ithalpherix

[ithalpherix]

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

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the years have made me weird and strange to talk to. but still i must post

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"Lan Zhan. We've only just reunited after all this time. Confronting me with so many questions is not proper."

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Jaguars swimming

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another frog for the frog website 🐸

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The Southwest and its wild horses 🐴 🖤🥲

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Every once in a while I think about how the Swiss have the cachet of “good chocolate” and Italy and France have the “good coffee” and well I don’t even really have the energy to get mad about it anymore

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danger approaches 🚨

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A Blacksmith’s Dream

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Salman Toor, Three Friends in a Cab, 16 x 20 inches, 2021

[ithalpherix]

I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

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Hannibal + touching Will’s face

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Weird when you first start paying attention to animal noises and realize they don't actually sound like the words we use

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Service dogs are one of those things that you don't spend a lot of time thinking about until you need one. Unfortunately, Big Dog doesn't believe that "really messy house" is a sufficient reason to pry one of their Labrador retrievers loose from their puppy grasp and train one up for me. I don't even need the dog to carry anything heavy, like axles. Just find where the hell I put the socket wrench I just had in my hand five seconds ago. Could even train a chihuahua to do it.

Hey. I could train a chihuahua to do it. Dogs aren't all that complicated, I thought. I've seen Homeward Bound like, thirty times. All they want is love, attention, and a job to do. Finding a couple dogs and getting them all juiced up to go locate whatever awful things in my filthy warren of a house my whims demand sounded like a great way to spend a weekend.

When I went outside, you wouldn't believe the luck I had. There were some dogs in my trash! That means that nobody owns them, according to my attorney friend, who currently can't be named because he tried out this wacky new legal theory and ended up accidentally deleting his identity from existence. He's physically fine, don't worry about him, but his driver's license doesn't have a name on it anymore and you wouldn't believe how angry that makes the cops. The point I'm trying to get at is: hey, free dogs.

These dogs didn't even really need to be trained, except to direct their enthusiasm. Yelling, pointing, a little spray bottle action, and I had this training thing down pat. Imagine my surprise when I came home from work and found that all my shiny things had been piled together in a corner of the garage. Makes it way easier to figure out what still needs to go in the parts cleaner!

We had a great time, me and my dogs, until someone from Animal Control came by and started hassling me about hiding "raccoons" in my "condemned house." I sicced them on him, of course, because that's what you do with dogs. You can't get between a regular old working class joe like me, and his oddly-striped collection of constantly hissing dogs that keep trying to clean up the kitchen in the hope that some discarded food is lying underneath the pile of moped parts and old magazines. Food-motivated is good, according to the disembodied voice that speaks to me whenever I go on the Google these days. Makes 'em a lot easier to train.