We Don't Need a Stinking Title

History and Literature Geek. Teacher. Husband. Father. Hispanic. Feminist. Socialist. General threat to society.

[horreurscopes]

starting a collection for my anthropology class can you guys send me more posts like these

[zarohk]

Look in my #nacirema tag!

[were--ralph]

cant stop thinking about this video

[were--ralph]

For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty

[sexygaywizard]

[things-about-cars-in-posts]

oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.

[draculasdaughter]

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

[three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat]

Listen, this is serious.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?

[whateverthebeeswant]

Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.

[three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat]

Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.

[teachingtales]

Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid

[professionalwritingnerd]

[irockasingranite]

Another inside tip from academia: Those papers in really expensive journals that are effectively inaccessible to anyone not in a university network? Depending on the discipline it’s very likely that same paper is on a “preprint” server somewhere, with no access restrictions.

Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.

So the next time you get hit with that paywall, you may not even need sci-hub, just click the arxiv link on google scholar instead.

[twinkenjoyer-deactivated2023083]

if for some reason none of this works, the old “send a email nicely asking for the paper to the author” is always a good trick. remember most scientists hate the commercialisation of scientific knowledge

[afoxwithpenguins]

Don’t mind me, just gotta share this with my bf so that he knows what websites to avoid

[astudyinpanda]

Many authors of papers are on ResearchGate! You can ask for papers there, if they don’t just post a copy to download. If they’re associated with a college, you can usually find their email addresses in the department directory, also.

[viking369]

Always reblog.

[digg]

[tenaflyviper]

If you can’t find a place on your blog for Patrick Stewart in a bathtub dressed like a lobster, then your blog probably doesn’t deserve such majesty anyway.

[revdrfrog]

It has returned to my dash and I cannot fight the compulsion to reblog…

[dreaming-jaybird]

the patrick lobster appears only once in a thousand years, reblog for good luck

[sidoniemoon]

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

[alexanderwales]

The king had six daughters, and they were all quite rebellious.

But by the time the sixth daughter came of age, the king had a handle on it. The avenues for rebellion were all well-trod.

The sixth princess had watched her eldest sister break the bonds of arranged marriage, instead settling down with a stablehand she had grown to love. The next eldest had become a pirate, ranging the seas in a ship with a black flag, a loyal crew of women at her command, before eventually the king had relented and granted her a charter to operate as a privateer. The third daughter had become a scholar, breaking the kingdom's taboo against a woman learning, and founded a college that began attracting plenty of talent, both male and female. The fourth daughter became a swamp hag, and the fifth daughter became the captain of the royal guard.

All of which left the sixth daughter with nothing to rebel against.

"I'm going to travel the world," she said.

"Oh, that will be nice," said the king. "To travel the world is a wonderful thing, will you want accompaniment or will you go it alone?"

The sixth princess huffed and didn't continue the conversation.

"I'm going to capture and ride a unicorn," she said the next morning.

"That seems difficult," said the king. "Will you want training or equipment, perhaps some expertise from your sisters?"

"I want to do it alone," she said.

"I suppose that's fine," said the king.

And the princess did make some tentative plans to hunt down a unicorn and tame it. She read through some books and consulted the court huntress. But it stopped grabbing her, and she let the topic drop.

Finally one day she came to breakfast with her father, looking glum.

"What's wrong, sweet pea?" he asked.

"There is nothing to rebel against," she said. "There's nothing that I could say that would shock you."

"Isn't that a good thing?" asked the king. "Your sisters blazed trails. The kingdom has reached heights I couldn't have dreamed of when I took the crown. You have no duties but those you choose for yourself, you are not barred from any path."

The sixth princess frowned. "Can I say something, and have you not laugh?"

"Yes," said the king.

"I am a thunderstorm," said the princess. "And everyone has umbrellas and raincoats. I am a burning match with no tinder to catch on. I was to explode, only there's no direction to explode toward, nothing that I can do, that I would want to do, that you wouldn't simply say 'that's nice dear, how can I help' to. My sisters have taken all the good rebellions."

"Hrm," said the king. "You do know that your eldest sister rejected arranged marriage for good, principled reasons?"

The sixth princess folded her arms. "Yes."

"And your other sister," said the king. "She did not join a lesbian pirate polycule out of a desire to be contrary. She genuinely was a lesbian with a strong desire not to be confined to a single lover."

"I know," said the sixth princess. "But ... she was a little contrary, wasn't she?"

"I find it difficult to tell," said the king. "But I suspect that when you think your father is being a pig's ear, any contrary impulses are greatly magnified. But tell me, do you think I'm being a pig's ear?"

The sixth princess considered that. "No."

"Well, good," said her father. "Perhaps I've learned something over the course of raising your five sisters."

