For the record when I played Vampire I was a Gangrel. A 28 year old night shift vet on a wilderness reservation in eastern Oregon (this is before I knew what eastern Oregon was) trying to rehabilitate the wolf population.
One evening she woke up and all the wolves were dead, ripped apart, and she instinctively feared the sun. Her sire found her, educated her, told her that werewolves had attacked.
He was lying.
I didn’t have a GM who could deliver on that, unfortch.
The way those aircraft carrier H&R Block commercials compare your tax bill to military expenditures in a way that affirms both American majesty and your resentment is brilliant.
I’ve basically had some sort of lesbian magnetism ever since I was peers with people who were old enough to have sexual identities - Meg Semisch in 6th grade when I had to walk up to the middle school to take Algebra I. I’ve mentioned before that in elementary school I identified as female for a bit and maybe there’s some sort of vibe from that, but even after that I remember calling myself a lesbian after that - jokingly, references to the Island of Lesbos, but now that I think of it “jokingly” in a way that didn’t really have any humor payoff and that’s kind of interesting.
Part of it’s just a genderbent version of the stereotypical fag/hag dyad - I can come with relationship issues and get advice from the position of “as someone romanced as a woman, let me explain some dynamics that might not be obvious/as someone who romances women, let me commiserate with you that bitches are crazy”. But even sitting at a bar next to some lesbian stranger, chances are decent that within an hour we’ll be buying each other shots and laughing our asses off.
I’ve actually gotten more cautious about that in the last few years, after a few times when I’ve opened up significantly in the expectation that sex was safely off the table and then had that rug pulled out. Which was itself interesting! To have, as a straight guy, that experience of “Oh I thought when you said ‘watch a movie’ you really meant watch a movie, but now I’m drunk at your house with no way of getting home and you’re running your hand up my thigh.” I think part of what really threw me about it was just the lack of a script to deal with. If a girl flirts with me in front of her guy, depending on whether he looks happy or angry I can kind of figure out what’s going on, and how to respond so as to bring about whatever desired outcome, but to hang out with a girl, and her girl, and then all of a sudden she’s getting up on me it’s totally fish out of water.
Oh man I just made an amazing chicken thai green curry. My cooking skills are weird such that if I ever set off to follow a recipe and intentionally craft a dish it comes out a tasteless mess but I’ve got a great track record improvising with whatever’s around in the kitchen
Home to everything you ever wanted to know about railroad history West of the Hudson and Around New York State railroad, history in Chicago and the Midwest, Connecticut, Links to some great WebSites of New York State railroads. An index of the railroads of New York State. Railroads in Mechanicville and Ballston Spa.
Hey, take a look at this website. It’s… I don’t know what it is, really.
My first instinct is to say with the cluttered, hand-coded look, in-line off-brand ads, ancient clip art, and the assembly of hobbyist knowledge in a non-interactive, idiosyncratically paginated and directoried, personally hosted site, it’s a perfect example of the Internet 1.0 of the late 1990s.
But that’s not true, is it. If you follow links - and there are a lot of them - the “site” sprawls over multiple domains, with the same appearance, but unique (and honestly interesting) content. Allkinds of railroadstuff, but also things like French golf courses.
The more I look at it the more it seems to be mid to late-2000s SEO-optimization, which would explain the network of links to related pages which might or might not themselves be optimization platforms. It definitely postdates (or at least has been updated since) the development of Facebook and Twitter integration. But by the standards of SEO optimization it seems awfully artisan - the material’s higher quality than I expect from content farms, and seems personally curated and to maintain some semblance of a coherent voice, plus it doesn’t follow the one page per topic, cranked-out and autoformatted for digestibility format I’m used to. Plus, optimizing for what? The ads are a total dog’s breakfast - the only recurring product that seems to be “in-house” are logistics services, so that might be it.
The more I follow links - half because I’m fascinated about the material discussed, half because of the page itself - the more I’m amazed at how much train content there is out there - it seriously outpaces the pop culture products I’m used to as icons of fandom content saturation. Then again, “trainspotting” was one of the original pre-internet models for anorak/otakudom. I guess it’s well-positioned for that - trains tie into pretty much every aspect of Industrial Era life, and are full of little whorled and niched aspects packed with arbitrarily large yet still finite - and well-documented - volumes of information. The kind of field anyone could enter, would take years to master, and yet could never be feasibly completely conquered. Always one more fact to track down; one more source to unearth; one more person to contact, learn from, credit, integrate into the society…
Christian Identity and Creativity are funny because they basically have the same backstory as Odinism or Wicca - someone committed to a project of palingenetic nationalism thought it needed a religious component, and decided to “revive” the “ancient, historic faith” of the nation, which they did by combining one part contemporary folk tales and practices projected backwards, one part avant-garde neo-mysticism, and two parts of the founders’ personal charisma and off-the-top-of-the-head mythology.
Now the ancient, historic faith of white Americans was, obviously, Christianity, and the hilarious part is that the fact that this was still a living and well-documented religion in no way prevented the whole process from proceeding along the exact same lines.
I just walked into 7-11 and they have their own in-house TV channel playing and there was a foreign affairs news segment presented by a woman in a “sexy schoolgirl” outfit and it was all very cyberpunk.
Christian Identity and Creativity are funny because they basically have the same backstory as Odinism or Wicca - someone committed to a project of palingenetic nationalism thought it needed a religious component, and decided to “revive” the “ancient, historic faith” of the nation, which they did…
I mean now that I think of it this is basically the same relationship Soka Gakkai has to Buddhism
The same relationship Joseph Smith had to Christianity.
The same relationship Martin Luther had to the Pope?
The same relationship Moses Mendelssohn had to Judaism
