ITT I will talk a bunch of shit on whatever you direct my attentions to

I am full of piss and vinegar and ready to throw down until such a point as I run out of steam

If i'm displeased with what you serve up for me to textually wail on though I reserve the right to talk shit about you instead

this thread

talk shit about me

do e-cigs or vapes help people stop smoking

b.c i'm trying to convince my university buds to stop smoking b.c i don't want them to die

this thread

An enjoyable social institution that's decaying into degeneracy by a lack of basic fucking courtesy on the part of the people who were Tricked? Reyweld was right on the damn money, that the Tricked don't post after getting Tricked like they've still got some vestige of pride? Lit legit, loudly and smugly proclaiming on Discord or some other channel that you were most definitely not tricked and you should take it upon yourself to complain how asinine the whole thing is in a faux-shaux of indignation at people having Fun, that's the height of Schroedinger's Self-Awareness Levels-Based Comedy right fuckening there.

Also less of a peeve but it's unconscionable to post about being tricked without a textual hat-tipping to explain however you were tricked. It's a collaborative engagement so give some fucking credit when credit's due? You wouldn't even get to be a part of this if someone didn't pull a sick enough stunt to catch you out so the least you could do is memorialise that

hiveworks

====> MSPA

my university for charging me $180 that i don't have just to take one (1) class next semester

b i r d w a t c h i n g

Beans.

talk shit about me

do e-cigs or vapes help people stop smoking

b.c i'm trying to convince my university buds to stop smoking b.c i don't want them to die

Well basic fucking math points to less of a discrete point "yes," and more like a wide spacious continent of "well actually it depends on how many cigs you smoke and how "reusable" the non-consumable components of your vape kit are before they'll require replacement". Upon this vast and hazy landmass, "yes" is the lone city lit up like a cigar tip in a starless night, and as we all know cities are fucking expensive places to live in.

*hoons around yesuburbia's fringes, where a scant few houses still have woods and creeks instead of cookie-cutter neighbors adjoining the back of their property. It's night and you're in the passenger seat and I'm driving with the window down and one hand out doing the wobbly-wavy thing in the slipstream*

Unless your friends are from the 40's they're probably pretty fuckening aware that smoking is bad for their health? The state-of-the-art fuckening science of just how bad it is to line your lungs with ash has enjoyed actual-factual status for years now, so I can only assume the Trump government's going to alternative away the dangers of smoking. Either way, your friends don't give a rat's ass.

Your friends sure as hell don't want to hear the obviously bad thing they do is bad, but they also don't want to hear about there's a good alternative to the bad thing even if you never say the thing is explicitly bad because that's subtext for you!!! The traditional debate technique of providing enough irrefutable reasons against a course of action ain't getting you shit in this case other than a lot of spare time to meet new people you were formerly wasting on these brick walls. Chimneys? This metaphor's going up in smoke lmao

Vaping btw is an easy target of mockery for the precise fuckening reasons it's not some silver bullet for fiscally responsible trachea-tainting: it's middle class as heck and when you're living paycheck to paycheck with essentially-fuckall ability to save money, you don't have the capital to drop on a "cost-saving" alternative with an expensive upfront price.

tl;dr if you want your friends to switch to less-cancerous drag-gening destroy capitalism. It's probably more rewarding and it won't be just your friends that thank you

oh. dang. didn't even realize the drain on their wallets e-cigs would be since we all have to pay for student loans and shit. this was very informative ty

The fact that I can't rate this thread 5 stars twice

hiveworks

Someone roll up an empty cask cuz I'm forecasting a bumper harvest of SOUR GRAPES

So the other day I was doing the perimeter patrol of my Face Book, in the ratty-yet-comforting-by-social-conditioning throes of a metaphor-sweater made of some kind of fiber I'm allergic to for the duration of this zag. The sweater is Seasonal Affective Disorder. There's a pattern knitted in that says "GOOD GOLLY HOW I WISH THIS COUNTRY I'M LIVING IN WAS BETTER ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH SHIT" and I'm finally making my way, downtown, out of winterntia hibernation and my self-imposed exilindolence from the community of ALTs scattered about this beautiful administrative region

Anyway so I'm on Facebook, and I see the group of people who I would dare to say I enjoy the company of most, of the less-limited-than-I-make-myself-believe-group-of people who speak my first language and live within a couple hours' drive from my town. These folks are doing a DnD campaign together and they posted a recording of their session and BOY FUCKING HOWDY WAS I JEALOUS.

