2023 costume contest

I'm not going to show all 27 entries in this post, but here were the winners.

People really do seem to like the cute, simple costumes, so Susan "La Shay" won 🥇 with her cactus. My mind immediately goes "but it's just a green sweater, some cut up pipe cleaners, a few fake flowers, and some brown fabric". However, I have to admit it's cute and clever. (Sorry, these images are from my computer screen.)

I got 2nd 🥈 with my Undertaker cosplay. It's extensive and expensive, and I freaking shaved 🪒 my eyebrows off, wore contacts all day, wore long coffin nails 💅 all morning, and kept a dog biscuit in my mouth much of my time out of my workspace to commit to the bit. I'm also wearing not just the cassock and mute robe but the cassock and two layers of mute robes! It was a cold day, but later (in the afternoon, after the parade), I removed some layers, as well as the wig and some accessories, like the nails 💅, lockets (hard to see in the photos here), and hat.

The person taking our photos was none other than Becky T., who lost to me that morning, when the pumpkin contest results were announced. She's not a professional photographer, but sheesh I feel like she used these photos as payback. 😆 Because she took that full-body pic standing on a chair, which makes me look shorter than I already am, and that's the pic she chooses out of the few full-body pics she took... and I actually growled at her 😂 through my dog biscuit when she flipped the rim of my hat up to get a closeup of my face w/ the contacts. My mouth was too occupied for me to explain she shouldn't flip his hat up like that....

3rd 🥉 went to Chris and Virginia, a married couple. Chris is on my Rad Chem team, and Virginia is our boss's boss's secretary. I never saw the movie The Warriors, but looking into it, I can tell they did a good job portraying rival gangsters.

The voting was online, just like with the pumpkins, but for whatever reason, you could vote for up to three costume entries. Some of the people voting for me said they also voted for Chris and Virginia.

The contest took place entirely on the 31st, and we got the results the following day.

We also had a chili cook off that day, and I didn't enter, but I was one of the official judges. We had two votes, as usual, for the chili contest: judges' choice and peer voting. First place 🥇 on both chili ballots went to Anna M., who is a team lead in Organic Chemistry. She also entered the costume contest, wearing an inflatable dinosaur costume, like this one I found online:

There was also an inflatable Pillsbury Dough Boy in the contest. Many of the people who dressed up participated in a parade through several floors of our laboratory, after I fulfilled my duties as a chili judge. I'll have to ask around for footage of the parade.... 🤔 😊

I might later download all the pics from the costume contest to post here... eventually. Oh, yeah! I forgot we got a group pic after the parade! Becky T. is the pickle/cucumber on the far right.

And here's a selfie 🤳 while I was working, wearing my PPE (lab coat🥼, gloves 🧤, and safety glasses 🥽).

sigh

y'know

I get annoyed with customers, just like everybody else, when customers do annoying customer shit

but nothing makes me actively angry at a customer

quite like being a bad scammer

not just a scammer, whatever, rip off the system, long as you don't actually cause harm I don't fucking care

but a bad scammer. a stupid one. one that is so asshattedly inept that I can't help but want to smack you with a rolled-up newspaper until you stop dodging it

So I work for the DMV, and that means I deal with car titles a lot

In my state, the DMV rule is that there is a legal distinction between "AND" and "OR" when it's between names on a car title (if this sounds familiar to you, that's fair; a lot of states do it, just as many don't or do wierd shit)

In my state, if the car is titled under Bob AND Steve, that means both Bob and Steve have to sign that title before they can change who owns it, whether that's to make it solely owned by one of them, or to sell it to somebody else, or whatever

If it's titled under Bob OR Steve, then either Bob or Steve can sign that title and do whatever the hell they want without the need for the other's signature, consent, or even knowledge

I bet you can guess why I'm describing this right now

Steve calls about the title on a vehicle they owned together with their boyfriend, Bob. They broke up! Very sad. And Bob said he renewed the plates on it already. Which is confusing for Steve, because Steve got the renewal notice for the plates

The thing about this is, I looked up the vehicle, because I'm supposed to when getting calls about it, to check its current status and make sure I'm not giving out info to somebody who doesn't have a legal right to it

And Steve is not listed as an owner on the vehicle anymore. Only Bob is.

