noise dept.
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Mike Driver
DEAR READER
wallacepolsom
roma★
shark vs the universe
★
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
taylor price
@theartofmadeline
tumblr dot com
Game of Thrones Daily
AnasAbdin
ojovivo
Misplaced Lens Cap
Origami Around
Keni
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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@ahzuri
The bus, patch notes:
Infinite Felatio Glitch has been patched out
Bus Driver now 5% more likely to make sure you pay
Increased odds of the bus driver skipping your stop by 3%
Added the weird guy trying to make chit chat back onto 7 routes
they call it amtrak because the trains am on the trak
I felt bad accepting financial aid for my medication, but also, I DID NEED THE FINANCIAL AID. so maybe that’s alright.
and now I can finally get my immunosuppressants and pay zero dollars for them, so that’s good!
this is very good advice, boosting this so more people can see
I'm also mad at myself for not accepting assistance on another medication. to be fair, I was in a better financial spot when I started it, but also I think my too-literal brain interpreted the question as "would your card bounce if you tried to pay for this?" and not "would you benefit from aid?"
Trying to keep myself from going "oh my god you people don' t know anything" by reminding myself that there are surely things that you don't just know, but consider such common knowledge that it wouldn't occur to you at all to consider that I wouldn't know that. I'd ask y'all to share some, but how the fuck would you know what is and isn't common knowledge to anyone else.
once in a theatre class i was reading a midsummer nights dream with another student and towards the end of the play there’s like a eunuch? she asked what that was and i had a moment of complete bafflement that someone would have never encountered the term before. then i remembered that the sheer amount of fantasy books id consumed in my life was probably what gave me that knowledge
I've had a couple of therapists and the one I liked best was a trainee about to graduate the master's program because she was very close to me in age, however at one point I had to tell her what a schoolmarm was and I felt 107 years old
reblog if you’re anti censorship and against harassing real people over fictional characters
The hate I have seen expressed against real humans in defence of people who don’t exist is unreal. Calling other fans “cockroaches” or wishing that “half the fandom would die” because they criticized words on a page or images on a screen is unhinged.
The slimy strings from okra and the gel from fenugreek seeds can trap microplastics better than the slightly-toxic synthetic polymer in use.
"The substances behind the slimy strings from okra and the gel from fenugreek seeds could trap microplastics better than a commonly used synthetic polymer.
Texas researchers proposed in 2022 using these sticky natural polymers to clean up water. Now, they’ve found that okra and/or fenugreek extracts attracted and removed up to 90% of microplastics from ocean water, freshwater, and groundwater.
With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Rajani Srinivasan and colleagues at Tarleton State University found that the plant-based polymers from okra, fenugreek, and tamarind stick to microplastics, clumping together and sinking for easy separation from water.
In this next stage of the research, they have optimized the process for okra and fenugreek extracts and tested results in a variety of types of water.
To extract the sticky plant polymers, the team soaked sliced okra pods and blended fenugreek seeds in separate containers of water overnight. Then, researchers removed the dissolved extracts from each solution and dried them into powders.
Analyses published in the American Chemical Society journal showed that the powdered extracts contained polysaccharides, which are natural polymers. Initial tests in pure water spiked with microplastics showed that:
One gram of either powder in a quart (one liter) of water trapped microplastics the most effectively.
Dried okra and fenugreek extracts removed 67% and 93%, respectively, of the plastic in an hour.
A mixture of equal parts okra and fenugreek powder reached maximum removal efficiency (70%) within 30 minutes.
The natural polymers performed significantly better than the synthetic, commercially available polyacrylamide polymer used in wastewater treatment.
Then the researchers tested the plant extracts on real microplastic-polluted water. They collected samples from waterbodies around Texas and brought them to the lab. The plant extract removal efficiency changed depending on the original water source.
Okra worked best in ocean water (80%), fenugreek in groundwater (80-90%), and the 1:1 combination of okra and fenugreek in freshwater (77%).
The researchers hypothesize that the natural polymers had different efficiencies because each water sample had different types, sizes and shapes of microplastics.
Polyacrylamide, which is currently used to remove contaminants during wastewater treatment, has low toxicity, but its precursor acrylamide is considered toxic. Okra and fenugreek extracts could serve as biodegradable and nontoxic alternatives.
