Any conspiracy theory about people going missing in National Parks is automatically silly to me. Like "Why are National Parks such a hotbed of disappearances???" because they're full of idiots. You've got thousands of people who've never pissed outdoors in their life wandering around the woods/desert/mountain with zero experience and zero gear and zero understanding that this place can kill them. You don't see as many disappearances in wild areas because people don't go to them unless they have some background knowledge. Whereas you get tour buses full of old folks and suburban families shuttling people into National Parks 365 days a year. If you took the same amount of buffoons and dropped them in the actual wilderness the disappearances would be significantly higher than at the parks. Use your brain.

Some fun stuff from the notes:

• park ranger who has seen people spread bacon grease on their campsite in the hopes of seeing a bear
• British person who is appalled that North American national parks kill people
• people who lure bison calves away from their mothers to photograph them
• a lot of it involves bison
• a LOT of it involves people trying to swim in the yellowstone thermal vents
• woman who tried to retrieve her dropped cell phone from a pit toilet and FELL IN
• Lots of people reminding me that caves are a problem too. I know, I just try to forget that caves exist because I hate them.
• Guys who tried to hike the entire length of Florida in flip flops
• Someone who approached a bear cub because they thought it was a raccoon
• Someone who works at an unspecified national monument and says dead bodies keep turning up at the picnic area (Hello???)
• A few Alaskans laughing at everyone
• Scottish person who wishes their parks were as effective at killing tourists as ours are
• A few NPS staffmembers saying the NPS is far, far too incompetent to wage any sort of large scale conspiracy about disappearances
• Several death threats against David Paulides
• People accusing me of being Bigfoot (I plead the fifth)
• A group who got on a raft in a river assuming it would loop back around... like at a waterpark
• Person recalling a time they saw a hiker "saved by monkeys" but did not elaborate on that
• BISON

I met a girl last semester who volunteered at a national park for several years and she told a story of the time a facility that rehabilitates bear cubs had a lady pull up with a Black Bear in the back seat of her car because she had hit the bear with her car and drove an hour to the rehab facility with the bear in the car with her. They had to make a post that was like "PLEASE DO NOT BRING BEARS TO US. BEARS WILL KILL YOU"

Monopoly-power has given supermarket chains too much power to increase food prices.

Monopoly-power had given corporations too much power to raise food prices.

#greedflation

an interesting take on this from matt braly, creator of amphibia

Imagine being a business that has managed to get THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF CUSTOMERS IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE, and you've managed to make it so this is a bad thing.

You did it. That's late stage capitalism in one sentence.

things im scared will climb through my window at night: clowns, nosferatus, the river strid,

People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

This is madness.

Thank you for this good PSA because I’m still seeing sincere, published, professional writers doing “ahhhhh oh no this monster was SO UGLY i’m mentally ill now!”

forms of eldritch horror include but are not limited to

- nobody will ever believe you, you must live alone with this knowledge

- you will never feel safe again, and you realize you were never safe before

- everything that was familiar is now strange and abhorrent to the point anything that now seems normal should be held in utmost suspicion

- having this new knowledge has opened doors that will continually reveal new equally cursed knowledge without end

- death and madness are no longer escapes

I’ve always felt that the idea of madness or sanity in an eldritch horror sense were misnomers. If anything, I feel a better term is a change of perspective. There is nothing inherent in seeing a greater being that “drives you insane”, it’s that this being doesn’t fit into your previous worldview at all and you have to wrestle that. Every character can and should react differently, changing in ways that “make sense” for them. It’s either a change in worldview or attempting to fit the greater being into your preexisting one. Both will have negative results, but will be interesting as hell to explore.

You know what? Unironically, I think this is the best comment I’ve seen on this post.

I just found out the offspring of a goat and sheep is called a GEEP and they’re the cutest lil shits ever I want 200 of them

A baby

VS an adult

Coool as fuck they have two sets of horns

Goats are associated with Satan and lambs are associated with God.

We have created the official half demon/angel and I’m very pleased

purgoatory

@dalekaiken

still losing my shit over that AI post that was like “i don’t wanna do the work of making art because im so tired and i cannot”

Like bitch do you not think people painstakingly making their own art are not tired ???

Sorry for the eternal human condition of Being Fucking Tired but unfortunately that’s not a reason to rip off other creators with your button press plagiarism machine HUN

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

My grandfather, who is 100, remembers his dad’s accountant doing math on an abacus. Now he texts me “<3” on his flip phone.

hello everyone, hope you enjoy this lab mouse adaptation of Frankenstein; I am completely exhausted

… i saw this without the caption at first and i thought it was a lab mouse desperately trying to fix his friend who had been sacrificed

The implications of “what if Frankenstein, but mouse” are vast and deserve careful follow-up and contemplation.

@kriber

#for real though#what if we were both experimented on and we were nothing but test subjects and you were the only light in my life and I in yours#what if we saw each other through it all#what if we didn’t get to be people what if we didn’t get to determine our own fates what if we were cut into again and again#what if you died and I didn’t – a failed experiment and a successful one – what if you died and the world didn’t end#what if I said no. no. this will not stand.#what if I took all that had been done to us and I did it to others ruthlessly and without hesitation#for the slightest chance I could have you back#what if I treated them like disposable things – like we have always been treated – what if I said they don’t matter#only you do#in exactly the same way you and I have never mattered#what if I refused to let death part us#what if I pieced you back together with the flesh of our kindred and it worked and you lived#what if you were my creature and I was the monster that made you#what if you were my friend and I lost you and I got you back and I lost myself#what if I loved you to the point of atrocity#what if I pulled on the thread holding your body together and did not weep and did not know if the love was enough

#and we were both mice

tags via @aethersea because holy shit