i don't do bad sauce passes
Keni
Peter Solarz
Stranger Things
KIROKAZE
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Today's Document
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Game of Thrones Daily
Kaledo Art
Three Goblin Art
art blog(derogatory)
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
taylor price
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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
noise dept.
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
ojovivo
Monterey Bay Aquarium
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@bane-76
The weather's getting warmer, so here's my seasonal reminder for other folks who have issues staying hydrated (autistics, people on certain meds, people who hate water, whatever):
Jello is, in fact, mostly water. So are a lot of fruits, like melon, cucumber, and berries. Ice chips are also water. If you find it hard to drink enough day to day, try eating your water instead. Every little bit helps!
[ image description:
A facebook post by Tiffany Pitts The text reads:
An Argument In Favor of Video Games From a Quarantined Mother #Quaranteens #WTFparenting My 15 yo son has spent every second of his free time during this pandemic hanging out online, playing video games with his friends. He started by ranking up to the elite tiers of Apex Legends. I am told this is quite a feat. Honestly, I believe it because it took him and his friend 6 hours a day for a week to rank that high. After that came Sea of Thieves. He joined up with more friends and sailed the digital oceans until piracy lost it’s shine. Also, when two friends started arguing in game. 2 nights ago they made a plan to meet up as a big group on Fortnight. None of them really play Fortnight much anymore because the crowd is a little younger. But they didn’t want to work too hard at playing, they just wanted to hang out. Last night, six of them met up again on Fortnight to hang out and play. They were goofing off, doing stupid teenager stuff, when they met a solo player named JamMaster. Sometimes if they meet solo players that are pretty chill, they’ll join forces. JamMaster seemed pretty young but he was by himself and they were having fun showing him what they knew about the game. They invited him to join their crew. Pretty soon they discovered that their first impressions were correct. JamMaster WAS much younger than they were - only 10 years old. They also discovered that it was his birthday in the morning. The boys realized that JamMaster had been hanging out by himself all night, on the eve of his 1 Ith birthday- which he would be spending by himself in quarantine. CLEARLY SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. Y'ALL, THEY THREW HIM AN 11TH BIRTHDAY PARTY They took him on a bunch of adventures, gave him all the loot they could, helped him win a few battles, and made his stay up until midnight so they could all sing happy birthday to him. This morning, as my son told me about their adventures and all the fun they had, I started to cry. I was trying to say something like “Oh that’s so nice” but tears just started spilling down my cheeks. He could not understand why. But…but… CAN YOU IMAGINE? The disappointment of being quarantined for your 1 Ith birthday only to be met by a random six-pack of teenage gamers who decide you’re awesome and want to throw you a birthday party? What a roller coaster. What an experience. What an incredible thing to do for a young gamer. In conclusion: video games, hell yeah.
End image description]
I think this woman is also a quality mom, because how many moms listen enough to what their kid is interested in to know what game they’re playing and how much time they’ve invested, and to listen to them talk about their game enough to hear a story like this? maybe it’s more common than i expect but this is the kind of engagement with my interests i craved as a kid
I can’t wait for the kid to get older and find this post!
a little bit of baroque fanart. we all get one super-niche old video game to be obsessed with i think
Ship's pet or better Ship's cat in hammock aboard HMS Barham, 1915
Well, see you, friends
https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/
Internal documents obtained by 404 Media show that Tumblr staff compiled users' data as part of a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI.
Don't go after staff members because of this, for what I know they weren't even informed until later in the process. You know who this comes from.
this is a drastic betrayal of user trust
That's an understatement. It's treason, and they know it. The fact they haven't announced it, that even within the company this had been handled mostly in secret? Bad people doing bad things
🚨🚨TUMBLR WILL BE SELLING DATA FROM OUR BLOGS TO TRAIN AI!!! 🚨🚨
That means ARTISTS, WRITERS, ANY CREATIVES ON HERE! YES YOU TOO FANFICTION WRITERS!!! Tumblr is making a deal with Midjourney to sell your work to train their AI!!
Every visual artist needs to poison their art (also keep watermarking the hell out of your art!). Use nightshade and glaze. I'm really hoping they're sued over this.
Also never post fanfics on here ever again. Just say you posted them over on your ao3 or something, but do not post them here.
Link to a post that has links to glaze and nightshade-
https://www.tumblr.com/loverofmythology/743533815316807680?source=share
As someone who has personally had to take those calls, they do matter. It just doesn’t matter what you say in the call: the only way your calls actually reach the politician is a tally sheet of each call received on different topics. End of the day/week, the politician gets told “you had X many calls about people wanting you to do this, Y many calls about people wanting you to do this, etc.”
Individual calls matter little, but if they get tons of calls on one topic then they take it seriously. The example above was probably during a time where the office was flooded with so many calls at once that they took the phones off the hook, which actually means that calls are working especially well. When the phones are blowing up, everyone in the office notices.
The best call to your representative does not involve you making an impassioned and well-argued case, because you’re probably talking to an intern. The most effective call you can make takes 15 seconds: “I am from [place in your district] and I am very pissed about [topic].”
OI. PEOPLE IN THE THREAD. CAN WE REBLOG THIS VERSION PLEASE. DON'T STOP MAKING CALLS.
But also as another person further up says, don't let your activism start and stop with phone calls either.
DON'T TRUST ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU NOT TO PARTICIPATE
Aight y'all. Here's a lesson I learned from my wife, and I wish I'd learned it years ago:
Before you buy anything, take 5 minutes to search (preferably with a non-Google search engine like DuckDuckGo) "best [whatever] for [specific purpose if necessary]."
Make sure you look at who the reviews are from; there are a lot of bad spam sites out there, but you can find good lists on reputable sites. However, you'll get some of the best lists on Reddit.
Most of what you'll find at the top of the lists on Amazon (and Walmart) are people who have paid for that spot. You'll still have to use discernment to make sure you're picking a good review site, but I'm not kidding when i say that the last time we had to buy a plunger, I ended up on a thread on a plumber's forum where they were discussing which plunger they keep in their own bathroom. (The overwhelming winner was something called a Toilet Saber, and... it's much easier to use than the usual style of plunger, actually.)
She searches "best potato peeler" and "best pastry blender" and "best standing desk" and it seems so obvious, right, but she does it for literally everything and the average quality of things I own has gone way, way up since I started taking 5 minutes to search "best yoga socks" and "best cuticle trimmers" and then going to buy whatever it is.
Her research skills go into overdrive when it comes to big purchases; she's the one who researched our sublimation printer and found the desk I currently use. If there's an extremely passionate subreddit out there about the thing she wants to buy, she'll find it and then read half a dozen reviews.
I cannot stress enough how much she does this. About. Everything. And how much everything we own is better as a result.
It's amazing, honestly.
Also, check if your library has a Consumer Reports membership! Consumer Reports has quite a bit of useful information and reviews, even without membership. But you might be able to get even more, entirely for free, with a library card.
Here's some of the members-only benefits I get through my library:
CR Savings: Member-specific discounts and deals
Best Time To Buy: "Our experts share the best deals on our top-rated products every month."
Repair or Replace: "Find out whether you should repair or replace a broken appliance."
TV Screen Optimizer: Helps you change your TV picture settings to be ideal for your home.
CR Selectors: Tools to help you choose which to buy of a certain product. Currently there are selector tools for mattresses, cars, refrigerators, and infant car seats.
Car Recall Tracker
Food Safety Alert: Text message alerts regarding food recalls.
Also, just in general, it is a good idea to check which services your library offers beyond book loans (and to check again occasionally, or to subscribe to the library newsletter, so you can know when new services are added). Lots of libraries offer a "library of things"; that can be useful both for items you only need temporarily and for trying out a certain product before you go and buy your own.
Oh, that's very cool! I didn't know that was a thing libraries might offer, and if I did know it once upon a time, I'd forgotten.