My train of thought went a little something like this:

• Awareness this group was doing DnD >upgraded to> actual audio proof that this was a thing people were doing and they were having fun
  
• Why don't I get to spend time with a group like this IRL
  
• Why wasn't I invited to this (select all that apply)
  • It's cuz DnD gets pretty unwieldy in large groups
    
  • It's cuz you live an hour's drive away so organising regular gatherings is harder
    
  • It's cuz you're much less of a factor, emotionally speaking, in these folks' lives than they are in yours
    
  • It's cuz your introversion kills any momentum on relationship-building
    
  • It's cuz you're indifferent on the existence of people until they're needed to serve your need of "avoiding loneliness"
    
  • It's cuz you avoid people because "using" people like that classifies you as a "bad" person and thus someone who should not be interacting with "decent" people like them
    
  • It's media
    
  • It's cuz your anxiety makes you overthink everything, especially social shit
    
• Wow, you know what, fuck these guys, I'm perfectly happy without participating in a scheduled social activity
  
• Wow that's hilarious, cuz last I checked my brain is incapable of happiness???
  
• You're Envious. Denying you want the thing or devaluing the thing is like Envy 101
  
• Oh man I'm so in tune with my emotions. I mean My emotional range is to normal people's what a bass guitar's is' with the top three strings missing but life's all about playing the strings you were dealt amirite?
  
• Alone and envious of other people's fun on a Friday night? God you're pathetic. Go back to step three of this list and add "toxic person these guys have no obligation to be friends with" to the sublist if you haven't already
  
• Go try organise your own shit. Cry angrily when it doesn't work out and blame your friends

And then you wait with all the impatience your apathetic ass can muster for a change in seasons and your eventual moving-out to a country where getting help with the Depression isn't entirely contingent on getting hithero-unattainable help with the Overwhelming Anxiety At The Mere Prospect of Failure/Rejection.


(What, did you think this thread was a Personal Bugbear Grooming service? Well yeah maybe it kind of is but you gotta take a fuckening spin on the Timewastrel Roulette to find out how much of a tangent I go on before actually getting to shittalking you shit of talkchoice)

Anyway I had exactly zero powerfully negative feelings toward Hiveworks so I had to go and do research? It's basically a group of friends repping each other's stuff and using a facade of professionalism to avoid acknowledging the fact they've got personal biases and taste and a dose of nepotism. To which I can totally fuckin relate.

They went done got themselves enough momentum and social capital within the webcomics community that now they're the kind of gig every young webcomic artist is aspiring to. And if they struggle to admit getting accepted is going to involve catering to a site owner's subjective tastes and/or the approval of a shadowy onanistic cabal, well, I'm not exactly in a hypocrisy-free place to blame 'em from y'dig?

tl;dr envy is gross and I say that as a deeply envious and petty person

====> MSPA

I will likely go to my grave wishing I had the courage to ask for an apology from NaS for how being a moderator affected me as a person who interacts with other people

me, your good friend sanzh

txt language

you know what?

me.

(this is a bad suggestion go ahead and ignore it)

my university for charging me $180 that i don't have just to take one (1) class next semester

To fuck with universities and IRL power creep ensuring that inability/lack of access to attend one caps out one's lifetime salary at what is, way too fucking often, barely a living wage. Fuck the society that taught me it was ok to look down on "friends" who "settled" for technical/vocational colleges, even though they were becoming nurses and draftsmen and artists exhibiting in galleries and me, I was cutting classes cuz I couldn't muster the energy to get out of bed and nobody IRL with any kind of stake in my life (myself included) wondered if it could be depression.

Anyway, I was so terrified at the prospect of having to tell my parents I would probably need an extra term if I was gonna finish this degree (changing majors from Genetics to Zoology appealed to me, but I had no room in my projected 3rd year schedule to take the required first year stats course. Speaking of which, why the fuck did I do calculus at high school instead of statistics? Because the latter was "not the math class for smart students." Stupid.) and I had this prescient fucking understanding of how much of a nonstarters my career in biochemistry was going to be. Summer internship? References? Not with these fucking grades!!!!!

So terrified was I at bearing bad news. Inconvenient news. I'm wasting everyone's time, money, and emotional investment in my success as a functional adult news. Were that I, so terrified, would change not only degrees but fucking universities just to get away from my past mistakes.

Anyway I ended up needing an extra term at the new university as well but hey at least it was a summer school term. I took three papers simultaneously and one of them was Marketing 101. And now i've been working four years in a job that doesn'T use this degree! At all!!! It's been rewarding in a lot of ways but please somebody pay me to work with birds/bugs!

I'm fucking relatively blessed in that my student loans were manageable and my country's got the economic clout of a sack of easter-chocolate-but-life-comes-at-you-fast-and-now-it's-bloomy-june coins so I could move to a different country for four years, send back the real $weet$tuff on the tubular swell that is the exchange rate, pay that shit right off and save enough money that I can take some time off to recalibrate my garbage brain when I move home in August this year.

