perpetual disarray

שלום בימינו • he/it •✡️• banner image from @femur-bandit

[butchtoks]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

In Rimworld I was just contracted to hold onto some prisoners for someone for awhile, very normal circumstance. Except that the idiots decided to stage a prison break one day before it was time to return them and I had to violently subdue them. So my neighbours handed me three prisoners in perfect health and a week later I hand them back with shattered noses and poorly bandaged head and chest wounds like. No this wasn't my fault. We're good people we run a good prison.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I did make them sleep on sandstone slabs and eat nutrient goo but in fairness the rock slabs are to make me need to break their noses less often, and everyone here eats nutrient goo. We're good people we run a good prison.

[softness-and-shattering]

How do the rock slabs function to decrease the totally passive need for totally passive nose breaking?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Prisoners have a prison break internal timer, and when it runs out they will attempt a prison break. The timer depends on things like how many prisoners there are, how healthy they are, and how many doors lead into the cells.

The timer only ticks down while a prisoner is awake -- it is paused while they sleep. So you can increase the amount of time before a prison break (and thus the amount of time before you have to crack them over the head with a mace until they stop moving) by making them sleep longer. This is done by giving them shitty beds made out of stone that reduces their sleep quality so they have to be in bed longer to rest up. Since prisoners only really need to be awake to eat and get brainwashed (I mean, chat companionably with the warden about which faction they should be working for and what they should believe, we're all friends here), there's no reason not to make their sleep as shitty as possible.

This is the kind and gentle way to keep prisoners contained and healthy btw. Mean players will often use the more direct and reliable "nugget pawn" method.

[clovercalliber]

hi, what the hell is the nugget pawn method

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Mental breaks and prison breaks don't matter if you amputate their arms and legs and leave them as a nugget with a head.

Some people just do legs, depending on what you want the prisoner for.

[ayeforscotland]

Happy Friday. Ann Widdecombe is dead.

[ayeforscotland]

Can someone now poke Mitch McConnell with a stick?

[sunspotpony]

No, he might wake up if we do that.

[ayeforscotland]

I was thinking it’d go straight through him like if you poke a rotting watermelon.

[proteusolm]

some animals are naturally blurry

[fivetrench]

*Whimpers*

[fivetrench]

@crazysodomite I think it's Neobrettus tibialis, a weird little spider thing. There's a clearer photo of one here!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Humans are like "let me hold the thing. Let me pick it up. It's cute and I want to hold it, I want to wrap my weird elongated front feet around it, I want to encircle it with my freakishly long, oddly flexible front toes. I HAVE to hold things I HAVE to or I'll die."

[elisabethdeep-blog]

I know normal people can just pass their bill over and around an object and know most things worth knowing about it, but humans don't have electroreceptors At All. They only have mechanoreceptors. Which are most concentrated in the aforementioned 'hands'... and in their mouths.

They do also have eyes, and their vision is actually pretty acute. But their optic and mechanic sensory inputs aren't integrated together like electro-mechanic sense is. So they have these two fairly sophisticated sensory complexes that Barely talk to each other.

No wonder they try to bring the two inputs together in their environment then; picking things up and turning them around allows them to apply both their mechanical and optical senses to the object. They're just trying to make up for a deficiency of neural organisation.

And like. I mentioned the other concentration of mechanoreceptors is in their mouth... So just be glad they mostly grow out of constantly wrapping their viscera-looking tongue around everything.

[icryyoumercy]

dear writers. please. if you insist on not using names or pronouns for some mysterious reason. and instead go for random ass descriptors. please at least make them vaguely sensible

if a scene contains, dunno, a sapient rock, two chickens, and one male adult human, the phrase 'the older man' is not a good choise. there is no comparison here to use a comparative for. i know it's the common turn of phrase, but please. pretty please. if there is only one man in the whole entire scene. he cannot be 'the older man'. just say 'the man'. or use his name. or a pronoun.

[libraford]

Not to oversimplify a complex issue, but i think we could reduce the number of deadly car crashes by increasing wages and having shorter work weeks.

