People don't actually grow out of their emo phases. People are forced out of their emo phases by employers who get a raging boner over controlling how their employees dress, cut their hair, whether they mod their bodies and so on

How many beautiful emo men would we have if not for the tyranny of the 9-5. How many strange goth women are trapped inside the performance of a clean girl aesthetic because she needs to be able to eat. How many people are wage slaves when they should be punks?

A lot of people are talking about what you are and aren't allowed to wear but I think that issue is secondary to what you are and aren't allowed to do to your body. Like "you have to wear a polo shirt and dress pants" fine as long as you're paying for the polo shirts and dress pants I now need to buy. Whatever. "You must have natural colored and clean cut hair, no facial piercings, no visible tattoos" now we have a fucking problem because I also have to have that hair face and body outside of the workplace. it's literally pervert shit I've met 24/7 doms less horny about controlling how their subs look.

The word you are looking for is “selfish.” Not narcissist, not sociopath, selfish.

I love the idea of a roomba topography map being the jumping on point for a liminal horror story. House of Leaves II: Roomba.

You assume it's just a software glitch - obviously some weird reflections or something confused the range finder, and the vacuum's mapping algorithm interpreted the data as a whole second room or hallway.

Sometimes the map shows that the vacuum has actually entered the non-existent space and is cleaning there, but obviously that's just the position tracking also screwing up, so it thinks it's somewhere far away and just maps it to the closest place it thinks exists.

The map keeps growing, though, and the vacuum's taking longer and longer to clean the whole house.

Eventually it's frustrating enough that you start setting aside time to watch it do the cleaning, so you can figure out what surface is confusing it and fix the problem.

Somehow the problem never happens when you're watching.

The vacuum seems more beaten up than you remember - scratches and small dents, nothing to stop it from working, but you're not sure where they came from.

Once, you look while it's cleaning and can't find it anywhere. The mobile app says it's cleaning the living room, but it's obviously not there. The app is often wrong, though, and when you hear it trundling around the dining room, which you just checked, you guess you must have just... missed it somehow?

When you empty its bin, there's strange, golden dust in it that you've never seen before.

You install a few cameras. Every time the vacuum malfunctions, it's always when it's behind something or in a dead zone between cameras. Even when you move the cameras. It's a different place every time.

Did you spill ketchup somewhere? There are desiccated flecks of brown and red in the vacuum bin.

You get a Bluetooth tracker - it's supposed to help you find your keys or your wallet if you misplace them - and you glue it to the vacuum.

That night, the vacuum has a new scrape on it, like it ran into something, and the tracker has been knocked off. You can't find it; the tracker app just says it's "out of range or turned off".

You look at your robotic vacuum. It's got more scratches and scrapes even than you remember from a few days ago. You check your camera footage and yeah, it's definitely gotten more beaten up. No footage of it running into anything, though.

One of the dents almost looks like a... bite mark? You must be imagining that.

You sit and think for a long time. You know it's just a machine; you know humans tend to anthropomorphize anything that moves (all the more so because of the googly eyes you attached when you got it), and you don't want to fall into that superstitious fallacy.

It's just a machine.

You look at the dents and cuts on its frame.

You sigh, turn off the cameras, and duct-tape a kitchen knife to the robot.

"Just don't scratch up the sofa." you mutter, feeling silly, and press the "clean now" button.

The startup beep is the same noise as always, and you tell yourself there's no way it could possibly sound 'excited'.

rune food safety pro tip:

you probably want to avoid raw milk right now.

rune food safety pro tip:

many raw milk buyers believe that raw milk suppliers do something to kill off harmful illness-causing contaminants and make the milk safe prior to purchase.

the process of killing off harmful illness-causing contaminants and making milk safe is called pasteurization.

the best time to stop drinking raw milk was 1920. the second best time is right now

And to be clear, raw milk is defined as not pasteurized. If it's raw, it has not been heated to kill germs.

If you've been told that raw milk is safer or healthier, or that regular milk has "dangerous chemicals" that raw milk doesn't, you've been lied to.

The only difference between raw milk and regular milk is that raw milk has not been heated to kill the germs.

Right now (Jan 2025) many dairy cows have a dangerous illness (H5 bird flu) that humans may be able to get from drinking their milk.

So it's extra dangerous right now to drink raw milk, which is defined as milk that has not been heated to kill the germs in it.

America, unlike most countries, doesn't enforce a law making corporations pasteurize their eggs.

It's probably also a good time to avoid undercooked or raw egg dishes (I mean for me it's always a good time to avoid that, because salmonella is also common in chickens and, again, American eggs are NOT usually pasteurized! but you do you)

Those liquid egg whites where you pour the goo from a carton ARE at least sometimes pasteurized, so that may be a solution for a while.

The moment there's a really big egg recall that effectively explains the danger (or whatever triggers mass awareness) I suspect the pasteurized stuff is going to get much harder to find though. Assuming it's not recalled automatically as well for being from the same chicken farms, it'll be the only pasteurized (germs killed) eggs people can get.

I'm convinced Mythbusters needs a reboot. Misinformation or mythinformation if you will, is at an all time high. We NEED the show that promotes critical thinking to come back. It doesn't need the same cast, in fact I think it would be better with some fresh faces. Imagine all the good it would do if you could just show your crazy uncle the Mythbusters reboot episode that debunks his anti-vaxx conspiracy in an easily digestible and entertaining format.

