"History. It's Gross"

very tired historian existing on social media

[agilupa]

Pokemon Legends Arceus NPC Guide

Major NPCs for Galaxy Team: Laventon: professor for the galaxy team. Originally from Galar, and was likely the village's outsider previous

Ever been writing a Legends Arceus fanfic, and feel awkward about populating your fic with OCs because you can't remember the names of any of the actual NPCs? No need to worry, as here's a handy dandy guide to what all the NPCs say, and notable character traits!

At the moment, I've not gotten super far, since I had to restart a playthrough. I couldn't find the minor NPC dialouge in the same way that I could for major NPCs, and I reaaaally didn't want to watch a bunch of playthroughs on the off chance relevant dialogue is included. There's not much under the major NPC categories (they talk...so much), and I don't have any Pearl Clan villagers yet.

I will keep adding as I play though! The villagers are alphebetized and you can go right to the one you want via the outline. TBH it's mostly for me, but I'm sure other people might find it useful.

Update: Pearl Clan has been added!

[beardedmrbean]

[frontmansdefender]

RIP to the legend

[silvermoon424]

This goose fucking rocks and had a crazy life!

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

Before and after his death, Thomas has been celebrated as an icon of the LGBTQ+ community for obvious reasons.

[bannertanks]

[dee-the-red-witch]

...so what I'm hearing is that they're horses.

[kittydesade]

Correct

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

you're laughing. charles dickens had a son named plorn and you're laughing

[mediummarketpaperback]

HE HAD A SON NAMED

WHAT

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

Plorn

[mediummarketpaperback]

NICK I LOOKED IT UP AND SAW NOTHING OF THE SORT IS THIS A PRANK

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

technically his name was edward but everyone called him plorn

[mediummarketpaperback]

Edward “Plorn” Dickens. my god.

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

I have something worse

[mediummarketpaperback]

oh???

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[mediummarketpaperback]

imagine getting stuck with the nickname Plorn

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

imagine getting sent to live in the Australian outback when you were sixteen

[mediummarketpaperback]

WHY WERE THEY SO CRUEL TO MY BOY PLORN

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

I have an answer to that one too

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[cogentranting]

The face of a man whose father nicknamed him Plorn.

[elodieunderglass]

Born without a groove 😔

[linguisticparadox]

[telomeke]

With each addition to this, I find myself nodding and murmuring, "Mm hm. The Plorn Dickens."

‌

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[higgsbison]

happy glorious 25th of may

[mammalianmammals]

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / USDA Wildlife Services

[heywriters]

As I am currently working in the antique/vintage "industry" an annoying fact has come to my attention...some sellers think antique and vintage are interchangeable words.

Firstly, though only tangentially relevant, their textbook definitions refer to specific things: antique is used to describe the age of furniture and domestic items, while vintage specifically refers to the age of wine.

But for those of you shopping for old books, home decor, clothes, toys, etc., here are some glossary terms so you can discern whether a seller is informed, clueless, or just plain old lying.

Antique

At least one hundred years old, or close enough. The copy of Anne of Green Gables pictured above was published in 1935, making it nine years shy of being a "true" antique but to the savvy collector it still passes.

Vintage

At least twenty years old, and rarely any younger than that—if it wasn't at least twenty years ago, the nostalgia for it likely hasn't kicked in and it's probably still in circulation. The sewing magazines pictured above range from the 1960s to 1970s.

Vintage "Style"

A brand new item that either reproduces or mimicks an old-fashioned appearance. This is a fair business practice as long as the seller is open about the fact that their product is brand new. Two of the tins pictured above are recent* reproductions of discontinued product containers. The one is the center is a legitimate antique.

Antiqued (verb)

Similar to "vintage style" but with more effort in that an item has been made to look very old, rugged, and weathered, often including faked patina or purposely faded coloring. The above photo is of a 1970s decorative wall spoon that was painted to look a hundred years older—antique styles were a huge influence in the '70s.

Retro/Retro Style

Not a reliable indicator of age, but of current nostalgia. If you see this on a product it is likely referring to something unique to its time period, especially short-lived things like toys, jewelry, clothes, and graphic design styles. Currently this word is used heavily on items in the 1980s–2000s range, but also iconic 1950s–1960s styles. The fast food toys picture above are from the late '90s to early '00s.

Other Labels

"Victorian" frequently, and inaccurately, used to label anything pre‐1940s and post-Medieval, rendering it absolutely meaningless in most cases.

"Y2K" gets tagged on anything from 1990 to 2009. This is inaccurate as y2K is literally in the name, "year 2000." Should only refer to the futuristic pop styles unique to 1999–2001.

"MCM" and "mid century" have also lost meaning. Both are derived from a specific late 1940s–1960s furniture and interior design style known as mid century modern, but are frequently misused to describe any item or style ranging from the 1930s–1980s.

"Art deco/nouveau" these are just style names, not indicators of age. Both styles have also had multiple comebacks, so be aware of that if you are looking for genuine antiques.

"Is any of this writing related?" Sure, if you want it to be. I just wanted to talk about words and history, and hopefully help some folk not get ripped off online. Also, don't blindly trust sellers just because you trust the site. Even sites with good reputations can't weed out every phony.

Entire post dedicated to the lady selling Smurf toys from 1980 as "antiques."

Thanks for reading!

———

*If you consider the '90s "recent."

All photos were taken by me.

[neosilverthorn]

So. For those of you who didn't pay attention to the details of the legal spat between Krafton and Unknown Worlds, allow me to give you some details of the finest legal comedy of a generation.

