Today at after-camp daycare, we played Life and Death and God.
Basically, it’s the Game of Life but with some alterations created by the six 8-10 year old boys that were there. I was designated writer of The List Of Stuff, aka the list in which anything we currently “possessed” (ie houses, children, pets, spouses, Gifts From God) was listed under our name so we could keep track.
God was played by the one boy who didn’t want to actually play. When I asked him how God was going to fit into the game, he said that God worked in mysterious ways so he could randomly give people News From God whenever he felt like it. We settled that if someone spun a three, they’d receive a miracle, and if they spun a seven, they’d get bad news, and at the end of every round (ie when everyone had had a turn) he could make a new rule for the world.
“Dude, you should’ve prayed more,” God told one boy as he spun a seven. “Your dog got possessed by a demon and ate your baby. You need to get an exorcism. That costs $50,000 and a life card.”
“Aww man,” the unfortunate demon dog owner said. “Not Shark Tooth Junior. She’s my only daughter.” Flips through his money “What if I don’t want to spend money to get an exorcism?”
God shrugged. “Then I guess you can keep a demon dog,” he said, “but it requires a human sacrifice every turn or it’ll eat you.”
The demon dog owner sighed and paid the money, and I crossed off both Shark Tooth Junior and Chicken Strip the dog off his List Of Stuff.
“Congratulations!” God said on another turn. “You’re pregnant!”
“But I’m a man.”
“That’s why it’s a miracle,” God pointed out. “It’s the next Jesus! Also you have to name him Jesus The Second cause I’m God and I say so.”
I was blessed with the ability to turn water into wine at one point, and started a winery as a side business. Both were added to my List Of Stuff.
At one point, not long after he’d had his first child, one of the boys’ mom came to pick him up.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”
“Give me a minute, Mom,” he called back. “I’m dead. We have to read my will.”
Thus proceeded the reading in which I read through his List Of Stuff one by one and he declared who each item/ability/person/animal went to and I then transferred each thing to other Lists Of Stuff.
“Your wife,” I read. “Elizabeth.”
“I’m leaving her to,” he trailed off, tapping his chin as he considered his options. “You, Kee.”
“You can’t give Kee your wife!” another boy protested, one who had already received three of the dead boy’s children. “That’d make her gay!”
“Kee can be gay if she wants to be,” the dead boy pointed out.
“Yeah,” the boy agreed, “but she’s already got a husband.”
“She can have a husband and a wife,” God declared. “It’s called being bisexual. It’s allowed. Plus I’m God, so that makes it double allowed.”
And that was how I ended up receiving everyone’s wives in their wills, and ended up married to my original husband, Lizard, and my four wives, Elizabeth, Lizzy, Eliza, and Shark Tooth (there was a theme that God had declared we had to follow in naming our spouses, a declaration which came after one of the boys had already married Shark Tooth). I had no children of my own, but had eventually received dozens in wills, as I ultimately ended up as the last person left in after-camp.
And yeah. Life and Death and God was definitely a fun time, and I feel like we’ll be playing it again in after-camp tomorrow. It felt a little like dnd, tbh, with God being the dungeon master, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to spice up their Game of Life. You could probably add in a drinking game aspect if you’re not playing with small children, or make like God Cards or something for people to pull from if no one wants to be God.
I wanna be famous, but like how voice actors or authors are famous. I wanna be able to go to conventions and sign stuff and meet people that are way cooler than me but somehow like my work and feel famous but then drive out to Robertitos taco shop for lunch in my Nissan Cube and not have anybody recognize me as I scarf down my chicken burrito and spill hot sauce on my shirt.
#goals
Honestly yeah
I saw an episode once of a 1950s game show that was just the panelists trying to guess which of three guys was Dr. Suess: https://youtu.be/KXR-DKjZKKk
As a small group of white supremacists gathered for their second “Unite the Right” rally, the rain began to fall.
Much
like the sodden pavements outside the White House, the follow up to
last year’s rally in Charlottesville was nothing more than a damp squib.
