HOT DAMN IT'S A TWISTY JAR

No shit you guys, check this thing out!  It is the best thing!  I know I am super late to the party on this but I don't even care because it is the best thing!

That's a fucking twisty jar!  It's like armpit deodorant, but for food!  Wait that sounds gross and less delicious than peanut butter that doesn't get all over your hands.  It's like lip gloss, but for food!  (Is that better?  At least it is stuff that goes around your mouth area like food does).  I hope wowbutter starts using it because getting fake peanut butter on my hands is like 40% of the reason I have not finished the jar in the cupboard.  About 25% of the reason it is still there is because we have no good sandwich bread and wowbutter just isn't as satisfying as peanut butter to eat straight out of the jar.  This is an awesome invention and I want to use money on it!  You can tell I am super into it because of all the exclamation marks in this post!!!!!!!

Ugh

Ok so there are actually loads (and loads and loads and loads) of things about the "straight ally safe place" tumblr, Straight Voices, that piss me off.  Like seriously, pretty much every other post has something awful in it somewhere, from concern trolling via the tone argument (if you were just CALM and REASONABLE and NEVER EVER GET UPSET about all the awful bullshit that any sane person would get rightly furious over, everything will be magically better!  This is why cis straight people are better at gay rights than gay people!) to appropriating LGBT shit (why can't I have straight pride?  You get to be proud of being gay!  It's the same thing, isn't it?) to....well, to shit like this.  But one of the simpler, stupider things that annoys me is that slogan they have, Straight But Not Narrow, specifically when they are on t-shirts.

There are a few people who posted photos of this shirt, but I chose this person's photo

because I didn't want to steal someone's face-visible photo without permission to use in a critical post.

I think I hotlinked it, so if they choose to take down the photo on their end

it'll disappear here too rather than being up despite what they want.

What is even the point of this shirt?  It's not in support of anything.  It's not saying, "Hey, I think it's unfair that gay people aren't allowed to get married!" or "The government has no business in someone's bedroom!" or "Maybe transfolk should not get beat up and murdered all the time!"  It is not raising awareness or supporting a specific cause (to my knowledge).  It's just self-centred and braggy.  "Hey, look at me!  I don't hate gay people!  Me!  This straight person!  Right here!  Isn't it amazing how fantastic I am for not hating gay people, even though I'm straight!?  I'm so straight, you guys!"  Congratulations, you are not a blatantly hateful homophobe, you have reached the minimum requirements for being a decent human being.  Now maybe you should stop making everything about you and what an awesome ally you are even though those darn lgbt's are just so cishetphobic omfg.

I Dreamed A Dream

Last night I had a dream that the walls of my house were full of maggots.  Not tiny normal maggots though, but giant snakelike maggots.  And they would burrow through the walls like fish swimming through a coral reef.  I watched them come out of the mouth of a man on a poster in my room, and go back in through his eye.  We didn't know where they were coming from, until we went underneath the house to look at the foundations and saw what must have been at least a dozen blocks of cheese, huge blocks, the size of a large trunk or sailor's chest.  Then my alarm went off and I woke up, which was disappointing because I wanted to know how the cheese factored into all this.

Sum It Up

I don't use Tumblr.  I have one, but I don't use it.  I do, however, have friends who use Tumblr, and one of those friends is Wyatt.  He made a post about autism that got pretty popular, and I wanted to reblog it but like I said, I don't use Tumblr.  So I'm just going to link it here to show my support.

If you can't see the screencap or don't want to click it to make it bigger, this is the text of the post:

"Here, look, I’m just going to sum it up reeeeal simple for anyone who still doesn’t understandIf you see a charity for autism that obsesses even the slightest bit over wanting to “cure” autism in any waystay the fuck away from themI am not an illness"

Hell to the yeah, I could not have worded that any better myself.  Not that I have autism or am any kind of expert on the subject, but I have mentioned my ADHD on here before.  Not the same, but it's kind of a similar position, where people assume I am broken or flawed just because my brain works differently sometimes and I should be "cured" or "fixed" and become a completely different person.  So I just wanted to say, yes, this is excellent and this needs to be repeated as many times as possible until it finally sinks in for everyone who thinks otherwise.

Stupid Expensive Textbooks

Ugh, I'm having flashbacks to college.  I can't find my copy of the national building code anywhere, and even though they sell a PDF version of it I can't find it online anywhere to download for free.  Come on assholes, I already dropped about three hundred bucks on the damn thing, you could at least make a free backup copy available when I misplace it.  If I ever legit buy the PDF version someday the first thing I'm doing is putting it up on the Pirate Bay for everyone else in my situation.

