fuck the grind. fuck work culture. i want a slow life. i want to wake up in the morning and scramble eggs and saute some spinach, squeeze some orange juice and cut up some strawberries, and eat it all while sitting on my porch and watching my goats mill about in the yard. i have a world of downtime to bake bread and garden and read and craft. i am free.
Today I learned that Van Halen have that rider in their contract about “a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed” in order to know at a glance if the promoter read the entire contract. And the reason they do THAT is because they once had a stage collapse because a promoter hadn’t read the proper way to set up all the specific technical stuff.
So if the band goes in the dressing room or catering and sees brown M&Ms, they know they have to double-check the stage setup for safety.
I heard about this on Freakonomics Radio. Turns out the bit about no brown M&Ms is HUGE, in BIG font, bold, underlined and quotated like they’re on the Group W Bench.
The band was all, “We have fifty-pound lights hanging over our heads and fire being shot out of cannons. We had to know whether they read our safety regs so we didn’t flamebroil any roadies.”
interesting how this has become a meme in the music industry about divas. i’ve always heard jokes that amount to “this stuck up celebrity hates the green gummy bears!! they’re refusing to perform just for that???” and its reading stuff like this that i realise how that joke might have come about. people get grumpy that the band refuses to play but cant admit its because THEY’RE incompetent, so they make it all about the M&Ms. another example of artists using a creative method to ensure they have a perfectly reasonable request fulfilled that is then bastardised by lazy people who wanna make money off them.
…this is like the music industry version of hearing the truth behind the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit
I love that Tumblr is like “We got Neil Gaiman to do a question and answer session so send in your questions and maybe he’ll answer them!” as though the man hasn’t spent the last few years hanging out here answering random questions and cementing himself as a widely beloved fixture of this site
“We brought in Neil Gaiman”
the fuck you did, he lives here
“we brought in neil gaiman”
you pulled him unceremoniously from his bed to go sit on the couch is what you did
There’s a history of pickled beets in my family. Growing up in the great depression meant that for my grandma that was sometimes the only thing available to eat and she HATES them. But my grandpa loved them so she would always buy a jar and when he opened the jar she’d be all the way in the next room and somehow just KNOW he was opening the jar of beets. She’d come running into the kitchen just to tell him ‘yuck!’
Years pass, grandpa died, my dad got into the habit of taking her out to eat at places with a salad bar so we could make sure we all get our greens. He’d always pick out a few pickled beets for himself. Grandma would point at them and say 'yuck!’
Years pass, my grandma is getting on in years. She has a Facebook account, but she just kind of treats it like a family newsletter and barely actually interacts with anyone and just kind of lurks. She has an aide to help her around the house and keep her company and do things that are hard for her. She can’t really type anything because last month she had a stroke that messed with her spatial reasoning and typing is hard.
A few days ago, I told Facebook that I had pickled beets on a taco and it was pretty good. My grandmother, age 96, alerted her aide that it was imperative that she reply. And so her aide Naiya, age 22, on behalf of the matriarch of the family, got on her Facebook specifically to tell me…
did cinderella ever talk to her man about his faceblindness
#‘i met the perfect woman but it was a special occasion’#'so now wherever she is her makeup and hair are probably different’#'this is my nightmare’
rip prince charming, who had to let the whole kingdom make jokes about his foot fetish for the rest of his life because every blonde with an updo looks basically the same as far as he can tell
they call him prince charming because he’s always really polite to strangers to cover for the fact that he doesn’t know if he’s supposed to recognize them from somewhere and when you’re a prince that shit starts wars
best part of this post is all the people with prosopagnosia confirming that they literally never questioned why the prince was incapable of hiring a sketch artist even in versions without masks/glamours
Please, please, for the love of god, Click. The. Link.
A had a partner with face blindness for several years. One time it was chilly so I threw on an old sweater I hardly ever wore, but i kept because it was literally the only sweater we could find at the street market in my size one extremely chilly morning in August 1983 in Auvergne and it had good memories despite it’s colour.
I’m a goth. I was a goth then. To my lover, I was a person of a particular size and build dressed in black with the occasional jewel tone and dark hair at a particular length.
The sweater was very much not Goth. It was a pale shade and oversized and nobbly.
We went to Cub Foods, which was a massive warehouse style grocery store. we separated to do our assorted shopping.
He couldn’t find me. He searched with an increasing urgency and rising panic. I oblivious contemplated box macaroni and jiffy mixes as he passed my aisle over and over.
My shopping done I spotted and hailed him, and he looked at me with some confusion, but he knew my voice, my hair, the particular cut of my trousers, picked because they looked good and I could run and fight in them, the shape of my boots. Once he looked closely, he knew it was me, but at a distance all he was seeing was the Wrong Sweater.
We were neither of us publicly demonstrative by nature, but he hugged me so tight in his relief. Once I understood, I felt terrible, and when I wore something uncharacteristic, I made sure he memorized it because I could never forget his terror and relief.
This is how I discovered he was face blind. I was the first person to notice, he’d hidden it so well.
can I interest you in some queer medieval loser teens?
a hot lady knight with biceps and principles? a sad, shy scholar who doesn’t want to be king? a chaotic lordling who turns everything into a joke so that people won’t notice how desperate he is for love? a princess who tells herself she’s ~not like other girls~ because she’s afraid?
they’re all gay! and you can read about them in GWEN AND ART ARE NOT IN LOVE, my debut YA novel, out now in the UK/November 28th in the US.
a little blurb, if you’re hungry: Gwen and Art have been betrothed since birth and have hated each other for almost as long; when they’re forced to spend the summer together at Camelot ahead of their upcoming wedding, Gwen catches Arthur kissing a boy, and Arthur finds proof that Gwen has a crush on Lady Bridget, the kingdom’s only female knight. they make a reluctant pact to cover for each other (read: mutual blackmail), and as things heat up at the annual royal tournament, Gwen is swept off her feet by her knight and Arthur takes an interest in Gwen’s royal brother …
THIS BOOK. I have now read it a total of three times and enjoyed it more every time around.
DO YOU LIKE the anachronistic masterpiece of comedy that is A KNIGHT’S TALE (2001)? DID YOU ENJOY THE TV SHOW MERLIN but wanted to turn it upside down and shake it until all the gay kissing fell out?
this is the book for you.
four adorable gay disaster weirdos with angst! they share one (1) braincell and bridget is holding onto it 70% of the time (gabriel: 28% - gwen: 2% - arthur: zero percent. never. not once.)
it’s hilarious. it’s full of being so overcome with gay feelings that you lose the capacity to function. it will sneak around behind the loos and skewer you cunningly in the heart when you’re not looking.
everyone please read it and then draw lots of fanart of lady bridget because phwaor.
