all the basic rules are the same like playstyle wise
trash talking is encouraged
you get as much time as you need but if you look away from the board your turn is over
the referee is yelling everything like a sports announcer and you cannot complain
you can take one of your pieces from the board and throw it at your opponents head but you sacrifice that piece
you have to name the king and queen something
fun additives to make the game unique:
a. close your eyes and reach into a bag of about 48 chess pieces to pull out your sixteen pieces. whatever you get is what you play and you must follow the rules of those chess pieces. if you get four queens good luck. if you get no queens good luck
b. the referee can decide to throw in as many checkers pieces as a time as they please, as long as equal pieces are distributed to both players. the players are now not only playing chess but also checkers on the same board.
Since this has gotten so many notes I feel obligated to tell y’all that I’ve never played a game of chess in my life. I don’t. I don’t even know what a rook is.
It’s about this dude Henry who’s an artist living in New York,
and he has to go back to his hometown in Montana to take care of his grandfather who just recently had a stroke and is wheelchair-bound.
Things are all fine and dandy until Henry finds out that his old best friend from high school, as well as object of his unrequited affections that he’s never really been able to let go of is also back in town. His name is Dean. He’s there with his two sons to recoup from a recent divorce from his wife.
Henry is extremely frazzled by seeing his long-time crush after so many years, but they spend a lot of time together over the passing weeks and seem to fall into their old friendship very easily. Perhaps a little too easily….??? hmmm???
And with everything with Dean happening, Henry can’t be blamed that he’s entirely oblivious to Pike, the man who runs the local general goods store.
It’s obvious to us (and the whole damn town) that Pike’s been head over heels for Henry since high school, but is painfully shy. He can barely talk to Henry at all and it’s the cuTEST GODDAMN THING oh lord help me from this movie.
Throughout the movie, Pike can’t seem to help himself from wanting nothing more than to make Henry happy from afar. He’s supposed to be delivering food cooked by one of the older ladies in town to Henry and his grandfather’s house to eat every night, but Pike cooks his own, exceptionally better meals, and delivers those instead and tells no one.
Now, Henry does notice Pike, and something about him catches his attention. Even if he doesn’t understand why yet. He tries to invite him to stay for dinner almost every night in an attempt to get him to open up, but Pike only becomes more closed off when he notices what’s going on between Henry and Dean.
I’ll stop there, as I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but I can’t leave this without talking about the town’s residents in this movie. This place is 100% one of those little towns where everyone knows each other as well as their business, you have nosy little old ladies, dudes who do nothing all day but sit on the porch of the corner store and smoke a pipe, and they all go to church on Sundays.
AND YET, not only is this movie void of any homophobia from any character, basically the whole freaking town is all up in this whole love triangle. They support Pike so much that there’s even scenes where they all play matchmaker with him and Henry. They root for them in the goofiest, most loveable way.
SO BASICALLY, this is a silly romantic comedy, except gay. It’s all super lighthearted comedy with tiny bits of drama thrown in. No one dies!!!! No one is killed or commits suicide and has a 100% happy ending!!! The three main guys are just normal guys!!! There’s not a stereotype to be found here!! anD ONE OF THEM IS NATIVE AMERICAN. No seriously guys it hurts me that not everybody knows about this movie. I discovered it when I was in middle school in our video store’s tiny little LGBTQ section, and must have rented it 20 times throughout the years before I finally bought it. I know this movie almost frame by frame I’ve watched it so many times because it’s just so disgustingly cute and always makes me happy. NOW, this movie isn’t perfect. It’s got some clunky acting, weird.. I guess artsy moments that don’t make sense, and crosses into the line of cheesy quite a few times, BUT, that’s really not important. This is treated exactly as if it were a het romantic comedy. Their being gay has nothing to do with the overall story, and is never brought up save for a small plotline where Henry is guilty with himself for never coming out to his grandfather. But overall, more LGBTQ movies need to be like this, it’s just way too rare.
GO WATCH IT YOU’LL BE GLAD YOU DID. Sadly, the only way I know to get ahold of it is to just buy the DVD. But it’s fairly cheap on Amazon! And even cheaper if you buy it used on there, but either way I promise it’s worth it to own. Like I said, I think I kept our video store in business from my renting it so many times.