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[fish-facing-forward]

Plagiogrammus hopkinsii

Crisscross Prickleback

Image source

Status: No IUCN evaluation

Distribution: Endemic to a small region from central to southern California

[snailspotter]

Today's snail: Cymbiola vespertilio | Bat Volute

[kingfucko]

i dont care if monday sucks... tuesday cost me sixty bucks... wednesday thursday give no fucks. it's friday im a duck

[teathattast]

[natequarter]

not only are most people completely unaware of the devastation of indigenous languages in the americas, most people are completely unaware of the devastation of indigenous languages in europe. never mind occitan, they don't know about basque! it's wild! bleak! existentially horrifying!!!

[natequarter]

the last few centuries of french history involved, amongst other things, a concerted effort to establish "french" as a legitimate country and cultural identity, and crucially as a language, which sounds like an absurd statement if you know nothing about the languages of france. french is a language, yes; it exists and existed in the late eighteenth century. but it was limited primarily to the north of france and was certainly not spoken or even understood across the country. other languages within france were banned and french was enforced following the french revolution and even to this day other languages indigenous to france have very little legal protection and are not recognised as official languages.

that's just one country in europe. one. and many people straight up have no idea about any of this!

[natequarter]

did you know france has celtic languages? breton is the only celtic language spoken outside of the british isles. did you know france has germanic languages? alsatian, for example, is spoken in the east of france, unsurprisingly in alsace. it's not even the only french germanic language. did you know france has a number of languages and dialects known as langues d'oïl closely related to french? norman and picard, for example, are spoken in the north of france. did you know that france has gallo-romance languages? franco-provençal (which has a number of dialects) is spoken in the east of france, as well as parts of switzerland and italy. did you know that france has a language most closely related to catalan, the langues d'oc? occitan is spoken in the south of france and has a rich literary history. did you know france is home to basque, or rather euskara, a language isolate which predates indo-european languages? romani dialects! corsican! so much more than just french! there are even extinct jewish dialects of occitan! extinct langues d'oïl like angevin! so much linguistic diversity and all anyone talks about is french.

[all-0f-the-above]

op is absolutely right, and I don't want to derail this post, only adding that I can absolutely sympathize given that there is a similar issue happening across the Chinese-speaking part of East Asia.

mainland China is particularly bad about this shit, having complete control over which groups get counted as a legitimate minority group. the whole "Han people are all alike" is an absolutely insane notion they dreamed up to try and unite people under them. in some people's view- even I'm Han, but our ancestral language is not Mandarian, it's Hakka.

they work very hard so that the only languages people outside of mainland come across are standardized Mandarin and Cantonese. and any and all other langugaes are called "dialets" or "accents" to delegitimize them. there are many indigenous people and languages within mainland China (recognized and unrecognized), but I also need you to know that Taiwan's indigenous community was really fucked over by the sudden migration after Mao won. they have a language. Hong Kong has an indigenous population as well! they have a language. it's not just Cantonese. Tibet is home to languages you've probably never heard of.

given the current state of ethnic minority group rights in mainland...

these languages are at even higher risk than they were previously.

extra fun fact about an indigenous group in Southern China (also in Vietnam): their English name "Boat People" is accurate, as they traditionally live on boats and not in permanent settlements on land! they are likely descended from an older lineage of Yue people. really fucking cool.

[beewulf]

i think if you sell a product and you change the product you should have to include patch notes. like,

Chip Brand Chips Potato Flavor Variant Version 12.9.2

Reduced quantity of chips per bag to help prevent chip fragmentation and lower calorie content

Increased quantity of air per bag to help prevent chip fragmentation and lower calorie content

Replaced [ingredient that contains nutrients] with [ingredient banned in the EU] to reduce calorie content

Added protein for some reason

[withnailrules]

Eartha Kitt performing in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1955

[keatxu]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[omikronsoul]

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

[justletmeremember]

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

[jollysunflora]

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality