"I want," the man said to the art robot, and then described an image in some detail.
"Certainly," said the art robot. A printout came out of its chest.
"Thank y- Hey! What's this?"
"A list of artists who make images of the kind you describe, and who are accepting commissions."

This is a horror story to a techbro and a feel-good comedy to anyone with a sense of human decency.

An Accessible Treetop Walkway Gracefully Winds Through Norway’s Hamaren Activity Park

@sparklingjohannasaesthetics

Looking at my microscope and saying "fascinating. you should really see this" and when you go to look down the eye piece the microbes on the slide I'm examining are creating a perfect copy of bad apple

i could not survive in ancient greece i would be spending all my money on red figure kraters or whatever. my husband would come home like where did all of the funds for influencing votes go and i'd be like honey look this amphora's got achilles and ajax playing dice on it

my wealthy husband: i thought i had some drachmas stashed away over here

the pottery i just bought with my husband's drachmas featuring an owl dressed up like a soldier:

Victorian Sun Costume 🌞

Things that real life sex has taught me that isn't in porn :

• Shaking during sex, no no, not her legs, him. Yeah. It happens to men too, from anticipation and excitement. I only had one partner who used to have that sometimes and the first time it freaked me out lol.
• Queefing, that has to happen at least once during sex, I mean, air goes in, sorry but it's gonna have to come out.
• Going too deep actually hurts, oh my fucking god lol. IYKYK. Hitting the cervix feels like ... hmmm. Dying. Yeah, death. Like I felt your penis in my actual guts and now I need to throw up because the cramping is horrendous. Thanks, don't do that again. Does the chick in porn not have a cervix or??? I have literally thrown up from this before, it is the most painful thing I have ever experienced during sex, hands down.
• That he might lose his boner mid-sex, this one's a big one lol pun intended. And uh, it might not be your fault. Actually most of the time it isn't. And guys, if it does happen, please communicate, it's really not a big deal, at least not for me, Im down to help, and also I can feel it getting softer okay lol don't be lying.
• Sometimes it can be painful for the guy too, this one's more common for men who have foreskin, at least in my experience.
• That you can get your period mid-sex, oh man. A sad moment for all of us. But here's the thing, when you're orgasming, everything contracts, and your uterus will contract and unfortunately if you were expecting it, welp, here it is. So yeah, it happens. But that's pretty great, personally i'm able to make my period come faster by masturbating over and over, true story (only if its a day or two away).
• You can probably orgasm but it's not a given, or taking way longer than you thought. I have ridden dick like my life depended on it because I was felt it annnnnnnnnd it was gone, annnnnd it's back, noooope it's gone.
• Related to the last point, looking cute when orgasming, sweetie listen, I look like I ran a marathon and like Im about to die (plus im a smoker, imagine that). So that lady in porn who's like *cute voice* oohh I'm coming! ... idk about you but I don't look cute when im about to cum super hard lol.
• Stopping mid-sex because you don't feel like it anymore.
• Sometimes it takes forever to get a condom or to put it on, relax dude, no one's judging you, I would rather you don't give me an std or a baby so take your time.
• There's no shame in asking to put a towel down, fluids, we have those, and we have a lot of those, and sometimes, some of us can unexpectedly squirt, whatever tf that fluid is, it's gonna go everywhere.
• That female lubrication can have a different color/texture depending on where she's at in her cycle/if she has an infection.
• Sex is smelly.
• A lot of us moan louder than we actually want to, to help you out. I have done that before, when bored or when the guy was doing something I didn't really enjoy but he did. Whatever, hey at least I've never faked an orgasm, Im literally not giving you that lol if you suck, you suck sorry. Now ... the reason you prob shouldn't do that is that he's gonna think he's doing something good, when really he isn't. Then he's gonna have sex with someone else, and do the same shit, and she's also not gonna cum. Don't be the reason another lady can't have an orgasm ok.
• That trying different positions isn't super glamorous. Some hurt, some don't feel like anything, some are awkward. Just because your bestie swears by reverse cowgirl, doesn't mean it'll work for you.
• That it's ok to stop and take a water and snack break, sorry one sec, Im hypoglycemic.
• That a lot of the time when you get fucked hard enough, you're shifting, like, quite a bit, and next thing you know you're almost falling off the bed, it's not cute, who cares.
• That sex can be awkward, uncomfortable, painful, not enjoyable, and that all of that is normal.

I love the blatent honesty in this. Hey kids, it’s Real World issues. Deal with it.

And for the record, I think almost falling off of the bed is hysterical. :)

I love this....

Adding this: some people have nerves set up in such a way that hitting the cervix isn't painful (or as painful, depending on how hard hit is or the time of the month or etc., etc.,)

Just because something hurts for one person doesn't mean it does for everyone -- this also goes in reverse. Just because one partner with a cervix enjoyed getting it pounded into oblivion doesn't mean all of your partners will.

Your body is not the blue print.

Every single time I see a list of PIV sex tips it includes "don't use super-deep, super-hard strokes because NOBODY likes that, it hurts EVERYBODY," and that's just not true! There's not even any guarantee that going super-deep will hit the cervix at all -- the uterus may sit at an angle that prevents direct contact. There's also an erogenous zone, like the G-spot but further in, that may respond very well to hard stimulation. If you have a friend who's a size queen and you don't understand it, that very well may be why.

That being said I would probably not go for the deepest possible dicking right off the bat, that's something to work up to. Enough people have this type of issue that I think you're better off keeping things moderate unless and until your partner yells "HARDER, DAMN YOUR EYES" and attempts to ride you to the coast.

I think there should be more awareness that a dick does not become fully hard all at once and then remain exactly that hard all the way through sex. It's sensitive to all kinds of changes in the body and will sometimes begin to go soft for its own personal reasons that it will not be sharing with the rest of the class. Often it's that the position doesn't provide much stimulation, which is usually down to an anatomical mismatch that you wouldn't know about until it happened, but it could be any number of mental or physical factors. Maybe your partner needs a breather. Maybe they were getting too much stimulation and their skin's starting to get sensitive. Shit, maybe they just got a cramp in their leg and it hurts like a bitch. It almost never means that you did something wrong or they don't think you're sexy anymore.

I think the other thing I would say is that internal shapes themselves can change based on hormone levels -- nothing super drastic, the womb is not literally wandering, but small changes in blood flow and fluid retention can have a big impact. There may well be some days where it literally hits different.

William Edward Stott - A Snow Storm (ca. 1891)

I do have to impress on anyone who wasn't around for it how batshit the reality boom of the 2000s could be. Especially on Fox.

Here are some 100% real 2000s reality shows:

• Who's Your Daddy? A woman has to guess which of eight men is her biological father. One of them really is, and if she guesses right she wins $100,000. If one of the seven fake dads convinces her to guess them, he wins $100,000.
• Black. White. A white family learns about racism by living a month in blackface, while a black family spends a month in whiteface. The black family was a real family, but the white family was just some actors hired to put on blackface to prove racism exists
• Without Prejudice? Five strangers decide which of five strangers gets a cash prize based off clips and their answers to political questions. Cancelled when one of the choosers openly said he'd eliminate all black contestants
• Welcome to the Neighborhood. Three conservative white families in a Austin subdivision decide which diverse family gets to move in. Unaired due to being literal housing discrimination
• Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay. Two straight men try to pass themselves off as gay and whoever seems more gay gets $50,000. Unaired due to. Due to. Due to
• Playing It Straight. A woman tries to find love among fourteen men, half of whom are straight and half of whom are gay, and she must eliminate two men she believes are gay each week. If she ended up picking a straight man in the end, they'd split a million dollars; if she picked a gay man, he'd win a million dollars
• Boy Meets Boy. This was Playing It Straight but starring a gay man and he had to eliminate straight people
• Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? He wasn't a multimillionaire. He didn't even have a million dollars in liquid assets. He had a battery conviction Fox claims they didn't see. Because it was the 2000s, somehow this ended up with the woman he won being widely vilified and turned into a national punchline. How dare she complain about a massive corporation tricking her into marrying a lying abuser, good thing Matt Lauer's there to take her down a peg
• The Swan. A "ugly" woman is given plastic surgery and wins a prize if she's the hottest at the end of the season. If she's not hot enough by the show's standards she's eliminated and called ugly on national TV
• The Biggest Loser. Overweight people engage in competitive crash weight loss that often led to awful health complications. Studies showed basically everyone on the show regained any weight they lost once it was over and they didn't have abusive trainers demanding they take huge health risks to win a competitive weight loss competition. Like the others, this one was cancel-oh, it was a massive hit that ran for 18 seasons? Yikes!
• Wife Swap and Trading Spouses. These were the same show and had a wife from one family go to another family that was different politically, racially, culturally, religiously etc. Most famous for the God Warrior

At the time people focused on the likes of Fear Factor but looking back it's wild how many of the worst shows toyed with politics. So many of these shows have a premise that's like "what if we exposed these conservatives to these people they hate?" or hyping themselves up as Important Experiments. Then they'd freak out when they got the kind of viral bigoted freakout they were trying to construct the whole time.

There were also a bunch of horrible reality shows, thankfully this time mostly unpopular, in the 2010s that based themselves around economic themes as a response to the market crash, but that's a story for another time

For the notes: these shows all predate the 2007-8 writers' strike. They're not ~because of the strike~. The early 2000s were just. That awful.

Amish Mafia.

Amish. Mafia.

This was a thing that existed.

Fuck. Now I'm starting to remember the Amish Mafia commercials and how dumb they were.

if I must suffer, so must you all!

And remember, the guy who came up with that show is the guy whose currently in charge of Warner Brothers.

Yes, the guy who axed the Batgirl movie, who is pulling all your favorite animated shows off of Streaming to save a buck, its the guy behind this bullshit.

gundam freaking wing