Oh, and I hope you enjoy country music to some extent because this has the countriest soundtrack of all time.
i’ve been asked this a lot: what horror movies would you recommend to people who try to stay away from the genre in general, for whatever reason? some people don’t enjoy being scared, some people find horror too unrealistic and outlandish, and some people don’t enjoy the repetitive tropes that are admittedly often present in horror films.
that being said, when i do give people recommendations for horror movies to dip their toe into, they’re often the same ones, or very similar ones. so i’ve gathered them here today, in case my horror loving followers have any friends who ask them the same questions, but aren’t sure of how to answer.
“oh hey,” she said, “it’s a really touristy area, but since you’re gonna be passing through anyway, you might as well stop by pier 29, see the dragons. also, there’s a—”
“hold on,” i said. “i knew your city had mountains, but. dragons? uh, actual living dragons?”
“dude, it’s not a big deal. they’re there all the time. of course they’re majestic and everything, but they’re loud and cranky and mostly they lie around eating garbage. now and then the city council will talk about trying to make them roost somewhere else, but—”
“dragons,” i repeated. i knew it was making me sound like a rube, but it was a lot to take in. “you live in a city that has dragons.”
“no, it’s cool, we used to go see them when i was a little kid. it’s worth doing. but that whole area is mostly dragon-themed gift shops, and the commercialization is kind of a bummer. also, sometimes a dragon will melt somebody’s car and it’s a whole problem.”
“honestly, i forget other cities don’t have them?” she said. “there’s a few other sites on the west coast where they gather. portland calls them wyverns, but that’s a portland thing.”
“chicago’s got, like, bunnies and songbirds,” i told her, “but otherwise it’s just your typical vermin. pigeons, rats, sphinxes—”
“sphinxes? what the hell.”
“oh, yeah, they nest in the el tunnels. sometimes a fucking sphinx will flap down out of nowhere, bring the whole train to a halt until the front car answers a riddle.”
“that sounds exciting,” she said.
“it’s the worst. your train winds up being twenty minutes late, and you just have to hang out hoping somebody up there read their mythology. there’s supposed to be a program where the conductors get trained in riddling, but i don’t know. rahm emmanuel keeps saying it’s not a budget priority.”
“huh,” she said. “guess the grass is always greener and all that. but on some level, it’s nice to remember that even with all these big box stores, the country still has some variety left in it.”
“yeah, did you know that in rhode island they call water fountains ‘bubblers’?” i said.
“whoa, seriously?”
“i read it somewhere. crazy, right?”
“crazy.”
i am here for urbanized mythological creatures
Switzerland has a lot of dragons, but dragons have long since moved on from collecting gold. There’s a purply-scaley one that roosts behind the Mad Mex that refuses to stop hoarding signposts. The city uses banners for the main roads and sells a lot of maps.
Golems love cities–with their stone buildings and sidewalks. There are strict laws about what one is allowed to say to them, because golems tend to be rather literal and very obedient. There’s always one kid who thinks he knows better. He doesn’t.
OH MY GOD THE CHICAGO SPHINXES, DON’T GET ME STARTED. Here’s the thing. When you buy your Ventra card at the machine – which is another one of Rahm’s scams, leasing that out to a private company, wtf was he thinking – it’s supposed to have the answer to the riddle on it, right? The sphinx is supposed to scan the bar code and let the train through.
that never fucking happens. Especially on the Blue Line which is down for maintenance all the time and constantly switching tracks and running shuttles, which means half the time you’ve got a sphinx that came over from the fucking Orange Line or some shit and is full of riddles that only the Irish mooks from Bridgeport understand. Or it’s in Polish only. Or it’s got a glitch that makes it stutter and if you interrupt it, it’ll get snippy and bite your head off. LITERALLY. They hush it up but it happens. Businesses lose millions from sphinx-related tardiness every year.
And then there’s a case back in ‘96 when it was proven after the fact that the “wrong” answer the Red Line Sphinx got was actually A PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE REGIONAL VARIATION but by then, the Sphinx had already eaten half a car full of drunken Cubs fans. I know, not much of value was lost there, BUT STILL.
You think SPHINXES are bad? Detroit has imps, thousands of them, and you know what they love? Buses. You know the major form of public transit in Detroit is? BUSES. So the drivers have to literally shoo away imps at every fucking stop, making them 30 minutes late, an HOUR late, and it’s not like there’s anything you can DO, because they’re all leftover from when the car companies were big, and ALL OF THOSE FUCKERS CLOSED.
