[Image description: Fanart of a scene from Dimension 20βs Fantasy High: Junior Year episode 14. The Bad Kids and The Rat Grinders square up in the middle of the school cafeteria. Alt text provided and copied under the cut. End ID]
So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????
I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.
Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?
Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.
Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.
wow. really hope this isn’t actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn’t facebook, you don’t need to know people before following them
Everybody acts like each new Game Changer is a new level of betrayal and psychological torture from Sam towards his friends.
Did we forget that the very first game changer was “Sam wheels out a strange machine and asks the contestants embarrassing personal questions, the veracity of their responses is judged by the Machine.
The machine is actually controlled by the contestant’s significant others who have been made accomplices. Forcing their loved ones into revealing shameful truths for internet broadcast.”
And sure, he’s gotten a bit more personalized with these, constructing a variety of torture chambers for Brennan Lee Mulligan specifically, putting Grant O'Brien in various situations and then bringing his mother onto the set. But deception and betrayal were part of Game Changer from the beginning.
So, when I hear people say “I can’t believe Sam WENT THERE” about something all I can do is think to myself
The “the average solesian meets 3 gods in their lifetime” factoid is actually a statistical error. The average solesian meets no gods in their life. Kristen Applebees, who has died so many times that she meets 2 gods per year, is an outlier and should not be counted.
This is the same logic as βbe gay do crimesβ because if something out of your control, like your sexuality, makes you a criminal, then youβre already a criminal, why are you obeying the law? What do you have to gain from it?
We have human rights so we donβt have to fight, steal or kill for the basics. It seems like the people in charge have forgotten how the world used to work.
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.
What’s really killing me is the storyline here. One of the friends is delighted to absolutely eviscerate him, whereas the other one looks pained. And there is a subtle overlay of Thanos’ line, “I’m sorry, Little One.”
While one member of the game revels in the destruction of his opponent, the other regrets it.  But only for a moment. Just as quickly, he begins to smile. Was the regret mocking? Or did his mask slip…. What is their history? What are their bonds? And why is one of them so gleeful to sever them? What brought them to this moment…
If a worker who isn’t the owner says ANYTHING similar to “I’m not really supposed to do this but-” and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.