existingtm - Tumblr blog

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RE Gabe being kickass

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remember when u were like 11 and the only thing u wanted was a lava lamp

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Resident Evil 7 Biohazard whatever is an amazing portrait of the impact of methamphetamine in the rural US. Everything from the textures to the design of the environment to the story itself.

I guess, as an American, I should be used to living in a media panopticon where everyone knows how we talk and what our houses look like, but the Baker estate is not like a movie set or an influencer's home. There's real clutter, the kind that accumulates when you haven't moved cross-country in over ten years and your kids have grown up: kennels for cats who've lived and died, tool boxes, riding mowers, plastic bags full of plastic bags, pool toys. The age of the house shows, not just in the dated wallpaper and cupboards, but in the glimpses we get through the crumbling walls of construction techniques that have been obsolete for eighty years. The pegboard as wallboard. The cludged-together, homeowner-grade repairs of railings and staircases. The immersion is total. This could be any rural home I've ever visited whose owners lost the battle against entropy.

Houses on cheap land can get big. Real big. The Bakers appear to have inherited a plantation house, but there's a lot more on the property. It's perfectly normal to build a mother-in-law apartment and park a trailer in your backyard when you've got the land. Code inspector? What code inspector? You don't need no stinkin' permits. You're not gonna sell, and if you do, the buyer can figure out what they want to do with your wobbly deck.

You own the house and you've got no neighbors to complain about their property values. If you've got money, you trick out your garage. Get a lift. Get a hoist. Fuck it, dig an oil pit. You can do it! That's your man shed. Build some racks out of hog panel and hang all your tools in some haphazard arrangement that makes sense only to you. You've got to be your own mechanic if you want to keep your vehicles running.

Then there's the Baker family themselves. They were nice. Normal. Probably voted for Trump, but so did everyone they know. Of course they'd take pity on a nice white woman and a little girl begging for shelter, they're not animals. Jack was ex-military and pushy; Marguerite was socialized to stand by him whether or not he treated her well; Lucas was an amoral genius who couldn't make it in the real world; Zoe was at least prepared to fly the nest but either she'd tried and had to retreat, or she hadn't quite gotten up the nerve.

By the time we meet them, Jack and Marguerite are caricatures of themselves. Violent, paranoid, impulsive, irrational, moody. They can barely even function. Marguerite's kitchen is swarming with cockroaches and flies, and Jack's outbursts destroy the furniture and walls of the home that he was once proud of. The areas where Jack and Marguerite live are heaped with garbage bags, dimly lit, and filthy.

Every time we meet Lucas, he's wired as hell. Lucas seems hyperfunctional, constructing his elaborate traps and escape rooms, except he can't make the details come together. He lines the walls of his areas with white plastic sheeting, but the mold creeps through the seams anyway. He doesn't bother to change the codes on his padlocks. He toys with Ethan and banks on Ethan being too dumb to shove a bomb through a conveniently placed hole in the wall.

Zoe can still be reasoned with, but we see her fears in her diary. We see the tinfoil taped over her window to block the light.

Lucas, Jack, and Marguerite exhibit behavioral changes consistent with early, chronic, and long-term methamphetamine abuse. Their house bears the same marks of frenetic remodeling, ambitious yet ill-conceived design choices, repetitive behaviors, and neglect that scar so many homes occupied by meth addicts.

Meth is like other drugs in that it rewires the brain to promote drug-seeking behavior, but it also over time causes the brain to atrophy. Signs resembling dementia or schizophrenia eventually occur, accompanied by cognitive decline, and much of this is permanent. It becomes harder for the user to fight back against their dependency (against Eveline) the longer they use the drug (the deeper Eveline's mold works into their bodies).

This is an American horror story, it's a familiar American horror story, and it's a love letter to our country from Japan that seems to me to say, "We're so sorry about what you're going through. Here, shoot some mold-monsters about it."

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"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

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Night and Day by Dominik Mayer

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reblog for sample size !!

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Radioactive exit

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RIP i lockpicked my chastity cage again so this time instead she's installing two lil guards next to my penis and one of them can only tell lies

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some of my favorite replies to this tweet. happy lesbian visibility week!

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this is a way better model... you'll still get transphobic & intersexist drs of course but i prefer this to male / female or even having separate questions for gender & sex.

[we can't see the full form, but i'd suggest having a "something else" option and dominant hormone question too.]

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i told my friend’s dad that he was hot (it was in context with the conversation, he was complaining that he was feeling old, etc), and he said a very genuine thank you and the conversation moved on to other topic, my friend was now talking about something else entirely when his dad goes

“i think if i were born in your generation i might have been bisexual”

and friend got kinda mad at me lmao

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Had a 'fun' new experience today in the form of my first ever mammogram because I found a lump on my chest a few weeks ago, and when you find a lump, you get that shit checked out.

Ironically, the lump I went to get investigated turned out to be nothing, likely just a cyst that made its way to the surface, but they did find something else on the scan that requires me to do a follow-up ultrasound in six months. The doctor stressed that it is most likely a fibroid, but given my family history of breast cancer and general weird health fuckery, they're being vigilant and keeping an eye on it.

The mammogram itself was fine. The technician doing it kept complimenting me on the "pliable" nature of my breast tissue and how easy it was to smoosh me into the machine. I was like thanks, I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome; my body is basically made of only slightly more reinforced laffy taffy.

She said, "That explains that," and then proceeded to smush my tits into a pancake. Apparently, they were the most compliant tits she's worked with. I said thank you because what else can you do in that situation. And then she asked me if I wanted to know how much they weighed, and I said boy, do I?!

So she started reading off the results and was like, "17.7 lbs," and I was like, gosh, no wonder they feel so heavy, and then she kept talking and said, "And the other one weighs..."

And that's when I realized she didn't mean total.

She meant one boob was 17.7lbs.

So in case you've ever wanted to know, my right boob weighs 17.7 lbs, and my left one weighs 17.3 lbs, bringing the grand weight hanging off my chest to an even 35 lbs.

The tech was like "gosh! That's a lot for someone of your size!" and I was like "ya fucking think?!"

For a frame of reference, I weigh 136 lbs total. One-quarter of my weight is tits.

I am one-quarter titty.

And I'm telling that to the next doctor who suggests I lose weight.

Anyway. Remember to do regular breast exams, and don't be afraid of mammograms. Yes, they're checking for cancer, but they also tell you fun things like how much your chest weighs and whether or not your boobs are compliant.