So of course there were hundreds of orphaned imps, and they kept SAYING they were going to reopen the factories, or at least get some good junkyards, but nooooooooo, they never did, so the imps just bred and bred, and now they’re all over every bus and it’s not like you can ever count on getting anywhere on time and long story short, I’d take a sphinx over imps ANY day.
yeah as someone who did high school and college in michigan and now lives in chicago, i have to say that as far as the age-old sphinxes vs imps debate goes, they’re both terrible in different ways. the imps are way more common and they probably have a wider total reach, and oh my god nothing like trying to board a bus already covered in those little suckers when said bus is already forty minutes late—
(sidenote: ugh people from bloomfield hills saying stuff like “well if i lived in detroit, i’d have the sense to carry around a nice heavy club or walking stick—” yeah dude good luck with your walking stick against two dozen imps)
but the sphinxes. let’s not, uh, sugar coat this: the sphinxes don’t just slow commuters, they kill people. and yes, if you know the riddle, you’re fine. but what if someone else offers their answer first? what if you get some overly cocky freshman philosophy major who takes it upon himself to answer for the whole car?
i think in the back of our minds, all chicagoans know that rahm emmanuel’s administration isn’t gonna lift a finger until one of the sphinxes goes after a wealthy tourist and it makes national news. and even then, we’ll get, like, flashy riddle-solving software installed in all the red line trains, and maybe the brown line, but no way is it gonna cover the whole infrastructure.
basically if you ever need to take the green line or the pink line, you wanna start studying your classical mythology and folklore fucking yesterday.
@copperbadge do puns work on Sphinxes as well as riddles?
You bet your sphinxter they do.
(Sphinxes hate that one but they’re obliged to honor it.)
I heard they sometimes get bad Selkie problems in Monterey Bay…
It was so weird moving to the South and then to the Midwest after growing up in New England because apparently everywhere else unicorns are a big joke to people? I get it, New Hampshire has the lowest teenage pregnancy rate because we’re all a bunch of virgins, ha ha like I’ve never heard THAT one before, but seriously, you try growing perennials when every year the goddamn unicorn herd comes through and eats all your bulbs. MY BACK YARD IS NOT YOUR PERSONAL TULIP BUFFET, LIGHTFOOT.
The Bunyips have a fondness for the sewers. Which is really something when you’re down at Bondi for an early-morning dip and find that the damn beach is closed because another Bunyip has gone for a swim in the sewerage outlet and then waded back in to shore. Oh, sure, the outlets are supposed to be distant enough that the effluent doesn’t come back to shore, but the damned council who proposed it didn’t think about what was going to happen to all those Bunyips who were missing the swamps that got drained when they built Kingsford Smith Airport in Botany Bay. Sure, a population of nearly 10,000 bunyips is going to make do with a couple of waterways that mostly reek of industrial waste. Not. BRILLIANT TOWN PLANNING, Sydney Council. FUCKING BRILLIANT.
On the other hand, for something really spine-crawling, I suggest you look up “Rio Tinto Mining vs. The Quinkins (Imjim). Cape York, 1985.” That was a clusterfuck and a half – the extra half-clusterfuck got added when they tried to bring the military in to ‘solve the problem’. Fourteen of the children have never been recovered, the roads up into the property are impassable, and the closest you can get is within five klicks by air, land, or sea before all the instrumentation goes haywire. The last chopper to try a landing got a mayday out before readings said it plummeted like a stone.
Also, have you seen the sheer idiocy of a government trying to prosecute local spirits who aren’t going to turn up in court for one and wouldn’t recognise your white man’s law even if they did? Not one of the better periods of Australian government.
I suppose Baltimore has it easy, somewhat? Maybe? Cause the people who get in trouble the most with the mermaids are well, tourists. And there’s SIGNS up. All over. Heck, there’s signs in BRAILLE!
But of course you’ll get the drunk, handsy college boys going down to the Inner Harbour cause some older one wants to initiate a freshman, and some freshman thinks it’ll be cheaper than a strip club to see ‘free’ bare boobs.
It’s like none of them read anything to know that above those boobs, behind those lips are a whole bunch of sharp pointed teeth the better to eat them with.
But mostly it’s the tourists who do read the signs, and don’t go hanging over into the water, or trailing fingers from the water-taxi into the water; But who refuse to wear proper sanctioned ear plugs. Some of them just bring their own which aren’t strong enough to block out the sirens. But others just…. don’t believe for some reason?
I don’t know. But it’s in the news a lot when it happens and some tourists will inevitably say they didn’t think the earplugs were important, cause mermaids are beautiful and nice.
Disney has a lot to make up for – not that it’ll ever do it. But. A lot.