“Utilizing these plant-based extracts in water treatment will remove microplastics and other pollutants without introducing additional toxic substances to the treated water,” said Srinivasan in a media release, “thus reducing long-term health risks to the population.”
She had previously studied the use of food-grade plant extracts as non-toxic flocculants to remove textile-based pollutants from wastewater and thought, ‘Why not try microplastics?’"
-via Good News Network, May 10, 2025
#my mother will be so pleased to learn theyve found a use for okra
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
I don't know which of you needs to hear this but "narc" is not short for "narcissist" when someone calls you a "narc" for snitching they are calling you a "narcotics officer"
technically narc isnt even short for narcotics officer its just cant for Cop, I believe Roma in origin
I read years ago in a book that it was derived from nakk, Romani for nose, as in someone who always has their nose in other people's business
ITS DERIVED FROM "NARCO" AS IN "NARCOTICS" WHAT FUCKING BOOK
Okay you know what pulling back on my derision because i can see how this mistake would be made but narc and nark are etymologically unrelated
Etymology is always doing some shit like this
Convergent evolution.
Linguistic crab
Two entire linguistic traditions have merged to remind you not to be a fuckin narc
reblog to summon godzilla directly into washington dc
something that made me sit down and stare at my wall for an hour
point of reference from an able-bodied person: standing in one place for an hour kinda makes my feet/legs hurt. longer than that is when it really hits but it takes an hour to get there.
if you are in pain within minutes or seconds, that is not normal. that is a Symptom. poke your doctor into finding out what it is or connect with disabled and chronic pain groups.
if you are in extreme pain, not just "ugh my feet ache" pain but "i am going to pass out" pain, that is not normal. that is a Symptom. poke your doctor into finding out what it is or connect with disabled and chronic pain groups.
I know some people try to rationalize as "well it's not excruciating compared to my baseline" and I am gently reminding you that the baseline is zero. zero is normal. this ^ is not. be kind to yourself.
AN HOUR???????
"walking for 15 minutes makes the bones in my calves hurt for 2 hours"
buddy... that's the Symptoms...
... Wait, what?
I mean, I can walk just fine, but standing in one spot for like 15 to 20 minutes will leave me in pain for days.
That is... not normal?
I love how everyone is still asking hey so my symptoms are actually symptoms? Even if I feel only x amount of pain after x amount of time? BUDDY THE NORM IS FEELING MILD DISCOMFORT AT MOST AFTER STANDING FOR AN HOUR AND THEY RECOVER WITHIN A FEW HOURS TO A DAY
That moment when you’re reading a fic and your OTP finally hooks up
That gif is literally perfect
#I reblogged this in 2013
this tag dealt me psychic damage thanks
#i’m putting it in the queue to give you psychic damage again later#your post is old enough to be in middle school
@kirihana CURSE YOU
Sometimes there's a bit of water gathering around your hot water heater so you're like "oh that might be a problem I'll call a guy" and after two hours of staring at Multiple Building Code Violations the plumbers regretfully inform you that the not only does the hot water heater need to be decommissioned and replaced in an entirely different location (with new electricity, gas and water lines put in) but you have a Mysterious Gas Leak *somewhere* in the labyrinth of (off-code) gas pipes that are made of sub-par materials that shouldn't still be working and your entire gas line system also needs to be replaced with copper (up to code, expensive).
Fortunately the only gas appliance I still have is the hot water heater, so it's one big long gas pipe, but still.
Anyway who wants some ebooks
I hope the fact that I've been living with a gas leak for an unknown amount of time doesn't affect my writing. If my books become worse without The Gas I'm gonna be so mad.
OH HOLY SHIT
@thebibliosphere I think your Cthulhu house and Derin's house must be cousins, because like damn
Speaking from experience, your writing gets better when you're not breathing in a hidden gas leak all the time. It just won't necessarily feel like it because you're no longer unknowingly breathing in gas.
Anyway, yeah. Our gas line also still needs to be replaced. Solidarity.
In life news, I am VERY close to actually finishing the rough draft of my original novel, and looking towards editing and publishing.
And I have a TERRIBLE feeling that since it includes queer stuff and a poly romance, it won't be palatable to mainstream publishers, though I am poking around for indie houses that might be open to that. I am absolutely unwilling to cut either the queer or poly stuff, I'm not doing a love triangle.
Which means I've been poking my nose around investigating various self publishing stuff... @thebibliosphere you've been a huge help here, inadvertently...and am biting glass at the fact that the royalties at Amazon are simply so, SO much better than anywhere else.