Krafton CEO looks at the hype surrounding Subnautica 2, goes over the contract between Krafton and Unknown Worlds, realizes he'll have to pay out bonuses and freaks out because shelling out those bonuses will make him look like a pushover.

CEO goes to his legal department, asks them to come up with a plan to weasel out of paying bonuses. Legal tells him the contract is iron-clad and to accept the loss.

CEO refuses to take the loss, asks ChatGPT for a plan. ChatGPT says the exact same thing the legal department did.

CEO demands a plan from ChatGPT, which dutifully spits out a plan at this point because clearly the CEO is a goddamn idiot.

CEO deletes the chat logs, failing to understand that 'delete' doesn't permanently remove things.

CEO follows plan, and is surprised when Unknown Worlds sues for breach of contract despite being told by both humans and an LLM that is exactly what would happen.

Court does not go well for Krafton's legal department. It comes out that after ignoring the sound legal advice of human beings, the CEO went to ChatGPT and asked for a plan. When asked for the logs by the court, Krafton's legal team states they were deleted, thus that it's simply herersay. Judge goes "Oh, that's okay, we'll have our IT folks recover them." Krafton's legal team is astounded that's even possible.

The chat logs are recovered. It comes out that even ChatGPT was in agreement with Krafton's legal department, and only spat out a plan after being asked a second time.

The judge, now thoroughly done with the stupidity of Krafton's CEO at this point, rules in favor of Unknown Worlds. Her ruling doesn't simply undo the scheme, but effectively leaves all control over Subnautica 2's development in the hands of Unknown Worlds, including the early access release date, reducing Krafton to just publishing out of contractual obligation. Krafton must also return all social media platforms for Unknown Worlds and Subnautica 2 to Unknown Worlds' control. Financial damages will be determined at a later date.

Krafton proceeds to violate the court order in less than 72 hours by trying to set an early access release date before returning Unknown Worlds' social media platforms.

Summary: In trying not to look like a pushover, Krafton's CEO now looks like a complete idiot who's going to have to fork over bonuses, plus court-mandated damages, plus whatever comes out of violating the court's orders. Krafton's legal department may as well come to court dressed as clowns after this. I suspect Unknown Worlds might buy the rights to Subnautica back after all this and either relegate Krafton to just publishing or find a different publisher for future games altogether.

[captain-price-returns]

[heyyoufriendthere]

This new fish species is called Snuffleupagus. You can probably guess why | CBC Radio

S. snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus, to which it bear

SNUFFLEUPAGUS REAL

[brightnessrandom]

Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!

It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey

They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!

Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!

Hooray for science and hooray for S. snuffleufagus !

[stahsm]

Overlock Stitch by @clothes_reetzy

[aceinthetrap]

Dynasty Flowchart (Extended) – Nüwa Hanfu

An ultra extended flowchart for identifying dynasties! Even identifying sub-periods of each dynasty. As always, this is a general guide ther

does the makeup look sad or happy? >>> goth & sad >>> middle tang dynasty [lmao]

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

art by Curtis Lanaghan

[libraford]

Are YOU gonna let THE GOVERNMENT tell YOU what YOUR GENDER is? That doesn't sound like Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to me! PROTECT your individual FREEDOMS and call your senator: we want the GOVERNMENT to stay OUT OF OUR PANTS! GENDER FREEDOM NOW!

[libraford]

Two men in your neighborhood are married... to EACH OTHER? Congratulate them for exercising their AMERICAN RIGHT to follow the footsteps of our FOUNDING FATHERS! They've got a fully AMERICAN spirit of FREEDOM and REBELLION! GOD BLESS THE USA.

[libraford]

Your coworker has a different RELIGION from yours? Well, that's just INTERESTING and you should talk about it on your UNION-APPROVED LUNCH BREAK. The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA was FOUNDED on Freedom of Religion and ANYONE should be allowed to seek the AMERICAN DREAM!

[libraford]

You think someone might be in this GREAT country ILLEGALLY? NO YOU DON'T! No one is in this country illegally! The minute anyone steps on our SOVEREIGN SOIL they're your FELLOW AMERICAN and where they come from is NO ONES BUSINESS.

[rosslynpaladin]

it's funny yeah, but guys this is actually how you reach the people who prefer these terms to frame all things Good and Correct.

[rosszulorzott]

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[twinklecupcake]

Suddenly thinking of 1989’s The Little Mermaid and you know what, give Eric some props here because he had the weirdest fucking hour of his life—

Wakes up from hypnosis where he was about to marry a woman he’s never seen before with his mystery girl’s voice, the instant he wakes up then the cute girl he’s actually fallen in love with now has that voice. Then she drops to the floor and has a fish tail, and then the first girl is suddenly cackling “too late!” and bursting out of her skin. So it turns out she’s actually an octopus woman who drags herself over to the real mystery girl - who’s a mermaid?! They’re real?! - and taking her back into the ocean. And Eric has no idea what’s going on here but okay, one of these women is clearly evil and he needs to go after his mystery girl.

And all of this happens/he realizes what he has to do within like, a single minute.

Prior to this he was just living out a sweet romance after having a Meet Cute with a shipwrecked girl, but okay, guess he’s involved in whatever the fuck this is. Acting first, questioning later.

And this is all before the kaiju attacks.

[twinklecupcake]

And let's also remember that Eric is one of the few Disney heroes who actively, deliberately murdered the villain.

He went "Okay then" and killed.