I don’t care how contrived it is. I will always enjoy two characters who don’t like each other somehow getting trapped in the same place, and having to work together to escape, while at the same time growing closer and learning that maybe, the other person isn’t so bad after all.

genuine question what the fuck is this

i press on the button and nothing happens so i can only presume i give a random prrson out there a heart attack

for complete context, this is in our bedroom

Hey gamers guess what

Random thoughts about para!Place n para!Ilse being fucked up by the Paradox Breach

An SCP tale about how the Department of Geology hired a whole entire dragon. Also that dragon is my AA. Look at my geology OCs, boy.

I walked upstairs to find both cats on the couch eating a bag of slowly thawing peas. Life is an adventure.

it is so wild to me the fashions that are called “emo” today. especially given the fact that probably 80-90% of it is actually scene, not emo. this would have started full on wars 15 years ago

whenever people call this

emo it drives me BANANAS. no! this is not how emos did their hair. this was a scene look!!! some people might have gone from emo to scene depending on their age when new trends happened but they’re DISTINCT

this is getting more popular so i want to clarify, the above are obv scene queens and were what all scene kids aspired to HOWEVER. all of this⤵️? absolutely would have been considered scene in the late 00s (all photos from searching “emo” on pinterest)

whereas these are more emo⤵️

you will note that the scene kids wear brighter pops of color, especially neon pink and green. there’s a lot of pop culture references, patterns and texture. miniskirts very popular, the more layered the better. the emo kids are more simple, the black skinny jeans are a staple obv and usually dark hair and a band shirt, maybe some stripes but not anything crazier than that in terms of patterns. maybe a few accessories, but not so many that you hear them coming from a few miles away.

now THESE three are more in the middle. personally, i would categorize the first as scene, and the #1 giveaway there is the domo necklace- a scene icon- and the multitude/stacking of accessories backs it up. the middle is harder- the front of the hair and band shirt suggest emo, but the pink, layering, and the hair bow are decidedly scene. i think you could probably call it either way but i would lean scene. the last one is also hard- the hair highlights and amount of accessories are more scene, but the color scheme, especially the silver and black for the accessories as opposed to patterns, make me lean emo.

(source: i was in middle school in 2008)

extremely important addition from @death-g-reaper:

[screenshotted tags: #a key trait of emo is a certain kind of androgyny it’s why emos were getting hate crimed for being gnc in the 2000s #it sounds silly now but there was a moral panic about the boys shopping in the girls section for pants #my partner was a 2000s emo/goth kid and he says that before the term skinny jeans came out #they just called them girl pants because they were getting them from the girls section #i feel like scene is way more girly than emo is traditionally like you can have girly emo but it’s more scene’s schtick]

very important and true!! a huge huge part of the hate that “emo” got was because instead of the popular skater style/oversized fashion they were opting for tighter clothes and specifically women’s jeans (which, before jean companies realized they could profit off of it and started selling skinny jeans for men, were just from the women’s section) and it was a WHOLE thing. the long styled hair and occasional makeup AND talking about your feelings?? this is why so much of the emo scene was written off by larger culture and even within hardcore/punk culture as, essentially, faggot music, for girls, stupid, etc.

I have former employers who seem to be unable in spite of their best efforts to take me off of certain mailing lists, so sometimes I'll just randomly receive an automated alert from someplace I haven't worked since 2007 informing me that a critical server rack's cooling fan is unresponsive and its CPU temperature is currently 108C, and I'm like, wow, someone should probably do something about that.

its so fucked up how difficult it is to move to another country you shouldn’t need a reason or anything you should be able to show up at the border and be like “the vibes were off back home” and they should let you in

laser tag places are always like “no running, no laying down, no touching, waah waah we can’t afford the liability insurance.” boring. where do i go for the  underground full-contact laser tag where i can tackle people from on top of the crates.

where can i get a melee kill

I’m gonna go with “someplace not in the US.” That’s the country of frivolous lawsuits.

this is your regular reminder that the US is not the country of frivolous lawsuits, and the idea that it is is 90s era conservative propaganda toward capping punitive damages so that malicious actors can get away with bad behavior due to a weak regulatory enforcement regime (the other thing conservatives in the 90s pushed hard). the US long ago made a decision that a lot of regulatory enforcement would come not from agencies proactively enforcing rules but from creating specific causes of action through legislation so that individuals could sue to protect their own rights. fine as far as it goes, and maybe appealing to those with a libertarian streak, but even that was too much for conservatives who oppose any and all regulatory framework regardless of how it was managed.

and it worked–by capping punitive damages under the justification that there were people running around getting rich filing frivolous lawsuits (often by lying about cases of serious harm caused by firms acting in genuinely negligent ways, like in Liebeck v McDonalds), weak regulatory regimes in areas like environmental law and consumer safety were hollowed out further. the real danger of frivolous lawsuits never came from consumers suing over harm they suffered, it always came from people with deep pockets using lawsuits to silence people who challenged them. some states have passed anti-SLAPP legislation to curb such abuses of the legal system, but there’s still no federal anti-SLAPP statute, and there really should be.

Also we totally have those rules in (at least some of the) places outside the US