Organisers
had applied for a permit for as many as 400 people – but in the end
they couldn’t gather much more than 20. The counter-protesters came out
in much larger numbers, a mix of locals with hand-made signs; Black
Lives Matter activists, and also some Antifa – left-wing activists –
dressed head to toe in black.
A man in a Mario mascot suit helps a steamroller operator destroy a shipment of illegal Game Boy games seized at the border in the Netherlands in 1994.
me externally: lit teachers arent pulling text analysis out of their asses
me internally: the reason people and especially students like to blame English for seemingly making up meanings where they cant see it is because literature is an art and art is widely regarded as ‘easy’, ‘anyone can do that’, ‘its stupid and useless’ unlike math and science which are widely regarded as difficult but important subjects so while students will readily admit that they have trouble with math or science they’re more likely to shift the blame when they dont understand a more artistic subject, seeing it as a sign of weakness that they dont get something thats supposed to be dumb and easy rather than seeing it as an important topic that’s just as crucial to their knowledge as any stem subject and just as difficult and in-depth as any math or science can be
today is national wine day and i’m seeing girls as young as 18 joke about being “future wine moms” with their besties and while this is cute and seems funny it also reminds me how normalized overconsumption of alcohol is in our society. it’s a tough thing to talk about because these convos sometimes lead to full out shaming of people who engage in this behaviour. on the other hand, the complete acceptance and normalization of this kind of behaviour is extremely harmful. we live in such a pro-alcohol society that alcohol consumption is even pitched as being “heart healthy” when antioxidant benefits of the grapes in wine don’t even come close to outweighing the destructive properties of alcohol. we have to learn how to discuss substance “vices” – because, let’s face it, drinking, smoking etc are literally always going to be apart of the human experience and will always be apart of our community and our lives – without promoting their absolute acceptance or absolute dissolution. the trend of aggressively shaming people into quitting cigarettes without addressing why specific demographics suffer certain addictions more than others is not beneficial in the grand scheme of limiting self-destructive habits.
we gotta approach a model where we can discuss appropriate limits for all substances without shaming people and using holier than thou rhetoric, but also not making such behaviour marketable and neutralizing its harm with cute memes etc.
As far as I can tell the “wine mom” trope started 12-15 years ago as a rebellion against the pressure to be perfect mothers at all times, but yeah, now the internet is full of women saying “haha I could never deal with my family sober amirite girls?” and I can’t tell which of them are just joking.
Just so everybody knows, this interpretation of the Yale strike is from Fox News. What is actually happening is if a graduate WORKER must stop fasting for health reasons or otherwise collapses, they can start eating and another graduate worker can take their place.
My graduate worker’s union just fought my own university tooth and nail to keep our benefits and make our lives more liveable. Graduate workers and students are paid poverty wages, when we often are supporting our own families while under the poverty line. Don’t let this shitty interpretation of a very real struggle going on in so many US universities color how you view union struggles in higher education.
Can I just say that the response of Kevin Cypher is literally a cookie-cutter of what (explicit) slave owners and slavery apologists used to say??
The idea that people taken away from their families and imprisoned and forced into labor sometimes experience moments of relief when they aren’t being actively punished does not mean they “love” or are “happy” performing countless hours of unpaid fucking labor.
The “happy slave” trope was absolutely disgusting pre-Juneteenth and it’s absolutely disgusting now.
how can you type “they’re happier to be working than sitting in a cage all day” and not realize how fucking evil you sound???
“They’re happier to be risking their lives in an obscenely dangerous wildfire than to be in cages”
That should be an implication of our prisons, not a defense of using prisoners for slave labor
Yes, Avril Lavigne, you can make it more obvious. You literally told me nothing about these two people except their genders and presumingly their young age. They could both be gay, or not even into each other. They could be two complete strangers. They could be living on different continents, or in different time periods. You gotta be more specific.
It’s the fact she then carries on to describe them as “he was a punk, she did ballet” and then says “what more can I say?” and it’s like you still haven’t actually told us anything ffs Avril.
He was a 17th century english prostitute, she danced in the Perm Theater Ballet in Russia in 1893
Wow way to use an archaic meaning of the word ‘punk’ for historical accuracy.
Mooncustafer 