The princess sat with that for a while, stirring her porridge without eating it. "I suppose," she said finally, "that I wanted to be special. To do something that would make people remember me, the way they remember my sisters."

"Ah," said the king, and there was real understanding in his voice. "That's rather different from rebellion, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

"Your sisters didn't do what they did to be remembered. They did what they did because they couldn't imagine doing anything else. Your eldest sister couldn't bear the thought of not marrying for love. Your second couldn't imagine a life lived on land, bound to convention. Your third couldn't stop asking questions, your fourth couldn't resist the call of wild magic, and your fifth… well, she just really liked hitting things with swords."

The princess couldn't help but laugh at that.

"The thing about rebellion," the king continued, "is that it's not about being contrary. It's about being true to yourself, even when the world tells you that you shouldn't be. So perhaps the question isn't what you can do that would shock me, but what you want to do that would make you happy, regardless of what anyone else thinks."

"I suppose that I wanted to be special," she said. "To have people remember me, to stand out."

"Ah," said the king. "That's rather different from rebellion, isn't it?"

"Is it?" The princess set her spoon down. "Bess didn't have to become a pirate. She could have just ... been gay. And she certainly didn't need to steal that first ship. Or paint it black. Or rename it 'The King's Folly'."

The king winced slightly. "I suppose there you have a point."

"And Danica," said the princess. "She told me she was incensed that you called bog magic 'unladylike'. There was definitely a lot of spite involved."

"Yes, well…" The king cleared his throat. "Perhaps I shouldn't have said that."

"My point is," said the princess, "that being contrary was part of it. Maybe even a big part. They wanted to do their own thing, yes, but they also wanted to… to…"

"Stick it to their old dad?" asked the king.

"Yes," nodded the princess. "But there's nothing to rebel against anymore."

"What do you want?" asked the king. "Do you know?"

"I want to not feel like this," sighed the princess. "I want to not feel like all the good stories are taken, like I'm not special, like I have no purpose."

"Alas," said the king. "I'm afraid that's something you'll have to work through on your own."

[winged-light]

"Well," said the vizier when she came to him with her problem. "Have you considered ruling well?"

She looked at him like he was crazy.

"You could agree to an arranged marriage to whoever would be most politically convenient," the vizier added. "Learn embroidery and dance and comportment and all the intricacies of court intrigue - all the things a princess is supposed to know. I'll teach you those skills, if you like. Use them to gather allies and information. Use that to improve the land for its people."

"That doesn't sound very rebellious," the princess said uncertainly. "Actually I'm pretty sure all that's the opposite of rebellious."

"Oh?" the vizier asked with a raised eyebrow. "So you're telling me it's the opposite of what you feel like you're supposed to want?"

The princess snorted in a slightly unprincesslike manner. "Nice wordplay, but you're not getting me with that. I don't think anything you say will convince me embroidery is rebellious, or that it helps... make the realm better for my subjects."

"Okay, so don't do embroidery. What about logistics? Learning the kingdom's shipping routes, how many tonnes of grain it takes to feed the city, how high the taxes on cheese or rubies need to be to fund the city watch. Teenage rebellion will be remembered for a few years, princess. A great queen who feeds her people and makes her kingdom great would be remembered for lifetimes. It would be difficult to feed all the hungry in your kingdom; it would take all your fire and thunderstorm, and then some."

"I'm not going to inherit," the princess hesitated. "I'm the sixth daughter."

"Do you really think your elder siblings want the throne?" the vizier said with a sudden, startled chuckle. "No. All the good stories might be taken, but very few of the great ones are. Great stories are very hard to tell, and very few people want to try."

The princess considered the challenge of trying to feed every hungry peasant in the kingdom. Then trying to keep peace on all her borders, offer justice to everyone wronged, educate the children of her realm, keep all their wells and rivers clean, treat every sick person... it was an impossible task. And if she failed in her rebellion against its impossibility, she wouldn't just be grounded or shouted at; it would be a price paid in lives.

A price, she realised, she was already paying every day.

"...okay, I'll give that a try," the princess answered. "But no arranged marriages. The political benefits aren't worth the hours of sleep I'd lose over it, and I'm going to need all the sleep I can get."

[wizard-of-interesting-failure]

"You will need knowledge, first and foremost," said the court wizard when she sought him out the next day, unsure of where to begin. "Of the challenges faced by the humblest of your people, and of the means by which they might be solved."

The princess opened her mouth to speak, but the wizard carried right on talking as he often did. "And strength of arms by land and sea, of course," he mused, stroking his voluminous beard, "for knowledge of the means is dust if they cannot be carried out."

The princess frowned as silence emanated from the ancient mage, opening her mouth only when she was sure he was done.

