to instead assemble a list of actual books for you guys to read on these matters instead of listening to a couple of DSA dilettantes go on about poop planes.

I have read most of these. I have noted where I have not read them, but they are highly recommended by authors of the other books. I have not linked to any stores because I know that somebody will yell at me no matter which store I link to.

James Mahaffey’s Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters, From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima is a series of very detailed but still easily-digestible vignettes about various nuclear accidents, as well as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He is openly pro-nuclear and also very strongly pro-regulation.

The Flight 981 Disaster: Tragedy, Treachery, and the Pursuit of Truth, by Samme Chitum covers two airline accidents (technically, one incident, and one accident, but that’s getting into the weeds) involving the same root cause: the cargo door latch on the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 jetliner. It is a fascinating case study in exactly how far a corporation will go to cover their ass, even when fixing the problem would be far, far cheaper. If you’re short on time, the documentary program Mayday (known by a slew of names including Air Crash Investigation and Air Disasters) did an episode on these flights, which you can watch legally, for free, on YouTube.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, wrote a righteously compelling book on nuclear weapons design and safety called Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, that I will gladly talk your ear off about any day of the week. It goes into exhaustive detail about how the US Air Force really kinda didn’t care about the possibility of a nuclear weapon detonating by accident and how a bunch of engineers spent decades trying to prove to them that it was a serious threat. It also indicts the top-down organizational structure that dictates that people at the bottom follow exact orders from the top, even when those orders are dangerous or nonsensical.

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, by Allan J. McDonald and James R. Hansen, is McDonald’s first-person account of the Challenger disaster. McDonald was the director of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project for Morton-Thiokol, the manufacturer of the SRBs, as well as the Morton-Thiokol representitive at the launch of STS-51-L. McDonald refused to sign off on the launch, but was overruled when NASA went over his head. He later testified before the Rogers Commission and was demoted by Thiokol for embarassing them, a demotion which was later reversed after intense congressional pressure. This book is, as far as I am aware, the only book on the Challenger disaster that was written by someone who was involved in the Space Shuttle program and the investigation into that disaster.

My final recommendation is one that I have not, personally, read yet, (it is on my list, I promise) but which is cited by several of the above books. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, by Charles Perrow, is about how complex, integrated systems, like nuclear power plants and space launch systems, have so many moving parts and interactions that there can be no one root cause of any accident. It also argues that the main issue in any accident is a systemic one.

Anyway, thank you for reblogging this post so much and please stop recommending me Joe-Bob and Bob-Joe’s 'y'all done fucked up’ podcast. Don’t make me regret this.