Jeff Goldblum's laugh from Jurassic Park

This Year - the Mountain Goats

pascalcampion:

Down at Bob Ross Creek

pascalcampion:

Down at Bob Ross Creek

justintimberlakedoingthings:

Justin Timberlake remembers how scary clowns are

adamusprime:

i don’t know if i can pinpoint exactly what i didn’t like about that book

it just didn’t seem as real as his other books to me? i was just acutely aware that what i was reading was a work of fiction, and that’s fine for more fantastical stuff, but like…i dunno. when you’re going for realism…

i feel kinda nervous talking about this because people seem to take it as a personal attack on them or john green when i say i don’t like it. it’s ok for other people to like it!! LOTS of other people like it! just not me.

I think I know what you mean. personally I liked it, but there were bits where it felt like kind of a pastiche of his other books and overall writing style.

"That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing my father or Fats Waller or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, “being alive is a crock of shit."
Kurt Vonnegut (via youngstero)

battledad:

I’m gonna become friends with John Darnielle one day and I’ll sign all important documents as Lloyd D. Pyes, Personal Friend of John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats.

Before he started playing at the Evening of Awesome, John Darnielle said that he wanted to thank John Green for relentlessly recommending the Mountain Goats to his readers, but I wanted you to know that I got into the Mountain Goats’ music because of your unrelenting blogging about them.

Lloyd Pyes: arguably more influential than John Green.

Learning languages is weird.

I don’t mean, like, wanting to learn a language is weird, that’d be a stupid thing to think. But the way language learning is set up is weird. Like if you want to learn a language, you’d better hope that a lot of other people also want to learn that language or fuck you.

I’ve been learning Lithuanian for ~half a year, and I’ve kind of struggled to find any resources for it. I’ve got a couple of dictionaries, but they’re really more tailored for native Lithuanian speakers learning English, and are just like adequate for doing the inverse.

Even other than Lithuanian, if you look at most websites or products that offer foreign language courses (like Rosetta Stone or duolingo or whatever) the list is usually really small. It’s the same in school, too - or at least from my experience it is. In school I only had the chance to learn French, Spanish or German; and not at university I can take foreign language classes for free, but only in French, Spanish or Mandarin Chinese.

And it’s weird, ‘cause it sort of suggests that some languages are more valid than others just because they have a greater number of native speakers, or because people want to go to places where they’re spoken more than other places. Which I guess makes some sense, but I sure don’t agree with it.

Also it must be even weirder for people who don’t speak English as their first language and want to learn another language, because almost all the resources I’ve found for learning languages are for English speakers. I mean, obviously I’m not likely to stumble onto a website for teaching Lithuanian to, say, Urdu speakers. But the podcast I listen to to learn Lithuanian frequently has commenters from the Netherlands or Spain or Germany who are using the same podcast to learn English.

By contrast, I just discovered Byki, which seems fairly good from what I’ve used of it, and actually has a pretty broad range of languages to learn.

(Oh and the podcast I use is Lithuanian Out Loud, if anyone was looking for something to learn Lithuanian from. It’s not updating very frequently any more, but there’s loads of stuff from basic to advanced in the archives, and I’m not even halfway through it yet.)

cantripgames:

(Story War is a cool card game we’re making that’s like Apples to Apples combined with Dungeons and Dragons, read more about it here.)

Hey, so! Anybody who makes Story War fan art and posts fan art in the #Story War tag will get a Secret Code that can be used on our Kickstarter to get a special edition of the game at a discounted price! And our Kickstarter launches at the end of the month!

Fan art can be of any of the above characters or anything we’ve posted on our blog! Everything is fair game! (You can even feel free to mashup Story War characters with characters from other fandoms, that’s totally acceptable and kind of canon - our game is set in a world that exists between other fictional worlds, so random cameos aren’t totally out of place! You can draw characters fighting, hanging out, or just doing a cool dramatic pose!

Also: We might be including a sheet of some fan art in the game itself as an additional little zine thing packaged with the cards. So if you submit fan art to the Story War tag, we might message you and ask if we can include your art in the game itself!

What if you can’t draw, and still want a chance at the Secret Code?

That’s fine, by reblogging this post and following our blog you would be doing us a huge favor! So, we’ll go through the notes and pick 10 random people who reblogged this post and give them the Secret Code, in addition to anyone who submits fan art to the #Story War tag.

Alright? Cool! Go go go!

(PS: If you’re in NYC, you can come to our playtest on Saturday!)

scottlava:

“Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.”
You can own The Great Showdowns book!

scottlava:

Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.

You can own The Great Showdowns book!