ACTUAL ADVICE MALLARD IS BAD AT ADVICE

This is the slut-shaming Actual Advice Mallard I mentioned in my last post:

Translated: if you are at all sexual, like by wearing low-cut tops because you like how they make you feel or by having casual sex because you find sex enjoyable and don't let other people judge you for it, you are less than human and nobody can ever respect you!  By finding empowerment in something I don't, you are just showing everybody how worthless and trashy you are because REAL empowerment is in doing what I approve of, not in doing what makes you feel empowered!  Doing anything that society can label as sexual, whether it's what you wear, say, or do, means you lose the right to equality and respect.  Slut!

This duck really pissed me off because I abhor slut-shaming, as I may have mentioned in an older post, especially slut-shaming passed off as concerned pseudo-advice.  Also, ignoring that specific example, while some of its advice was good, the duck meme had a lot of total bullshit as well.  So I'm going to run with the joke I made in my last post, and actually follow up on making fun of all the terrible advice mallards I found.  Let's go!

Women are a completely different species and it is a hopeless dream to try and understand anything about them!  But there's no point in trying because all women understand each other (presumably via the female hive mind, because women are all pretty much identical personality-wise) and we all hate each other, no exceptions!  Sorry, all my female friends.  I thought I loved you all because you are such rad individuals, but nope!  Women all hate each other.  That's disappointing.  Now I feel lonely.

The only reason you could possibly get mugged is because you live in a bad area, and the only reason you live in a bad area is because you're too dumb to think of moving to a better one!  There is no reason whatsoever that anyone would choose to live in a bad neighbourhood.  Rent is exactly the same price in every area of town and moving from one home to another is completely free!  Nobody has to worry about being close to work or schools, and nobody has any emotional investment in their home or neighbourhood that could make them want to stay.

Women are mostly interchangeable and the only thing you should expect from one is physical attractiveness and mental stability.  What her personality is like and whether you love her are not important.  Settle for what you already have rather than trying to find a loving, emotionally fulfilling relationship.

People always try to match their bra and underwear whether or not they expect anyone to see them, and presumably they do it to impress other people rather than because they personally like having matching sets!  Also they have cats, because they are lonely!

Again, women always choose clothes because they want to impress other people rather than because they personally like wearing them!

Having children is an event that is always planned ahead and never ever happens by accident, and poor people shouldn't get to make that decision for themselves!

A woman who is not physically attractive is completely worthless and if you spend any time at all talking to someone who isn't conventionally beautiful, you are wasting your life!  The only thing a woman is good for is being pretty!

I am not a doctor, but if you are really depressed it is easy to make large lifestyle changes, and you should do them before you go to a real doctor to see if you can get medicine to help you with your disorder.  Depression is not really a big deal and you probably don't need any help in dealing with it.

Nobody shares the videos they take with other people who couldn't be there for the actual event, and it's impossible to enjoy the moment and plan ahead at the same time so don't even bother to try!

Sports are the single most important thing that could ever exist, and you must stay for the whole game every time no matter the game, no matter what else you have to do that day!

Because dogs and children are pretty much the same, right?  Just put out a bowl of dry food and take it out for a walk or two every day, and if it misbehaves while you're gone you can just keep it locked in the basement or something until you get back.  And if you find that you get tired of the responsibility after a few years just send it off to a shelter or something.  You can do that with kids, right?

When Is Sex Not Like Pizza? The Default Male

I'm sure most people have heard this dumbass quote before:

Haha so funny!  And so true!  Right?  Well, I hate this quote.  Not because I hate pizza (I don't!) or sex (I don't!) or funny quotes (I don't!).  I hate it because it's a really blatant example of the "default male" position.  Unless something is specifically about a woman, it's probably about a guy instead.  It's really obvious that it's a dude who came up with that line, and the woman in the picture is probably laughing at him for it.  For guys, sex is always good!  Even if it's bad!  Because hey, it might not be fantastic, but you still come in the end, right?  This quote is completely accurate, for a guy.  Ignore how "bad sex" for a woman ranges from feeling unsatisfied in the end or feeling nothing at all the whole time, to feeling a lot of pain and discomfort.  Female experiences get ignored because male is the default, so even bad sex is good because guys somehow forget that women also have sex and hey it's totally different for us over here.  This next piece of advice from the Actual Advice Mallard meme gives a solid, presumably gender-neutral in practice relationship tip...but uses a female pronoun because it assumes you are a Default Male* dating a woman.
*Yes, it could also assume you are a lesbian, but if you argue that then you're just appropriating actual LGBT issues in order to pretend that you're open minded when we all know you were thinking of  a heterosexual relationship.  LGBT people have serious issues to deal with, and you aren't helping them by hiding behind their language while reinforcing cis-hetero defaults.

Individual examples like the ones I've provided might not seem like very much, and anybody reading this probably thinks I'm making a big deal over nothing.  Two little pictures, who cares!  But it's not just two pictures.  Everywhere you look, men are assumed to be the default.  Movies with female protagonists stand out, because almost every film has a male protagonist.  It's assumed that a story will be about a man, so it's notable when it isn't.  Many women who have heart attacks don't realize that's what they're having, because men and women show different symptoms, because it's the male symptoms that everyone is taught about.  Crash test dummies are designed after the average male body, which leads to women being injured or killed more often in accidents because the safety designs are not made with the average female body in mind.  Finding out Samus or anybody else is a woman in games or stories is a Huge Twist, because when you didn't have any prior evidence that they were female, you assumed they were male.  If a job has different titles for men and women who are doing it, the man's job will be the actual job title (actor, councilman, waiter, etc).

For the most part, these are individual little things that, one-on-one, don't amount to much at all.  Like how getting one litte mosquito bite isn't a  big deal in the grand scheme of things.  But when you face an endless barrage of little bites like that, not only is it disheartening, it can be dangerous (see heart attacks, crash test dummies).  It really sucks to look everywhere and find that in most places you are the other, the stranger, that whenever something addresses its audience it makes it clear that you, woman, you are not part of this audience.  You are not who we are talking to, you are not welcome, you can stick around if you like but we will always remind you that we will ignore your perspective.  Also, seriously, the heart attack and crash test things are for realsies dangerous.  I started this blog post just to complain about that first pizza quote and the general existance of the "default male" but the more I thought about it and what it included, the shittier I felt.  Now I'm afraid to do any sort of research on this topic because I really don't want to find out any other ways that society is basically saying health and safety for women is way too much work if it means we have to try new, less male-exclusive testing methods.  I'd rather just live in blissful ignorance, thanks.  Maybe if I plug my ears and hum 24/7 I can convince myself that sexism is over.  Hmmm hmmm, la la la la, oh look the Advice Mallard is pretending that slut-shaming is advice.  Maybe my next post should just be a series of terrible Advice Mallards that I make fun of.

Lay's Maple Moose Potato Chips

These are the most disturbingly Canadian chips I have ever seen.

The flavour is Maple Moose, and the picture is of a moose curling seductively around a giant bottle of maple syrup* while giving you bedroom eyes and a come-hither smile.  No, I don't know why the moose wants to have a threesome with you and that bottle of maple syrup.  I am not entirely sure I want to know.  I am entirely sure that I don't want to meet whoever made that image.
*Or perhaps a tiny moose curling seductively around a normal sized bottle of syrup, I am not sure which would be creepier

I only ate one, so I can't really give a good description of the flavour.  Also I am not a professional food taster so I probably wouldn't do a good job of it anyway.  But they are very...sweet.  Probably because of the maple.  Kind of too sweet, they are sort of gross. They do not have any moose in them, unfortunately.  At least, not that I could taste.  My mother ate more than I did and she said they tasted sort of like ketchup chips, only sweeter.  Apparently a Newfie guy came up with this flavour for a contest, and there are four other flavours to try?  One of the other flavours is grilled cheese, and one is Caesar salad.  I kind of want to try the Caesar salad chips.

I fixed my laptop!

My mother and I have the same model of laptop.  This is a photo of hers.  Specifically the fan part.

This is a photo of mine.

As you may have noticed, mine lacks those little plastic bars.  They snapped off one by one, usually when I went to pick up my laptop and my fingers landed on them and the tiniest bit of pressure made them crack like a MUN student in the middle of finals.  And as it turns out, these insignificant little bars that break if you touch them are structurally integral.  Did you also notice how my laptop gaped at the corner in that pic?  It meant this is what was happening to the hinge part.

That got much much worse over the last 24 hours, to the point where the lid was only hanging on by the one hinge on the other side, because a big part of the plastic casing broke and took the other hinge with it when it decided to take a break from being connected to the rest of my computer.  Oops.  I guess I should have been more careful with the little bars.

No worries though!  I didn't have any duct tape, but I did have tuck tape (once I called my dad while he was out kayaking and got him to tell me where he was hiding it).  Success!  I fixed it!

I didn't think the tuck tape would work as well as it did, honestly.  I figured to make it work I'd have to use so much it'd end up covering the fan exhaust hole (or whatever it's called where the little plastic bars used to be) and the power button.  But as you can see, that didn't happen!

Well, it sort of happened.  But only on the very edge of the fan bit, not important at all.  Never got near the power button!  It seems to be holding well, too.  Of course I can't say that with any certainty, because it's only been on for like an hour, but the lid's gone from hanging off like a trapeze artist to not wobbling at all, not even a little.  Worst case scenario the tape doesn't last and I have to replace it every so often.  That's a much better worst case than not fixing it at all and eventually it gets so broken it stops working, right?