Amazon
Draft2Digital
the difference is fucking STARK
That's fucking insane
Like as much as I dislike Amazon, the numbers are absolutely implacable here. It sucks but like. Eight and a half dollars, PER SALE, of royalty difference is absolutely inarguable here.
have you looked at @copperbadge’s model / advice on self publishing? I know he’s had to push this rock up this particular hill, and came to a different conclusion than Amazon self-publishing.
ETA: Systlin just posted to say that @thebibliosphere has hooked her up with a beta and a potential publisher. I'm going to leave the post up so others can possibly use this knowledge but please refrain from further publisher suggestions and selfpub advice!
Unfortunately, if what you want is to maximize both sale volume and revenue -- which is a very normal goal, I'm not taking a swipe at that or anything -- Amazon is probably the way to go. I write for fun and have a large readership already so I didn't necessarily need Amazon, and when I was on Amazon it forced me to price my books higher than I was comfortable with, which is why I backed out.
As an alternative to Draft2Digital, I use Lulu.com. The mechanism -- how you upload your book and what information you include -- is functionally the same, but Lulu doesn't charge a setup fee, allows you to edit your text multiple times without fees, and is slightly less expensive per-page. So if you don't want to deal directly with Amazon, Lulu is superior to Draft2Digital in my opinion.
Lulu will allow you to sell through other platforms such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc, but it's opt-in, it won't do it automatically, and if you do that it makes you price the books so that those platforms aren't taking a "loss" by their standards. So a book I publish on Lulu might cost $10 to print (that's Lulu's cut) and I can sell it for whatever I like above that on Lulu -- say I sell it for $20, I get $10 per book. But the same book would "cost" Amazon $21 since Amazon takes a much larger cut, and Lulu's retail price dictates Amazon's. So in order for Amazon to sell my book, I have to price the book above $21. If I price it at $22 and someone buys it from Lulu, I get $12, whereas if someone buys it on Amazon, I get $1. Lulu will never be more expensive than Amazon but Lulu will always take Amazon's cost into account if you hook them up together. (I just pulled numbers out of the air for that example, but for a real-life one, when I took one of my recent 6x9, 90K-word paperbacks off Amazon, I was able to drop the price from something like $18 to $12.)
Selling directly through Lulu without involving Amazon is thus absolutely the most profitable way to go except that you don't get Amazon's reach or universality. Buying from Lulu, people have to know it exists, navigate the site, and trust that it's legitimate. Buying from Amazon, someone might just...find your book, and people will go to Amazon just to browse, which they will not do on Lulu, especially since as a self-publishing site, Lulu is full of garbage bad books. So if you're publishing outside of Amazon you will have to do a lot more publicity and you will never have the same sales volume.
I will also say that when Lulu published my work to Amazon, something got truly fucked up -- I'm not sure who did it, but either Lulu or Amazon assigned someone else's book to my author name and fixing it was really hard because I wasn't the one who set it up, Lulu was. I couldn't just go in and remove the book, I had to talk to Amazon and then Lulu and then have Amazon and Lulu talk to each other. I think my author page on Amazon might still list a book by Kathleen Starbuck as one of mine. There's also some weird shit around adult content -- I believe to sell on Amazon through Lulu, you have to jump through some hoops if there's adult content by Amazon's standards, which I know includes erotica but may also extend to queer/poly non-erotic content.
So yeah, I think depending on your goals, Lulu is worth exploring, but if you want to make life easy on yourself probably the best thing to do is just hold your nose and go with Amazon. However, if you're interested in Lulu I'm happy to answer questions.
Also, if you're interested in publishing in such a way that you can have your book sold in stores and held in libraries it will need an ISBN for the print version and a separate ISBN for the ebook. If you're in the US those cost $125 each unless you buy in bulk, which I happen to have done, so I have like 80 of them. If you want a few I'm happy to give you some for the at-cost of $5 per, but there's no way to transfer ownership of the number itself, so you'd officially be published by Sam Starbuck / Extribulum Press (you'd retain rights/profits, I'd just be your publisher on paper). I know Lulu will also give you one free and I imagine Amazon would, but often that means they retain certain rights to the text that I've never been comfortable letting a corporation have.
Slight addendum to what Sam posted above: there is no set up fee or fee to change files with Draft2Digital. I *think* they might limit how many times you can change a file within x amount of time, but once the timer resets your fine again. It makes them a good option for mass distribution and library access.
Ingram Spark, however, may they rest in filth, did used to charge $75 to set up your book and then $25 there after to make alterations to files. I think the setup fee was reduced, but they’ve found new awful ways to get money out of us (like $25 per 30 minutes to speak to a customer service rep on the phone if you need help and your issue can’t wait the glacial age it takes for them to respond to their free email) and they also made it so you need to contact a customer service rep to pull your work from their network. The quality of their books has also taken a steep nose dive since 2020. I had four books arrive without covers a while back. Just straight up naked in the box. And I had to fight them to get a refund. Madness.
At this point I’d pick Lulu over Ingram if I didn’t have draft2digital. Fortunately for my ADHD, I do have D2D and only have to remember one login account 😂
Ah, my mistake! I thought D2D had introduced a setup fee when they had some merger a while back but I may have mixed them up with Ingram Spark (which, damn, I'd forgotten that one existed). Reblogging for more accurate info.
Two additions:
1/ Ingram no longer charges to revise books either.
2/ If you want your book in bookshops, as far as I know you need to have it in Ingram's system. This is in no way economical, I probably earn $2 per book, but it does open you up to another market, AND people can order through their local bookstores, which is neat. The exception to this is sometimes bookstores in my area will ask if they can buy copies directly from me, but they have already been carrying my books and know they will sell. And occasionally some bookstores will take indie books on consignment, but that is really annoying and not everyone does it.
Also, on the negative side of the chart, I have had bookstores refuse to carry my book because the wholesale price didn't allow them to mark it up enough (I guess that specific store wanted to sell it for the same as Amazon would? Like some bookstores sell my book for $5-6 over what you'd pay on Amazon and they sell plenty of copies, I am told. So...whatever. Sorry I keep my prices low.) Also, if someone returns books, it can easily wipe out your profits for a month because you don't get charged for the cost of the books + shipping like you would if you had bought them, but the wholesale price they charged to the bookstore. I am honestly kind of surprised that is legal.
Draft2Digital has access to Ingram's market. So book buyers can buy from them as well. I don't think they have the full international reach of Ingram (yet), but you can still get your print book distributed to brick-and-mortar stores.
From their FAQ:
Print books published through D2D Print are made available to Amazon and to all distribution channels served by Ingram, including Barnes and Noble and most independent bookstores in the US. It will also be available for physical (“brick-and-mortar”) stores to order. https://draft2digital.com/faq/
And yeah... the whole retailer side of things is... honestly, it feels like a racket at this point. There's a reason I don't allow returns on paperbacks, even though it makes brick-and-mortar stores less likely to stock me, and that's why.
I've also been told by people who do the buying for certain big-box retailers that Ingram isn't showing them the retailer discount, even though Ingram requires me to put my books at a 50-60% discount to remain available for retailers to buy. I've seen screenshots; they're being shown something like 10% on their end while I'm showing a 60% discount.
So wherever the fuck that money is going, it's not going to the retailer or me. (This may have been fixed since then, but the last instance I know of this happening was in 2024)
…I want to just draw a fashion zine of just Miss Piggy, oh my god. she is so underrated and underutilized, where is my succession-like muppets satire thing LOL I want it so bad. let me do it disney call me pls
EDIT FOR JAN 2025: I’M MAKING A ZINE OF MISS PIGGY FASHIONS. It is happening, I have heard your comments. Please stay tuned to my instagram for updates!! Here’s a preview:
thank you for like, a bajillion notes!!!
ugh sorry guys, I got a job literally right after posting this and it’s been insanely busy, forgive me…. I’m gonna post what I was gonna put in the zine here, no need to pay or anything (but if you like I have a kofi, I’d hugely appreesh hehe)
sorry to string you guys along for I guess a whole damn year, hahahah
Superman desperately scanning the street during a fight to find the most morally acceptable car to throw at his opponent, knowing that not everybody has insurance, and loss of transportation can ruin a life -
A wave of incredible relief washes over him as he spots the hard geometric lines and silver paintless sheen of a Cybertruck.
DELETE THIS POST
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
*clicks play in morbid curiosity*
*hammers reblog button*
I think I find this post every April Fools Day and I am so happy that I do
WHAT THE FUCK
i missed it last year so i’ve had this scheduled for an entire damn year
That’s right!
