My old 1up.com avatar, when I went by the name “Chunks Chewbacca.”
Let's Play Ducktales for NES with SG-88
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game DuckTales is made by Capcom in 1988. Considered a classic by many, watch as SG-88 play’s this frustrating game! DON”…
I need to cash in on this Let’s Play craze.
3 days ago - 
2 -
2 - Your Tired Meme
In an effort to ruin fun for people, I think a good tumblr would be one where you just repost peoples meme posts and claim that you’re doing it because the meme is tired. No one can really pin down when a meme starts, and being cool means you must constantly be ahead of what is not cool. So if you just made the claim, authoritatively, that you were an expert, people would see their fav meme on your site and tug at their collars and be like, “Oh shit, I just posted that tired meme,” and stop using it. It would definitely cause some strife for people, but if the site got big enough we could literally see the rise and fall of memes in mere hours instead of days.
The Worst Kind of Online Articles
One of the best things about the future in which we live is that we all have these magical devices that let us see everything. There is just so much stuff on the Internet to read or watch or participate in, it’s staggering and awesome in the literal sense. So many publications exist today that simply could not have existed at the scale they’re operating ten years ago. I love it. I think it’s great. We’re living in a cool time where entertainment and news is evolving in how it’s delivered and how it’s consumed. In such a transitional period of evolution, it’s not uncommon or unexpected to see bursts of adaptations exploding onto the scene only to quickly disappear. I’m hoping the shittiest, laziest type of article is soon made extinct by something better and less dumb. You probably think I’m talking about list articles, like “44 Reasons Your NES Rocked!!” or something. But I’m not talking about list articles. List articles are totally fine. They order information, making it easily digestible to an audience that is increasingly distracted. No, the laziest and worst article is the current-event Twitter-mining for outrage article. That’s when a current event happens and a writer goes on Twitter and searches for a term relevant to the event. One that will, ideally, invoke rage and teeth gnashing in viewers. Like searching for “nigger” on MLK day, or “faggot” when something LGBT related is in the news, and then putting these results in an article to prove a point. I’m totally fine with publicly shaming people who deserve it, but cherry-picking offensive tweets is just super lazy. Effective, sure, but really dumb. You could support any claim by cherry-picking Twitter search results. Finding a layer of retardation on the Internet is like writing an expose about the color of the sky. Yes, there are dumb and hateful people out there. Everyone knows this. They are in the minority. Shocking, but true. Bringing attention to them serves no purpose other than to scratch the itch people have to see a group of freaks doing disgusting things.
The spread of the black death.
Poland
Poland, tell us your secret.
Poland is the
oldnew Madagascar.If I remember correctly, Poland’s secret is that the jews where being blamed all over europe (as usual) as scapegoats for the black plague. Poland was the only place that accepted Jewish refugees, so pretty much all of them moved there.
Now, one of the major causes of getting the plague was poor hygiene. This proved very effective for the plague because everyone threw their poop into the streets because there were no sewers, and literally no one bathed because it was against their religion. Unless they were jewish, who actually bathed relatively often. When all the jews moved to Poland, they brought bathing with them, and so the plague had little effect there.
Milan survived by quarantining its city and burning down the house of anyone showing early symptoms, with the entire family inside it.
I reblogged this tons of times, but the Milan info is new.
Damn Italy, you scary.
Poland: “Hey, feeling a bit down? Have a quick wash! There, you see? All better”
Milan: “Aw, feeling a bit sick are we? BURN MOTHERFUCKER, BURN!!!!!”
Also, this might have something to do with it: from what I understand, O blood type is uncommonly… common in Poland. Something to do with large families in small villages and a LOT of intermarriage. The black plague was caused by a bacterium that produced, in its waste in the human body, wastes that very closely mimic the “B” marker sugars on red blood cells that keep the body from attacking its own immune system. Anyone who has a B blood type had an immune system that was naturally desensitized to the presence of the bacterium, and therefore was more prone to developing the disease. Anyone who had an O type was doubly lucky because the O blood type means the total absence of ANY markers, A or B, meaning that their bodys’ immune system would react quickly and violently against the invaders, while someone with an A may show symptoms and recover more slowly, while someone with B would have just died. Because O is a recessive blood type, it shows in higher numbers when more people who carry the recessive genes marry other people who also carry the recessive gene. Poland, which has a nearly 700 year history of being conquered by or partnering with every other nation in the surrounding area, was primarily an agricultural country, focused around smaller, farming communities where people were legally tied to, and required to work, “their” land, and so historically never “spread” their genes across a large area. The economy was, and had been, unstable for a very long period of time leading up to the plague, the government had been ineffective and had very little reach in comparison to the armies of the other countries around for a very very long time, and so its people largely remained in small communities where multiple generations of cross-familial inbreeding could have allowed for this more recessive gene to show up more frequently. Thus, there could be a higher percentage of O blood types in any region of the country, guaranteeing less spread of the illness and moving slower when it did manage to travel. Combine this with the fact that there were very few large, urban centers where the disease would thrive, and with the above facts, and you’ve got a lovely recipe for avoiding the plague.
Interestingly enough, as a result from the plague, the entirety of Europe now has a higher percentage of people with O blood type than any other region of the world.
WHY IS THIS ALL SO COOL
When Tumblr teaches you more about the plague than 12 years of school ever did.
Just to throw a nod in, as a medieval historian, this is all credible, and is the leading theory as to the plagues effectiveness at this point. So. Enjoy your new knowledge!
“ …literally no one bathed because it was against their religion.” Uh… that isn’t true. Be careful trying to make facts fit into your tidy narratives, folks.
(Source: , via nenetnokomis)
Today’s Cartoon History Lesson
Today I learned that the shitty car version of Voltron is referred to (in Voltron circles) as “Voltron Vehicle Force.” I feel this is a case of fans willing to apologize for a terrible aspect of their favorite series. They worry that lobbing even some light criticism may open the flood gates for a deluge of critical assessments. Technically, Shitty Car Voltron isn’t even in the Voltron universe. It’s just an adapted version of the Japanese show Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. It’s similar to how Power Rangers is just a collection of clips from Japanese shows purchased for pennies. But Shitty Car Voltron isn’t spliced crustily into a show about a rainbow coalition of southern California 20-somethings playing teenage ninja. It’s a stand-alone show where a rainbow coalition of galactic species fight evil in flying minivans.
Shitty Car Voltron came on after they ran the story of Awesome Lion Voltron to completion. Continuity has never been a strong point in American television. Adaptations of foreign shows marketed to kids was basically a guy in a distribution office somewhere going, “lol ya right,” and shipping all the episodes to affiliate stations in a cartoonishly large and disheveled box. Being a little kid means being confused constantly, and you start to accept the confusion, because doing so is a survival instinct. But as you grow more mature and start to understand your limitations, you’re at the same time growing out of many of those limits. It’s frustrating, especially when you are used to watching a show every day after school about giant lions turning into a robot man who battles enormous alien monsters. Then, one day, without warning, you tune your television to the Voltron station and suddenly there are all these stupid cars flying around. It wasn’t fair to us, as children, to be so willfully lead astray by thoughtless local programming directors.
Remember when you stood in line to see Phantom Menace, because your whole life had been leading up to that point, and all your Star Wars dreams were about to come true? Then you got about ten minutes into the movie and your mind recoiled in horror, because you realized your whole stupid life was a lie, and nothing could have possibly met your expectations of a new Star Wars movie? And then, after a little more time, you felt sick to your gut because you could see everyone around you was mentally kicking themselves in the balls to convince themselves that it was not a shitty movie? Further still, you figured out that while your expectations were unrealistically high, that still didn’t excuse how terrible Phantom Menace turned out to be? That’s a lot of questions, but if you took those feelings and broke them into smaller chunks of despair, those chunks would perfectly encapsulate the feeling of coming home from school and finding an episode of Shitty Car Voltron was airing in place of awesome robolions.
After his friend said something, something NEW NINJA TURTLES MOVIE something, something RUINING MY CHILDHOOD…
You know what actually ruins childhood? Divorce.
(via feitclub)
I Went to the Museum Yesterday
The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. I’ve never been. I’ve been past it a million times. I’ve been in the building itself, but back when it was J.J. Newberry Co. and the floors were wooden planks and the old ladies who worked there would follow you around because you looked like a shoplifter on account of not being super old. I had an hour so I figured I’d check it out. It’s kind of a big deal on the coast of Maine. So I went in. I was disappointed, mostly. I didn’t check out the entire place, but nothing I did see grabbed me. There is a selection of Louise Nevelson works, and I find her paintings to be really boring. Her sculptures are alright, I guess, but they don’t take me to another place, emotionally or imaginatively. So bleh. They also have a pretty decent selection of Andrew Wyeth pieces, and I really like Andrew Wyeth. He’s like the gritty reboot of Norman Rockwell, who I also like non-ironically. So I was super stoked to go and point my eyes at some of his works, but I was startled to find that Wyeth’s works have no difference in impact when viewed in person or seen in a quality book. Bummed out. Their bathroom facilities, however, are second to none. Clean, fresh smelling, and tucked far enough away from anything to allow for a really stress-free surprise pooping. Surprise poops are stressful enough, so it was really refreshing to be able to relax in what was essentially my own private poop dungeon. A+.
