This Spring, I Reserved A Room Online, At A Best Western Motel, And Received A Pop-up Message That Said,

I'll say it again, it's the way she treated Loona at the party that makes her so hot.

Queen bee

nosferatu? non. VOSferatu. c'est pas mon problème

Having never played Skyrim, I remember running around World of Warcraft in 2012, wondering why one of the most prominent guilds on my server was called Fus Ro Dah.

Context: my roommates were huge Skyrim nerds and played it almost daily in the common area.

This is here because I can't post photos on the local message board. I'm trying to find the owner of these two kittens before the raccoons get them.

the Guardian

US farms are forcing workers to buy inedible, expensive meals: ‘It makes you feel enslaved’

Employers hiring migrant workers through a federal program must provide food or cooking facilities. But many of those picking our fresh food

On an August afternoon, Pablo stared down at a foam plate sloshing with flavorless pinto beans and a particularly bad version of huevos a la Mexicana. The simple, usually delicious scramble of eggs, tomatoes, onions and jalapeños is difficult to mess up. But if anyone can find a way to make it unpalatable, it’s the cook at his labor camp. Soupy eggs are the last thing the 42-year-old from western Mexico wants to eat. But after a 12-hour day harvesting tobacco in the brutal and sometimes deadly summer heat, he must eat – and this was far from the worst meal he’s been given. A few weeks ago, fellow farm workers got sick due to raw and moldy food they were forced to purchase. On days like this, Pablo can’t decide which is worse: that he’s forced to pay $80 a week for this slop, or that everything about what he eats, when he eats and how much he eats is tightly controlled by his employer. Pablo, who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, is one of more than 35,000 migrant workers in North Carolina this year as part of the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program, a guest visa program overseen by the US Department of Labor (DoL). The program enables American employers to hire foreign workers to perform seasonal agricultural work. Employers in the program frequently exploit their migrant employees, and the structure of the program makes easy work of it. Visas are tied to a single employer who must also provide housing, transportation and access to food, creating a crushing power imbalance between American employers and migrant H-2A workers.

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

Note that this does NOT say, "If a person cares about you, they will drop whatever they're doing, RIGHT NOW, and rush to your side for any reason you deem sufficiently important, and if they don't, then they don't care about you at all."

“No matter how busy a person is, if they care, they’ll find time for you.”

— Unknown

@glitzbot

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

Smugfolk: (getting off the ferry) "How are you, this morning?"

Ferry terminal agent: "Cold. Wet."

Smugfolk: (who has already stopped listening) "What?"

I know I'm not the first to Uno-Reverse the whole humans-summoning-demons thing, but what kind of mundane tasks might an otherworldly being need a summoned human to do? What kind of "powers" might a demon gain from a pact with a human? And what might the human demand in return?

Is spitting on one's hand, then shaking hands, the "humonic binding ritual"?

What happens when a demon calls down that which they cannot send back up?

A. Shipwright on Deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/ashpwright

DoodLetMeGO on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ashipwright