And then there’s the other thing. All the jokes about how they ‘thought the city with mermaids would be Seattle’, nudgenudge, wink wink.
And someone has to smack them down with; how many lost women tossed overboard by the slave trade did Seattle get drifting into their harbours in the under-currents? If there’s no proper bodies for mermaids to lay their eggs, there’s no mermaids.
I used to live in Canton, and there’s lovely apartments there. It’s just a touch expensive for the soundproof glass, y’know? But still, early Saturday morning, watching the mermaids float and sun themselves can actually be pretty, if you’re three stories up, a hundred or more yards from the water and with good soundproofing; all the brown and bronze and I saw a red tail once. She was gorgeous, dark skin, red tail, upper body all muscled like a dancer.
so having grown up in pennsylvania and north carolina, i thought i was prepared when i moved to florida for school last year. “after all,” i thought, “how different can a skunk ape really be from a bigfoot?”
well, i still don’t know the answer to that question, because it turns out florida is a really big state, and the particular area i moved to hasn’t seen a skunk ape in over twenty years (though, thanks to breeding programs and conservation efforts, i hear they’re thriving elsewhere).
what i have encountered is basilisks.
they are everywhere in central florida, apparently, and nobody even thought to mention them to me before i moved.
“i’m sorry,” my floridian roommate apologized a few weeks into our cohabitation. “they’re just such a standard part of the background for me. they don’t seem worth freaking out over, to be honest.”
now, i was freaking out, but it turns out the greater basilisks we all know and fear from legends, campfire stories, and the occasional sensationalistic news report only live deep in the swamps. they rarely bother humans. the slithery little guys i’d been seeing out of the corner of my eye on my morning walks– vivid red or gold scales, about the size of a pigeon– are comparatively harmless. yes, if you make direct eye contact with one, it causes an unpleasant pins-and-needles sensation in your arms and legs that can last all day, plus a transient feeling of dizziness and nausea. but it’s not going to paralyze you, let alone turn you to stone. and it’s pretty hard to accidentally make eye contact with a lesser basilisk, anyway. they aren’t confrontational animals; they’ll only try to meet your gaze and stare if they think you’re attacking them or something. (i do worry a little about my second roommate’s dog– she’s been zapped a couple times trying to chase and catch the poor things and, well, she’s a dog, they don’t learn from that kind of experience.)
anyway, turns out most people around here kinda like the lesser basilisks. unlike their large and lethal cousins, they’re mainly insectivores, and they love to eat mosquitoes and roaches. good for pest control!
Ah yeah I’ve heard y’all have problems with basilisk on your side of the state! Hope your roommate’s dog can be kept away from them.
I know the skunk ape population has been on the rise again especially in the national forest in the middle of the state. Who knows, they might migrate back into your area soon!
But as for my area we’ve been having real trouble with the sea serpents lately. They hang around the waterways and rivers during breeding season.
Not that they themselves are the problem I think it’s more people not respecting their habitat. It’s at least once a year some jackass is speeding with a boat in a no wake zone and they’ll cut up their backs pretty bad, even with all the scales. It’s a real shame, especially the juveniles. There’s programs to rescue and rehabilitate them here but it’s hard to get every one, and that’s just the ones that get spotted.
Though I gotta say I’m proud of the legislation we have protecting their nests. People get arrested if they disturb them and we gotta cover the lights on the beach during the hatching season so they can wriggle down to the ocean okay.
All the tourists around here are scared of them and I gotta admit we do have a high attack frequency. My sister’s friend has a friend who got bit by one last year. But I still think it’s cause there’s more tourists in the oceans and the poor things mistaking them for fish or a shark or something. They’re predators and they’re hungry but they’re not man eaters or anything. And they sure are pretty if you catch a glimpse of them, their scales are mostly blues and greens but they’re also always a little iridescent! All those documentaries pretending they’re stone cold killers make me sad
oh, i know! it’s like that shark week baloney– even the discovery channel likes to pretend they’re these vicious, unstoppably bloodthirsty things, like the Terminators of the natural world or something. sure, i guess that makes some people more interested in them, but it also makes a lot of people way more scared of sea monsters than they need to be. most attacks on humans aren’t even fatal, if i’m remembering the statistics right.
mermaids are actually way more dangerous than sea monsters– as someone mentioned upthread– but are there 6-volume cult classic horror movie franchises about killer mermaids with a taste for human flesh? pretty sure there aren’t! (i’m talking about those Behemoth From Butcher’s Bay flicks from the 80s and 90s, of course. i mean, they’re pretty entertaining! but they’re also not what you would call scientifically accurate. at all.)
yeah, i get worked up about this stuff, sorry. where i’m from, bigfoots get a similar bad rap– and they aren’t even predators! there have been all of four confirmed bigfoot attack deaths in the state of pennsylvania, ever, out of like nine attacks total, and all of them involved someone hunting or otherwise antagonizing the bigfoot. well, except for one that might have had rabies, back like a hundred years ago. i think people are just creeped out because, well, they are big– and they kinda look human? like, they’re too close to the uncanny valley to be charismatic megafauna. or whatever.
There’s another story that I like about a Chinese general who had to defend a city with only a handful of soldiers from a huge enemy horde that was in all likelihood going to steamroll the place flat within hours of showing up.
So when said horde did arrive, they saw the general sitting outside the city’s open gates, drinking tea. The horde sent a couple of emissaries over to see what was what, and the general greeted them cheerfully and invited them all to come and take tea with him.
The horde decided that this was a scenario that had “MASSIVE FUCKING TRAP” written all over it in beautiful calligraphy and promptly fucked off.
Whoever that general was, he was clearly the Ancient Chinese equivalent of Sam Vimes.
did he just invite us over for tea nah man i’m out
This just keeps getting better
I fucking love history.
ok but tbh that story misses a lot of the subtlety of the situation like ok
so this story is the Romance of Three Kingdoms, and essentially takes place between Zhuge Liang, resident tactician extraordinaire, and Sima Yi… OTHER resident tactician extraordinaire.
The two were both regarded as tactical geniuses and recognized the other as their rival. Zhuge Liang had a reputation for ambushing the SHIT out of his opponents and using the environment to his advantage, thus destroying large armies with a small number of men. Sima Yi (who kind of entered the picture later) was a cautious person whose speciality was unravelling his opponent’s plans before they began. So it was natural that the two would butt heads; however, since Sima Yi tended to have more men and resources, he started winning battles against the former. Which, y’know, kinda sucked.
On to the actual story: Zhuge Liang is all like “shit i gotta defend this city with like 10 men.” Literally if he fights ANY kind of battle here, he WILL lose; his only option for survival is not to fight. And that’s looking more and more impossible until he hears that his rival is leading the opposing army. And then he gets this brilliant idea. He basically opens all the gates, sends his men out in civilian clothes to sweep the streets, and sits on top of the gate drinking tea and chilling out and basically makes the whole thing out to be a trap
When Sima Yi comes he’s all like “yo come on in bro”
and Sima Yi is like “yeah he’s never been that obvious about his traps before. this is definitely a bluff” and he’s about to head in when he realizes
wait. he knows that i think he’s bluffing.
and so he gets it in his head that maybe, just MAYBE, Zhuge Liang has this cunning plan that will wipe out his army – recall that he has a pretty good handle on what his rival is capable of. And after a long period of deliberation (which is just like “he know that I know that he knows that etc.”), being the cautious man he is, SIma Yi eventually decides to turn his entire army around and leave.
Zhuge Liang later points out that the plan was based specifically on the fact that he was facing his rival; if it had been anyone else, there’s no way it would have worked. A dumber or less cautious person would have simply charged in and won without breaking a sweat.
and that’s the real genius here: it was a plan formed entirely just to deceive one man, and it worked.
Zhuge Liang is the most brilliant, sneaky-ass bastard in history. One time his side’s army was out of arrows, which pretty much meant they were screwed. So Zhuge Liang goes and does the logical thing, which is build a fuck ton of scarecrows and put them all on boats. Then he makes the men hide in the boats and sail them out on the river.
Well, that day was super foggy (which Zhuge Liang had predicted. Did I mention he was also a freakishly accurate meteorologist?). So the enemy across the river sees a fleet of boats armed to the teeth with what appears to be half an army of men. They panic! and start firing arrows like crazy.
Zhuge Liang lets this play out for a while, then he’s like, ”Ok guys that’s enough.” They calmly turn the boats around and go back to base, where they dismantle the scarecrows and pull out all the enemy’s arrows.
Zhuge Liang is legend.
I love this post. It just keeps getting better. Like seriously, I would have adored learning about this in World History.
If you want to see this in cinematic glory, watch Red Cliff.
Especially since it makes Zhuge Liang look like this:
Red Cliff is 50% bloody battles and 50% eye candy and about half of that eye-candy is due to Zhuge Liang
sparksoffandommagic 