"Oh! And a touch of magic, naturally, always essential when attempting the impossible," he said with a playful wink. "I'm far too busy with my wizardly duties, of course, but I just so happen to know five people who might be able to help you out with all that..."

[animentality]

[weaselle]

Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.

[ruinedchildhood]

A guy in China built a fully working subway system and station for his cats

[sweetwithheatwriting]

@copperbadge @hellenhighwater

[copperbadge]

The scale of this really threw me off for about half of the video, but it's a really fascinating setup and I love how creative these folks get for their cats :D

[cruzfucker]

[1canadanus1]

Omg this is just like one of Pliny's letters.

When I am in the courts I frequently find myself regretting Marcus Regulus, though I hardly mean to say that I want him back again. Why then, you may ask, do I regret him? For these reasons. He used to hold the profession in great respect; he used to be nervous and anxious to succeed and write out his speeches beforehand, though he could never thoroughly commit them to memory. Even his practice of smearing ointment over either his right or left eye - the former if he were appearing for the plaintiff, and the latter when he was pleading for a defendant - and his habit of changing the white patch from one eyebrow to the other, and consulting the soothsayers as to how his cases would go, though due to gross superstition on his part, were also to be partly explained by the great regard in which he held our profession. Again, his other practice of always demanding that we should be allowed to speak as long as we desired, and the way in which he succeeded in getting an audience together, were very gratifying to those who were engaged in the same cases as he was.

Pliny the Younger Letters 6.2

[1canadanus1]

Everyone's reblogging my addition and I didn't even put in the best part of the letter!

However, be that as it may, Regulus did well to die, and he would have done better still if he had died earlier.

[spidergirl-fibula]

*grips your shoulders* do not stay online too long. do not engage in discourse. do not read marx. you have to get out and touch grass and realize everyone outside is normal. just be normal like them. just be like me. ill fucking kill you

[spidergirl-fibula]

brainrotten degens on the internet: "imperialism capitalism tma/tme misogynoir class war orientalism"

people in real life: hey hows it going. I'd kill you if someone told me to

[jumese]

i step out onto stage clad in full corpse paint and death metal regalia and start playing the most middle-of-the-road soft rock you've heard since 1974

[jumese]

[deirdreskye]

[wilwheaton]

someone finally admitted it

[teaboot]

The only downside to talking to small children like they’re normal people and treating them like normal people (as per my mom) is that as they develop into bigger children they are viscerally aware of every single moment in which they are pandered to like stupid little accessories (as per my dad, my teacher, the special ed aide, every adult in my middle school) and you end up getting a lot of phone calls from people reporting your kid for (checks notes) “undermining authority”, “disrupting the classroom environment”, “disobeying elder peers”, and “unionizing the grade eleven gym class with intent to incite a mutiny” (as per me) and you end up with a Grown Adult who will absolutely encourage and enable other people’s children to fuck the sustem

[teaboot]

Anyhow the most empowering shit you can say to a kid in my experience has to be

“Wow that adult was being a jerk”

“That sounds really frustrating”

”Good job handling that, I would have lost my mind”

“It’s cool, I don’t expect you to remember me”

“You don’t have to hug me if you don’t want to”

“Yeah sometimes (authority figure you can’t avoid) doesn’t know what they’re talking about, it’s not your fault, just do your best”

“I don’t totally understand what you mean but I get that you’re upset, is there anything I can do?”

”Wanna go yell and break stuff with me?”

“You don’t need to be friends with that kid as long as you can still be polite”

“If an adult tells you to do something that will get you hurt, you don’t have to listen.”

“My number one goal is to keep you safe, but I don’t know everything and sometimes I’m wrong, so let me know if I make a mistake.”

“Man. Today sucked.”

“Yeah I also kinda wanna cry right now”

“Whoops, yeah, my bad”

“I don’t know the answer to that but we can probably figure it out”

[girlnextvore]

this sims 2 ad has like such deep gay energy to it. Like this feels like queer history to me

[boingmann]

[hoodiegal]

The funny thing is that it wasn't even an intentional stance taking. They just forgot to code a check to make sure characters genders "matched", resulting in that characters could get into relationships regardless of gender.

[fungaljungal]

What the hell are you talking about? They didn't forget anything. A programmer for the sims 1 was a gay man who programmed gay relationships into the game and they kept adding it back, intentionally, in each game.

[json-derulo]

Actually, you’re both correct. It was an accident and a deliberate decision by one gay developer:

“During The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before—at least, to this extent—and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code.

When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the game’s lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. Jim Mackraz, Barrett’s boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work; the underlying rules for the game’s A.I. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. “He didn’t think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least I’d be out of his hair,” Barrett told me. “Neither he nor I realized that he’d given me an old design document to work from.”