For actual fucking serious though I wish I had been told about/given the opportunity to add a bit of functionality to the modular stacks of shitbricks that is a university degree with its three-to-four-papers-a-semester structure. Let me get certified in horticulture and bird banding as part of my Conservation Ecology degree structure! "Research skills"? "critical thinking"? "experience with Office Suite"? "Presentation skills"? Better have something else under your belt if you want so much as direction to the application page, fucker!

For something that's touted as such an ubiquitous given, a sighful inevitability for the self-respecting Young Person (and god I'm gonna need a whole extra post some day for the Extraordinary Dickery that is the systemic shitting-upon of anything other than the high school>college track), university is the royal court of racketeering. Forty, love, that's how old you'll be when you're done paying this shit off!!!!

I mean, sure, there'll always be options to finance all those stingers and dongles and dongers and stingles that for whatever reason can't be tossed on Passing The Bar Tab Core, but it gives the uncanny fuckening impression they maybe, just maybe, you're gonna be that one that don't give two shits about you after you've handed over your thousand-dollar. Otherwise they might've warned you the costs of having to spend another semester to finish your degree, like a not-asshole would do??? You hear people at Student Services or the like, the kind being paid to help go-gettering students nab a scholarship, you hear them saying just how much of a bummer it is so many scholarships don't get applicants. Fuck's sake just use the money in a counterracket to bring everyone's costs down then! Fuck off this totally works, I took an Economics department (summer school) (first year) paper one time so I know my shit!

my university for charging me $180 that i don't have just to take one (1) class next semester

[snip]

thank you so much for this holy shit

you are now my new favorite forum member

eat THAT, pharmdrugs

so whats the deal with that airplane food

if you're gonna talk shit about someone, make it me, i can handle it 100%

b i r d w a t c h i n g

So

I've got two posts on Tumblr giving me a steady flow of notes right now, and as it so happens they're both about birds. One of them was me slapping a pun on some toys I got out of a capsule machine and is sitting pretty at about 230,000 notes. That's got enough tags/comments to the tune of "new pokemon confirmed" to kindle in me a fiery contempt for people who don't take the time to check if a "joke's" been done yet, to say nothing of the nauseating round it did through a grody web of DDLG/kink/pedophilia apologia blogs. Stop adding kiddie stuff to your sexsthetic, you sick fucks

The other post is my recent craft project to which someone responded:

Never underestimate the power of the birb fandom.

Now, there's a juicy irony to my probably-autistic ass getting such a kick out of being able to place correct names and classifications to each animal I come across, but positively bristling at being lumped into a nebulous nongroup by a total internet stranger. I don't make/collect cool bird-adjacent stuff to appeal to a bunch of fuckerers I've never met; trying to create community out of things you like rather than things you do is screeching miles of facile away from "a good starting point for a genuine human connection"

I'm not saying you're a "fake bird fan" if you reblog a good looking pile of feathers without knowing its scientific name (I'm a judgmental enough jerkoff though that I'll probably be thinking it if you fuck up the common name though), but guess what! We've trained computers to recognise that pictures contain <arbitrary animal>; having a finite list of shit-you-prefer and being able to hit "reblog" on that noise does not make you an interesting human being!!!

Placed back to back with the kink shit it's actually kind of hilarious how mad I am about this, but hey! this thread is my garbage heap and I'll crow about whatever I want from atop my tyre-fire-spire.

Anyway,

birdwatching is a shitty fandom in the more traditional sense of shitty fandoms. The Dudes (not to be confused with "dudes" in the birding parlace, which apparently better-translates to "filthy casuals") attempt to codify a wonderful opportunity for inspiration+education+teamfriendliness into a cock-measuring contest of how many birds you see within a single season/year/lifetime. Of course, "winning" is restricted to the wealthy few who can afford to travel around the world, or who have enough systemic privilege that the prospect of selling all their shit and setting off on an international birdromp seems "fun" instead of "terrifying".

They also do that Archetypal Bad Nerd shit where they try to make their hobby "respected" by way of exclusion. "Birdwatching" is, apparently, not used for "serious" people-who-watch-birds, who should be called "birders" (or "twitchers" if they combine travel with rare-bird-spotting). It's apparently also acceptable to shit on people who show up to a rare bird zone and photograph it, y'know because to hell with the three-billion odd people with an internet connection but no immediate means to show up in some fuckwhere marshland to get a load of that smew. Makes a Manu want to go take selfies with a grebe just for the satisfaction of knowing I'm pissing off some nerds, except I'm honestly as bad as these tossers because if I actually saw a grebe while out and about, I would sit down, hold up the group, and be very ticked off at anyone who won't shut up and let me watch this floating babybus of a waterfowl in well-deserved peace.