Can you guess what about this scenario made me really angry

If you guessed "Bob forged Steve's signature to put the vehicle entirely in Bob's possession, even though he could've completely legally signed it with his own name and been fine," congratulations, you now know why I spent 20 minutes making phone calls and fuming that Steve is gonna need a lawyer now

if you're gonna be a shithead to your ex, at least check and see if you even need to commit a fucking crime beforehand, god dammit Bob

“Caught a bus back to Marble Arch and then walked through Hyde Park. There were tens of thousands of people there lying on the grass under the trees - so thick that it was difficult to walk along. As usual several things about them amazed me.  

The first was the scanty attire that the girls here wear. Even to my rather untrained eye a thin cotton frock seemed to be the sole garment of most of them and absolutely no imagination is necessary. However they’re not the least bit self conscious about it and nobody seemed to pay any attention. I imagine they’re very comfortable and I wonder if we’re not just a bit too prudish in North American about such things. After all we all know what’s underneath anyway.”

Twenty-seven year old RCAF Medical Officer in 1942 has more self-awareness and respect for women’s choices than most people in 2023. More at 11. 

i got rickrolled today but it didn't work because i have adblocker installed, so youtube just told me i violated the terms of service. yesterday i was trying to edit a picture as a joke for my girlfriend, and google made me check a box to prove i'm human because i wasn't "searching normally".

it isn't just that capitalism is killing fun and whimsy, it is that any element of entertainment or joy is being fed upon by this mosquito body, one that will suck you dry at any vulnerability.

do you want to meet new friends in your city? download this app, visit our website, sign up for our email list. pay for this class on making a terrarium, on candlemaking, on cooking. it will be 90 dollars a session. you can go to group fitness, but only under our specific gym membership. solve the puzzle, sign up for our puzzle-of-the-month-club. what is a club if not just a paid opportunity - you are all paying for the same thing, which makes you a community.

but you're like me, i know it - you're careful, you try the library meetings and the stuff at the local school and all of that. the problem is that you kind of want really specific opportunities that used to exist. you are so grateful for libraries and the publicly-funded things: they are, however, an exception - and everything they have, they've fought tooth-and-nail to protect. you read a headline about how in many other states, libraries have virtually nothing left.

do you want to meet up with your friends afterwards? gift your friends the discord app. you can choose to go to a cafe (buy a coffee, at least), a bar (money, alcohol) or you can all stay in and catch a movie (streaming) or you can all stay in bed (rent. don't get me started) and scream (noise complaint. ticket at least).

you want to read a new book, but the book has to have 124 buzzwords from tiktok readers that are, like, weirdly horny. you can purchase this audiobook on audible! your podcast isn't on spotify, it's on its own server, pay for a different site. fuck, at least you're supporting artists you like. the art museum just raised their ticket price. once, they had a temporary exhibit that acknowledged that ~85% of their permanent art galleries were from cis white men, and that they had thousands of works by women (even famous women, like frida! georgia o'keefe!) just rotting in their basement. that exhibit lasted for 3 months and then they put everything away again.

walmart proudly supports this strip of land by the street! here are some flowers with wilting leaves. its employees have to pay out-of-pocket for their uniforms. my friend once got fined by the city because she organized a community pick-up of the riverfront, which was technically private property.

no, you cannot afford to take that dance class, neither can i. by the way - i'm a teacher. i'm absolutely not saying "educators shouldn't be paid fairly." i'm saying that when i taught classes, renting a studio went from 20 bucks an hour to 180 in the span of 6 months. no significant changes to the studio were made, except they now list the place as updated and friendly. the heat still doesn't work in the building. i have literally never seen the landlord who ignores my emails. recently they've been renting it out at night as an "unusual nightclub; a once-in-a-lifetime close-knit party." they spent some of those 180 dollars on LEDs and called it renovating. the high heels they invite in have been ruining the marley.

do you want to experience the old internet? do you want to play flash games or get back the temporary joy of club penguin? you can, you just need to pay for it. i have a weird, neurodivergent obsession with occasionally checking in to watch the downfall and NFT-ification of neopets. if i'm honest with you all - i never got into webkins, my family didn't have the money to buy me a pointless elephant. people forget that "being poor" can mean literally "if i buy you that toy, i can't afford rent."

you and i don't have time to make good food, and we don't have the budget for it. we are not gonna be able to host dinner parties, we're not made of money, kid. do you want some kind of 3rd space? a space that isn't home or work or school? you could try being online, but - what places actually exist for you? tiktok counts as social media because you see other people on it, not because they actually talk to you.

there was a local winter tradition of sledding down the hill at my school. kids would use pizza boxes and jackets and whatever worked, howling and laughing. back in september, they made a big announcement that this time, rules were changing, and everyone must pay 10 dollars to participate. when im not scared shitless, i kind of appreciate the environmental irony - it hasn't gone below 40. so much for snow & joyriding.

i saw a bulletin for a local dogwalking group and, nervous about making a good first impression, showed up early. the first guy there grimaced at me. "sorry," he said. "there's a 30-dollar buy-in fee." i thought he was joking. wait. for what? the group doesn't offer anything except friendship and people with whom to walk around the city.

he didn't know the answer. just shrugged at me. "you know," he said. "these days, everything costs money."

no offence but the reason tumblr is “dying” is, well, yes, of course the cursed like/reblog ratio and the change in user behaviour (because of people being used to how instagram and tiktok work) BUT also the lack of weekly shows. i say it with my whole chest, they don't produce captivating and engaging stupid weekly tv shows anymore because streaming killed that so you have spikes of activity here when Something happens in general fandom or up to three days after a new season of whatever drops and then it's a wasteland. this is obviously an old woman yelling at a cloud missing supernatural and the vampire diaries and pretty little liars and all these other shows type of post but honestly give me back weekly tv shows where i have something to watch for 40 minutes almost every day of the week after work so then i can read and reblog it on tumblr give it back for the sake of my sanity

ROMANCE DAWN TRIO

girl who needs to ask for reassurance would rather be stabbed than admit they have needs

GIRL GENDER FUNNY‼️ POST MADE BY MOST FEMININE HE/THEY SHUT UP‼️

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

1920s Baroque Works 🥂

Always wanted to do a movie poster redraw of the Great Gatsby so here they are!!

"content creator" is a corporate word.

we are artists.

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything

I'm such an idiot sometimes. I was so distracted by ch205 and blogging about it that I dumped my samples down the sink instead of splitting them between two sets of centrifuge tubes. I'll have to reprep the whole batch, since the part I dumped out was the barium, which could have been reingrown, if I'd somehow messed up the yttrium instead. 😔

Oh well. I'll drop another batch tomorrow and get some other stuff done, too. I'll reprep this lost batch on Friday.

Today, all I can do now is get weights on the batch I did yesterday, crunch the numbers, do some data entry, etc. before I leave early for a dentist's appointment. This evening I'm seeing Peter Gabriel in concert.

Off to lunch now... and back to ch205.... 🤷🏻‍♀️

yesterday I went to a little meeting at my local queer community center and I was admiring their bookshelves and mentioned that I work at the public library and someone said "well I bet they don't have any [LGBTQ+ books] at our library" and I was like um. yes we do. we have tons of them. half of our employees are queer leftists so they said "oh well I bet they don't in [nearby rural county]" and I was like uh once again yes they absolutely do. gay people live and work there as well

so here's a quick reminder that if you don't think your local library has enough queer centered materials you should actually check before assuming, and if you're not satisfied with their collection you should submit a request for more such books. I don't know what the political landscape of libraries looks like outside the us rn, but within the us no matter where you are, I promise you there are employees at your library fighting for inclusion and intellectual freedom and they can't win without vocal public support

Whoops. No more reading at work (⁠•⁠ ⁠▽⁠ ⁠•⁠;⁠)

There's a version of the "don't go grocery shopping while hungry" rule specifically for writers where you should never under any circumstances be allowed to touch your draft within 3 hours of reading a really good story. Because sometimes when you read something great your head goes "fuck this is so much better than my stuff I should make that more like THIS instead!" Look at me. That's the devil talking and you should close the document NOW.

Little Xallergh and her hags moms