That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. “In hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,” Barrett, who is gay, said. “But the design felt right, so I just implemented it. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,” Barrett said. “He told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.” Nobody on the team questioned Barrett’s work. “They just pretty much ignored it,” he said. “After a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. It was widely expected that E.A. would just kill it, anyway.”

In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.

On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.”

- from The Kiss That Changed Video Games by Simon Parker

[blignick]

[arrghigiveup]

TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

[drst]

These are my people.

[petermorwood]

Betting I’ve reblogged this before. Betting I’ll reblog it when it turns up again.

In addition to the print terminology stuff: the visual shorthand icons and ad graphics for something about writing are still often pen-nibs, fountain pens and typewriters…

…while graphics of a monitor, keyboard and mouse remain visual shorthand for computing…

…even though most writers now use monitor /  keyboard / mouse or even laptop / touchpad.

In addition, headers for “this blog / website is about writing” are often in one of the many imitation typewriter fonts complete with smudges, or just Courier.

The start and end call icons on most / all smartphones is still the handset of a classic desk telephone, and sometimes the open-app icon is a complete phone.

The term “hang up” for “end the call” refers to something even older - one of these…

And of course the Save icon is indeed a 3½ inch floppy disc.

Why it wasn’t a 5¼ floppy is a mystery. The icon version is just as distinctive.

Also, why various OP updates never changed “Save” to the graphic of a CD / DVD or flash drive is another mystery, and nowadays a Save icon should probably be a cartoon cloud.

Graphics and terminology are funny things.

[nehirose]

reblogging this again for EVEN MORE information.

[porcupine-girl]

I’m mostly entertained by the guy who thinks you need to know that “case” means “box” in French as though that’s not what it means in English.

[catgirlforeskin]

skeumorphism my beloved

[bizships]

It’s fascinating. This post alternately made me feel old and taught me something. Tumblr is amazing.

[prismatic-bell]

@derinthescarletpescatarian

[through-gayas-eyes]

"One of the coolest examples of creative living that I’ve seen in recent years, for instance, came from my friend Susan, who took up figure skating when she was forty years old. To be more precise, she actually already knew how to skate. She had competed in figure skating as a child and had always loved it, but she’d quit the sport during adolescence when it became clear she didn’t have quite enough talent to be a champion. (Ah, lovely adolescence—when the “talented” are officially shunted off from the herd, thus putting the total burden of society’s creative dreams on the thin shoulders of a few select souls, while condemning everyone else to live a more commonplace, inspiration-free existence! What a system . . . )

For the next quarter of a century, my friend Susan did not skate. Why bother, if you can’t be the best? Then she turned forty. She was listless. She was restless. She felt drab and heavy. She did a little soul-searching, the way one does on the big birthdays. She asked herself when was the last time she’d felt truly light, joyous, and—yes—creative in her own skin. To her shock, she realized that it had been decades since she’d felt that way. In fact, the last time she’d experienced such feelings had been as a teenager, back when she was still figure skating. She was appalled to discover that she had denied herself this life-affirming pursuit for so long, and she was curious to see if she still loved it.

So she followed her curiosity. She bought a pair of skates, found a rink, hired a coach. She ignored the voice within her that told her she was being self-indulgent and preposterous to do this crazy thing. She tamped down her feelings of extreme self-consciousness at being the only middle-aged woman on the ice, with all those tiny, feathery nine-year-old girls.

She just did it.

Three mornings a week, Susan awoke before dawn and, in that groggy hour before her demanding day job began, she skated. And she skated and skated and skated. And yes, she loved it, as much as ever. She loved it even more than ever, perhaps, because now, as an adult, she finally had the perspective to appreciate the value of her own joy. Skating made her feel alive and ageless. She stopped feeling like she was nothing more than a consumer, nothing more than the sum of her daily obligations and duties. She was making something of herself, making something with herself.

It was a revolution. A literal revolution, as she spun to life again on the ice—revolution upon revolution upon revolution . . .

Please note that my friend did not quit her job, did not sell her home, did not sever all her relationships and move to Toronto to study seventy hours a week with an exacting Olympic-level skating coach. And no, this story does not end with her winning any championship medals. It doesn’t have to. In fact, this story does not end at all, because Susan is still figure skating several mornings a week—simply because skating is still the best way for her to unfold a certain beauty and transcendence within her life that she cannot seem to access in any other manner. And she would like to spend as much time as possible in such a state of transcendence while she is still here on earth."

From : BIG MAGIC - creative living beyond fear. By Elizabeth Gilbert.

[queer-as-city-folk]

People in this US city are considered uniquely bad and aggressive drivers

what is Cincinnati

what is Atlanta

what is Boston

what is Philadelphia

what is LA

Voting ended onSep 7, 2025

[massachusetts-official]

Official Poll of Massachusetts