Yoooo he just changed the game
Oh, this is really neat, this is the same thing they did in Sh! The Octopus in 1937 to do this transformation scene. In black & white, the color of your light can hide makeup, then all you have to do is flip the color, and the audience just sees the difference in the light levels, but cannot see the color shift. The quick explanation for why this works is the blue makeup absorbs red light, looking very dark when only red light is present, but also looks about the same as relatively fair skin when only blue light is present. Same goes for the colors the other way.
Ahh, I think that they had this in one of the early Jekyll and Hyde adaptations as well. :)
Twilight Zone used this trick too, in The Howling Man, where this guy morphs into the Devil.
And again in Long Live Walter Jameson, where this guy loses his artificial youth
I think the first time it was used was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1931.
God, I love practical effects
Hey so remember how grocery prices suddenly jackknifed during lockdown and never went back down?
Well turns out the companies would have done that shit either way and had been steadily price-fixing for the last decade!
Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson just announced more than $40 million in court-ordained Fuck You money from massive swaths of food production companies are to be paid out to households earning at or below 175% of the federal poverty level ($25.5k for 1 person, $34.5k for 2 people households) before Dec 31st of this year. Happy Holidays.
"The bottom line here is that my legal team took on two large corporate price-fixing conspiracies that increased the cost for groceries for Washington families. We've prevailed, and as a result, we are sending checks to over 400,000 Washington households."
Cannot stress enough the extent of the conspiracies he's talking about here. 15 out of the total 19 chicken producers got nailed in this lawsuit. Not the total number of conspirators, mind, just the ones who left enough evidence for the AG to kick their ass in so expedient a manner. Make no mistake, all 19 were in on it. The court case against the rest of them has been delayed until October of next year, though. None of them are making it out unscathed.
Tuna didn't escape antitrust horseshit either, because the CEOs of Starkist, Chicken of the Sea, and Bumblebee Tuna had a fucking group chat where they complained that the price of tuna was "too low" and they agreed to artificially inflate the price.
“What’s so maddening about the conduct of these companies is the reason that they engaged in this price-fixing conspiracy was greed. They wanted to make money."
So anyway the AG who nailed their asses to the wall and continues to do so is running for governor. If you live in Washington, could be worth your vote when primary season rolls around.
You know, if you don't live in Washington state... think about calling YOUR state attorney general and asking what they intend to do about that information. Are they going to protect citizens in your state? If you, like me, think that watching our pay trickle away in the checkout line is a shit deal... Maybe harass your reps and AGs about it.
The thing is, the more states react to the same information, the more likely that they'll succeed. Governing is no longer happening in federal Congress, so if your state chooses to take action on behalf of its citizens.... well, it's not like it's going to be easily stopped. Class action law is still law. The choices made by the prosecution determine what law is law and what law is simply a hollow effigy of lies. Who keeps the strong accountable to the law?
So I am writing to my state AG. I may also write to members of Congress, on the off chance that there is an avenue of restitution there as well. I want to know: if they can get a breath of refresher cash from their government trying to chase down some money, can I get some from mine? Because fuck! That'd be nice!
Price-fixing conspiracies are sort of central to how capitalism is understood to work. Don't believe me? Let's hear from Adam Smith:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. The chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.
Hummingbird moth
This sent me down a rabbit hole of research this morning.
Hummingbird moths are adorable. They really do behave like hummingbirds, hovering to drink nectar or, in this case, delicious orange juice. Hummingbird moths are actually far more placid than hummingbirds, so you can often get quite close to them like this and they seem to not care at all.
But one thing I wanted to explain before reblogging this: the wingbeats in this video. They look super slow, somewhere between 5-6 beats per second. That doesn't sound slow, but even the largest and slowest hummingbird known beats its wings twelve times a second.
Obviously, this is an optical effect of the camera and video encoding used here. The day is bright enough that the camera is able to capture unblurred images, but it still has both a maximum shutter speed and a rolling shutter: this can create some really funky distortions depending on the speed of the object you're trying to capture.
So, what you're actually seeing is little slices of the moth's wingbeats, which happen to be slightly out of sync with when the camera is capturing images: if you look closely, you can see moments when it looks like one wing is flapping up while the other is flapping down, for example. That's one of those artifacts of the rolling shutter.