Grebes are great. Organised birdwatching- sorry, birding - is essentially Pokemon Go, but aggressively Victorian England with waaaay too much of the shitty social baggage that entails.

Also birders talk about a bird's "jizz" when trying to ID it from a distance from limited characteristics which is, just, great, good job birdnerds

Beans.

I have, as of hitting "quote" on this post, have basically no shit to talk about beans. Lemme get on the world wide google and see what leglume and doom I can muster

Okay.

alright.... (I am seeing a fantastic opportunity for a pun here but it is ridiculously niche even for my go-to history buff friend (who is not buff but does not need to be for me to care about 'em a lot). Hey Sanzh if you're reading this, you're a cool dude and you better be preparing your ass for me to comprehensively roast it)

Ooh

Alright alright alright I think I can steer this pod to my comfort zone

---

So here I fucking was, chillaxing on an island off the coast of this one continent called Asia (dunno if you guys have heard of it), ruminating upon Ye Bean and my western-ass cultural marinade I've been stewing in the last 25 years automatically directing my mind to a pigeonhole fool of fat flat green sons of bitches. Broad beans. Hanging on their vines like the ash at the cigarette tip of a hard-boiled detective; tresses with curls enough to strangle a trellis, ready to pop off the vine like a shady warehouse full of gangsters cutting deals as the c®ops circle outside. Coats the color of old money.

Btw Please for the love of god, if you're gonna boil beans do it hardly, as in, hardly do it. Don't. Do not. There's so many better ways to eat them. Heck eat better beans. Eat peas, they're technically beans. Eat soybeans. There are so many fun things to do with soybeans! They're good as a snack! They're great and more nutritious fermented! You westerners will ferment grain juice and drink that cuz acquiring potable water was beyond your ken for a couple hundred years there and you believed letting sky-fungus shit in your drink was what made it safe?

And, now, thanks to one Henry "Brave-New-World-Style-Praise-The-Ford" Ford, globally we use the bulk of soybean production on more energy-intensive protein????

Protein, I should note, is one of those things that to me seems to sit in the unexpected middle of a venn diagram of "Shit In My Knowlospheres" to the point it feels like a disservice that kids don't get taught this shit?

Proteins are what fuckin, everything, in your body is made up of that isn't calcium'n raw metals'n shit. (And proteins still play an active role in how your body handles those minerals.) They're like Pop beads meets origami; the exact order the amino acids (the beads in this metaphor) are linked up in in a given protein (and thus the physical-chemical limits on how the thing can/will bend) are dictated by the DNA sequence. It's really cool and basically when you're eating protein (from meat or fish or dairy or eggs or seeds) you're breaking those origami-chains back down to individual blocks, then making cool new shit out of those blocks from a bunch of billion-year old instruction manuals your parents gave to you! It's like etsy for your endoplasmic reticulum!!!!

Naturally, proteins and amino acids come from things that were alive at some point and were planning to use that shit before you tore them from their dirt-cradles/slit their throats. That, or they were stockpiling that shit for their offspring in the form of eggs, or weed eggs (also known as seeds, and incidentally-germ(inate)anely beans).

Having spent billions of years evolving to best-provision their offspring, and having not spent billions of years evolving for maximum displaced tree goblin digestibility, beans are chock full of protein but put that shit behind an enthalpic paywall so it's not easily digested without very specific enzymes that everyone assured us early in our evolutionary history (I'm talking the unicellular stages) we weren't going to need later, then they made their own fancy clubhouse by the time we'd specced into multicellular consumer lyfe and shut that door behind us.

(Enzymes btw are just fancy proteins; the pop-bead origami equivalent of making a bottle opener out of moulded plastic, paper, and vigorously stretched analogies)

It turns out we can just trick beans into breaking that protein down for us by patting them on the back and sending them off on the germination process, which is where we get bean sprouts from. Which are delicious and (comparatively) nutritious. I think this is also the justification for activating almonds? Nature is amazing

BUT you know what's also amazing? It's stuff made from soy beans. Soy beans are oily as well as protein-y and we can make soy milk out of them. Then we make tofu out of the soy milk. You can make all these things out of soy beans! If you let the right kinds of fungus in and let 'em party on your mashed beans-and-carbs, you can make All this good stuff too!

So having grown up with Soy For Days in my bicultural household, where miso paste was a more-than-reasonable addition to dad's Sunday roast pan-gravy, I was legitimately kind of pissed to discover in the US you grow most of it to feed to cows. Soyriously? I knew you guys grew a fuckton of corn for a similar purpose but I always associated soy as food, not as "oil plant with a bunch of leftover plantmash we may as well feed to cows". I get how hypocritical my carnivore ass is right now but if it's protein (and a complete protein) you want... guys.... it's right there.........

no nevermind, talk to me about frogs

the concept of Historical Jesus