My favorite is people who send me unsolicited dick pics and then they’re like, “uh, hi? Are you ignoring me?”
It’s just so funny to me. Like one minute I’m designing bioreactors and getting published for heat dissipation in polymers and then I open this godforsaken app to dudes hanging brain who can’t even pronounce “saponification” calling me a slut because I won’t give attention to their limp excuses for existence.
3 billion years of evolution and the greatest form of communication you can conjure up in your fermented omelet of a conscience is submitting your wrinkly ball sac to a stranger on the Internet to substitute the attention your parents never gave their mistake of an offspring.
Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
My violin teacher, the day I started: So we still use horse’s hair for the bow because if 4 centuries we haven’t found anything better
so we have these cookie jars that sit on top of the cupboard right. we’ve had them for years. you can record yourself saying something so when you take the lid off you it will make a noise so you can hear if someone is stealing your cookies or something anyway anyway we have 3 of them. a pig, a cow, and an owl. now i was left alone one day. mum and dad at work, my brother at school and my sister at her boyfriends house. so i had a thought. what if i recorded myself screaming? so i did. in all 3 of them. all 3 different screams too. one was an excited shriek, one was a terrified scream, and one was a long shout. these cookie jars recorded up to 15 seconds, so i took FULL ADVANTAGE of that. now…here’s the thing…i did that almost 3 years ago. and these cookie jars have been sitting on top of the cupboard collecting dust.
until today.
mum’s painting the kitchen, so she had to take everything off the top of the cupboard. and uh…you know how battery powered things…start dying? they……slowly run out of juice? she asked me to check inside one of the jars. the pig, to be exact. and…the pig was the terrified scream. i unsuspectingly opened the jar and as the lid came off the jar, i remembered what i did. but i didn’t remember in time, because in that next second, a fucking demon cry sounded from this Almost Dead Battery Powered Pig Cookie Jar. it was a sound i never want to hear again. everyone ran into the kitchen to see what that god awful sound was and i just stood there, holding this satanic wailing pig. i shut my eyes, and waited the full 15 seconds, until it was silent, before turning to my mum and handed her the pig, and then leaving the kitchen.
i’ll admit i’ve done some dumb things in my life, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the sound i heard today.
Mark the electrician has been here for five minutes and he’s already said “well that’s…weird” twice from the other room and frankly I’m afraid to ask.
It’s not good when skilled tradesman are standing in the middle of your room pinching the bridge if their nose, is it?
Mark just referred to the wiring in our bedroom as “creative” and “interesting”.
This is fine.
And now he’s taking apart the ceiling. I’m not worried, are any of you worried? I’m not, haha, it’s not like this house was previously owned by someone who would do something stupid like try to wire their house themselves…or store tins of varnish under the furnace behind a secret alcove…
Ha ha…
Ha.
Hm.
Fuck.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NO NEUTRAL WIRES??!?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GROUNDED INTO THE SCREWS HOLDING UP THE CEILING LIGHT???!?!!
I want to know more about this house
Ahh, it’s only money …
Seriously, having owned a few 60+ year old homes, it’s never simple to fix anything because even if what was done was ok under the building codes at the time it was installed … it’s probably not any longer. I once bought a house with a “computer bedroom” – I realized when it was inspected pre-purchase it was the only room besides the kitchen (ALL the major appliances in the house – stove, fridge, water heater, washer & drier – lived in the kitchen) where the sockets were properly grounded, so it was the only room the previous owner plugged in his electronics.
Look at it this way – your house hasn’t burned down yet. Now that you KNOW, of course, ya gotta make things safe®.
The Creative House Renovations! I bought a house in Toronto… it had a nicely drywalled basement. EVERY light socket, outlet, switch, EVERYTHING was dry walled in. The flushing mechanism in the toilet tank was held together with a string. The living room was freshly painted white, AROUND the furniture. Oh, the memories!
Steel Phoenix Studios 