between iron and silver

mia • slowrunning the second half of my 20s • she/her • east/southeast asian-australian on whadjuk noongar boodja (land). full-time enthusiasm enthusiast and your favourite introvert's favourite extrovert. to warm your heart, see #blanket for the heart. for a burst of whimsy, see #delightful.

[coldswarkids]

I want you all to imagine with me, if you will, what I witnessed today.

McDonalds parking lot. teenage boy. giant polished white ford Tundra. windows down. blasting. I mean BLASTING. Beethoven's moonlight sonata. boy demolishing burger.

[only-tiktoks]

[kawree]

Y'all for real please do these. Even if you're certain your posture doesn't suck. One day you will wake up with impinged shoulder pain like I did and let me tell you it fucking HURTS. Do these exercises even just once a week and it will make such a difference. Especially my fellow creatives out there, stop shrimping over your work and go do these right now. RIGHT NOW.

[symptomesper]

Also, if you’re even a little concerned about getting a hump or having trouble standing fully upright in your old age, this is how you prevent that. If you want to be up and about when you’re old you have to start when you’re younger. And keep in mind there is no bad time to start and it’s never too late. Starting today is way better than never starting at all.

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]

[glasshomewrecker]

Everyone should be aware of nitter.net

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

Similarly, imginn.com works for most Instagram addresses. I still haven’t found one for Facebook.

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[these-violet-delights-fic]

People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!

[electricsheeple]

every diversity win for women of color is a win for me too

[electricsheeple]

i love stories about women of color in areas that they aren't usually stereotypically in, or experiencing things that aren't talked about enough. every single story i hear makes my heart giggle and jump with joy.

[homunculus-argument]

The human body's response to HRT is actually admirable in the sheer indifference. Just pure I Don't Give A Shit, I Just Fucking Work Here compliance to the new instructions. You can get testosterone injected straight into your body and it doesn't even question where that shit came from, coming back from a coffee break and just going

"Okay, everything seems to be in ord- oh fuck now what? Oh huh. Alright fine. New orders came in, cancel the menstrual cycle. Dig up the genetic balding patterns from somewhere, I don't fucking know they're buried somewhere in the dna. I'm greenlighting the growing-hair-on-your-toes thing. Yeah just cancel the ongoing maintenance processes, new orders came in so this is apparently what we're doing now."

[tanadrin]

genuinely i think a big problem with science education is we spend too much time in high school telling students DNA is like, the Magical Essence of an Organism.

dna is mostly just instructions for building proteins, and not very persuasive ones at that. it sits in the nucleus of the cell, and what happens after RNA transcription isn't any of its business. this is a good thing! it means we can override it sometimes when we need to (and when we know how). but a lot of rhetoric around DNA (and therefore gender and sex and morphological freedom in general) treats it like this Platonic sorcery that must be obeyed, lest we incur the wrath of the gods. and it's nothing so special!

[jackironsides]

[thehobbitchronicles]

— Morgan Harper Nichols

[godsfavoritespecialangel]

The chances of your fish committing credit card fraud is low, but never 0

[tuxankhamun]

[memeuplift]

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[json-derulo]

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

[thelawfulchaotic]

This is such a good example of systemic solutions to problems!! Putting it in my pocket for explaining problem-solving vs. blame and punishment in the future.

[ilovecoelacanths]

went to a new optometrist today wearing my squid facts ‘save our freaks dont mine the deep’ shirt from @sarahmackattack that has a strawberry squid on it. and i wasn’t even thinking about it but the optometrist walked in and he was like ‘oh what does your shirt say’ so i showed him and he was like ‘oh that’s neat!’ and then i thought he might like to know about strawberry squid eyes since they have weird eyes and he is an optometrist and all. so i was like ‘yeah it’s actually a real kind of squid called a strawberry squid, their eyes are really cool because they have one big yellow-green one and one small blue one’ and he kind of gasped and went ‘oh my god that’s so interesting i wonder why they have that. do you know what their retina composition is like?’ and i watched as he minimized my chart on the computer and started looking up images of strawberry squid and then he googled ‘strawberry squid retina composition’ and he was like ‘sorry we’ll get to your eye exam in a moment i just really want to find out’ LMAO 10/10 optometrist experience will be returning

[lasaraconor]

[radicalgraff]

"Welcome to Genocide Nation. Land Back"

Seen in the Northern Territory of so-called Australia where protesters from around the continent are converging to demand the closure of Pine Gap, a US spy base which has operated since 1966.

[thatstormygeek]

The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine

Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly

Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities

An MSG database tracked and categorized hundreds of celebs, famous Knicks superfans, and even some of Taylor Swift’s wedding guests. Labels

[corvidcall]

to anyone in the areas impacted by the wildfire smoke, my #1 biggest piece of advice as someone whos been dealing with wildfire smoke in the NW united states for years, is build yourself a Corsi-Rosenthal Cube

they perform as well as expensive HEPA air cleaners, and are comparatively VERY inexpensive. all you need is a box fan, 4 air filters, a piece of cardboard, and some duct tape!!!!

i think it took us maybe a half hour to put ours together, if that, and we replace the filters every 3 months. it's really made a HUGE difference, both when the air quality is bad, but also with our allergies

[o0fyuu0o]

Saw these easy to read instructions on Twitter. Stay safe 💚

[sun-cheyne]

Also just a handy, DIY air filter in general, if a bit bulky. For a less bulky and cheaper (but also less effective) solution, you can simply tape one filter to the fan, cut a shroud if you'd like.

[snowriddenwolf]

just FYI, this is quite literally what the climate scientists at my work who specialized in wildfire smoke impacts recommend. it works great, it's cheap to make, and it will make a noticeable impact on your air quality.

[mechanicalriddle]

i have asthma & keep one of these running in my room perpetually. after I set it up the difference in my sleep quality was pretty much night and day. Dont waste your time on proprietary air filters; SIMPLY bust out the duct tape

[binturong-of-the-day]

The binturong of weariness

[cleolinda]

Josh Johnson's koala impression is one of the few things that has brought me joy this week.