I Think The Number One Worst Piece Of Traditional Advice People Give About Being Bullied Is To "stand

if house md were running in 2024 there would be an episode with a patient who identifies as an ‘online content creator’ (cagily) where house agrees to take the case primarily because when he offhandedly refers to her as an onlyfans model both cameron and cuddy get really offended and say it’s a sexist assumption so he doubles down and becomes committed to finding the patient’s onlyfans and proving it. at some point it would be revealed that chase actually is an onlyfans model and started doing it as a stopgap after his dad died and he suddenly got disinherited but he makes so much money off it that now medicine is basically just a hobby. cameron and foreman both disagree with the concept online sex work but it turns out they disagree for different reasons (cameron thinks it’s exploitative and not-feminist, foreman finds it distasteful and thinks people should get ‘real jobs’) and spend most of their scenes together arguing about this while chase gets continually more shifty. they break into the patient’s house and there’s a full ringlight and camera setup which seems to confirm house’s suspicions. while trying to find the patient’s onlyfans house accidentally finds chase’s onlyfans instead and considers publicly embarrassing him about it like he did with wilson’s sex tape but soon realises that most of the staff at the hospital are already subscribed to chase’s onlyfans so makes fun of him for that instead. it then transpires that the reason why the patient is so cagey about being a content creator is that she’s an ASMR artist and all the soap she’s been shaving on camera has irritated her lungs. cuddy is about to make house give her 20 extra hours of clinic duty as recompense but at last minute it’s revealed that the website the patient uses for some of her bonus commissions is, drumroll…onlyfans, because she’s been banned from patreon. how does house know this? wilson is subscribed to her because the soap videos sometimes soothe him to sleep. something by cigarettes after sex plays. roll end credits.

My spicy take on Studio Ghibli movies: Joe Hisaishi's jazzy piano solos are jarringly incongruous to the movies' fantastical tone and vibe, and they're also a little tacky.

Kyana: me and my boys are gonna mess you up

Dani: I rolled a one

Vhas: I rolled a one

VRLA who rolled a seven: Fuck

NGL the idea of being properly seen unlocking one's latent superpowers is a pretty banger concept

Absolutely astonished that while helping a lady today she turned and said, “Your eyes are different colors!”

Reader. My eyes are different colors but it’s so subtle that I’ve had close friends who couldn’t tell the difference. I’ve excitedly told people only to have them clock it and go, “That’s it?”

I’ve had multiple people I’ve known for years see my eyes in sunlight and go, “Oh! Your eyes are green!”

Mom mother still calls me her blue eyed girl.

But here comes this beautiful lady. Who I’d only known for five minutes was just gushing about how cool it was that one of my eyes was greener and the other bluer and how she desperately wanted a dog with heterochromia and how she thought it was super noticeable.

My day is made. I feel like an anime protagonist. I could leap a tall building. I think this unlocked superpowers, probably.

Overheard last summer in the Downtown Tourist Trap:

(1) "He used, in an hour and a half, a whole can of propane."

(2) (while one of the best-known marimba bands on the West Coast is playing in the park) "There's some odd music over there. Do you wanna come?"

Spotted Towhees (Pipilo maculatus) look like someone took an American Robin (Turdus migratorius) and tried to make it "edgy."

By Pranav Tadepalli, CC BY-SA 4.0

And they really are edgy little fuckers, too. They'll pull up every single shoot that pokes its head above ground in your garden, and are very clever at getting through barriers. They do not fear humans, not further than you could lightly toss one.

If you find a roadkill or mysteriously-dead towhee in Spring, it's worth its weight in gold, because they are deterred by a corpse of their own species. The next problem is putting it somewhere these ground-feeding birds will notice it, without making it a free snack for the first scavenger that comes along.

@comicaurora

Hmm. So, then, THX-1138 is a queer story?

Yeah. Yeah, that checks. That prosecutor at the trial is absolutely a rabid foaming queerphobe, the one the judge issues a warning to…

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK none of this would be intentional from George Lucas or anyone else?

I am going to be thinking about this all day.

You know, on the topic of 'can you be meaningfully queer in this game', I'm going to say that the game doesn't have to be a romance-centric game (eg Monsterhearts) to meet that threshold.

I'm going to take a slightly left-field example: Paranoia. In this (black humour dystopia) game, everybody is a clone grown in a vat, and fed a steady diet of mood-altering pills to keep them complient that - among other things - suppresses your libedo, to ensure there won't be non-vat-grown humans, and further the society strongly discourages romance in general.

This isn't the focus of the game, but it still means that the game presents us with a hegemonic standard for sexuality and relationships (they don't happen), and ways to be non-normative, and the decision to do so is meaningful.

An entirely heterosexual couple holding hands in Paranoia is - because their relationship is so non-normative the the game's scope, and will have serious consequences for them - a more queer story than any gay tiefling found families in D&D.

In Paranoia, the decision to engage in a sexual or romantic relationship is a meaningful one, in a way it isn't in D&D.

(You will note that romance is not mechanised in Paranoia, nor is it going to be a common mode of play, but the game does mention 'forbidden romance' as a potential plot hook).

Yeah, the harpy is me IRL at pretty much anything vaguely like a party.

Fortunately for me, some people actually like that kind of thing!

girls night girls night

"...but, hey, I'm pretty happy with this one."

As you should be!

Modern Monsters 9: Lesser Dragon (Dragonet)

The modern world has very little space for giant monsters to roam the land.

If any of the large sapient lizards - the greater elemental dragons, fire and ice drakes, wyverns, wyrms, or any others you can think of - still live today, they certainly don’t venture far from their inhospitable hiding places. Human settlements have encroached too far into the wild edges of the lands. Even the skies and seas are not entirely untouched.

However, just as the more widely-known living fossils like coelacanths and tuataras continue to survive, if one knows where to look, there still remain small populations of dragonets scattered across the globe. They have adapted through necessity to living on the quieter edges where human influence, though undeniably present, begins to fade into wilderness.

Like their larger relatives, these small creatures are sapient and have some influence over the elements. However, these lesser dragons branched off quite some time ago from their more powerful and more intelligent giant cousins. Even the most unusually large dragonets are no bigger than a small domestic cat.

Consequently, their abilities don’t quite match up to dragons of medieval lore.

Dragonets have a level of intelligence roughly equivalent to a young human child.

They understand human languages well but may struggle to articulate themselves fully, given that inter-dragonet communication uses an intricate combination of scents, pheromones, scale colour changes, and elemental flares such as barely detectable atmospheric pressure changes alongside any vocalisations. As a result, they only have so much patience left for polishing up their grammar.

It’s really anyone’s guess whether it’s the brain equivalence to a small child or the genetic link to greater dragons that makes them so temperamental and so keen to hoard shiny things for themselves.

The different populations of dragonets have started diverging into subspecies at this point, with different types showing different elemental affinities.

The pictured specimen’s tendency to leave trails of frost lacing from its path may seem to imply that this type throw ice magic out into their environment, maybe because they love the cold. The fact of the matter is, the opposite is true - they just like to keep warm, and their bodies absorb heat from around them to such an extreme degree that they drop the temperature of everything around them. They are far less snappy and more energetic in the summer when their bodies don’t have to work so hard to maintain their preferred high core temperature.

More than one shrewd hedgewitch has picked up on this, over the years.

The promise of a warm fireside for the winter, along with all the cat food pouches they can eat, has been quite effective in convincing frost dragonets to form a partnership of sorts.

They still need to be treated with respect, and they must have free access to the outdoors, of course; draconians of any size cannot tolerate captivity. However, they can bond with the right sort of humans, and those that do so quickly learn that they rather enjoy a ride in a shirt pocket or on a shoulder when offered.

It is also well-known among such favoured witches that dragonets are surprisingly good with their children, particularly their little girls.

A lesser dragon is still a dragon, after all.

And dragons do so love a princess.

~~~

This time around the picture came first. I just really love dragons, and wanted to dream up a way a pocket-sized one could exist. Once I saw its face, I knew I wasn’t going terribly verbose on the poem this time.

It doesn’t often talk to humans, but it’s trying its best.

I’ve also seen “dragonet” sometimes used to refer to baby dragons, so let me be absolutely clear that yes, I’m using that here as a separate species name, and this is a full-grown adult one ready to fight you for that shiny bottle cap.

I love bearded dragons, so I went straight to that as my baseline for the picture. Which I dedicated far too much time to, as usual, but hey, I’m pretty happy with this one.

~~~

Modern Monsters series

Modern Monsters 1: Dullahan

Modern Monsters 2: Kelpie

Modern Monsters 3: Kuchisake-onna

Modern Monsters 4: Cuca

Modern Monsters 5: Vampire

Modern Monsters 6: Dr Frankenstein

Modern Monsters 7: Frankenstein’s Monster

Modern Monsters bonus: Frankenstein, Monster (it’ll come some day I swear)

Modern Monsters 8: The Scissorman

Modern Monsters 9: Lesser Dragon (Dragonet)