But this led me to wonder what the wing speed of a hummingbird moth is. This turned out to be harder to determine than one would think. There's no videos of hummingbird moths on youtube that were taken with anything other than a standard digital camera, and obviously the shutter speed isn't fast enough. So, I went on a literature dive.
Wikipedia is usually the place to start a search for primary sources on a topic you're not familiar with, but Wikipedia doesn't list anything for the hummingbird moth species I looked at. General educational websites don't tend to cite their sources: some of them say 40-80 beats per second, but where'd they get that number from? Perhaps someone simply intuited that they flap their wings around as fast as hummingbirds, or perhaps someone misread "hummingbird" as "hummingbird moth" one day, you honestly don't know.
What you want in this case is a grade-A nerd that went out with some fiddly equipment and did some math, then documents it to a ridiculous degree.
Searching Google Scholar required my feeble New Year's Day-brain to remember "hertz" is the preferred unit for fast objects: it's literally the same as "beats per second", it's just more general and can be used for any fast, repetitive event. As a result, I've found out that scientists are apparently very interested in hitting hummingbird moths with tiny projectiles or forcing them to take hard turns, partly because a lot of people want to make really small drones these days, and self-righting flight is important for something that weighs less than a french fry.
These sources list average wing flaps as 15 - 28.8 Hz, but these were under adverse conditions, namely, y'know, getting pelted with little projectiles and being forced to do Deja Vu-worthy skid turns. So I kept looking, and adjusting my search terms.
Eventually, I found the answer, for at least one species: Photographed in an animal wind tunnel with a high-speed camera, the hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum) was found to have an average wing speed of 69 Hz.
Nice.
I adore analog technology like this
"areas without electricity" in 1910 included well over 99% of the world so that's kind of weird wording
These were built for everywhere because everywhere was "areas without electricity".
Holy shit I think I just cracked the code of why people think you can’t sell things on Tumblr 😭
I was reading one of the Substacks I subscribe to, talking about how they promote their publication and their various sources of traffic, when I came across this paragraph:
Now I happen to also run a fairly popular Substack (about gay vampires). One whose readers are almost entirely Tumblr users. And Tumblr clicks have just never shown up in my stats, I’m used to it. Naturally I had to comment:
It’s not just Substack’s tracking that doesn’t work on here. NO tracking works on here. Tumblr is just one of the last platforms left that completely obscures its users’ data!
That’s why there’s this persistent myth that you can’t advertise on Tumblr. It's not that you can't sell things here, it's that you can't use the invasive methods that are standard everywhere else.
Games from older consoles are being made less and less available to the point so much of the industry's history could easily vanish without
Preserving classic videogames from consoles past.
I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.
Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!
Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.
I might've added the BG3 Art Book to my dnd assets stash
It's got stuff like the 5e players' handbook + 5e’s character sheet, the dm's guide, critical role's explorer's guide to wildmount, baldur's gate and waterdeep city encounters, 101 potions and their effects, volo's guide to monsters, both of Xanathar's guides, a bunch of other encounters, one shots, class builds, and other fun stuff!!
Just editing this to say, holy shit. Maybe it's just because I'm looking at only the Planescape ones, but having relevant hyperlinks to 5etools is just amazing. It's like a dream I've had but never wanted to commit to. Thank you @tadfools
The X owner has no time for a democratic experiment dedicated to knowledge. He would rather yell puerile ‘jokes’ into the ether, writes Zoe
“…the sight of Elon Musk charging towards Wikipedia with his trademark guile and delicacy was so predictable that it was almost relaxing. He saw a collective resource that people prized and he wanted to hurt it.”
Thoth knows Wikipedia’s not perfect, but I’d sooner have it handy than not have it.
Hey, you know how we spent 7.99 at Tumblr for useless blue checkmarks mainly to spite Musk? Maybe we should go donate the same amount to Wikipedia out of spite. And also because Wikipedia is far more useful than the accurately-named useless blue checks.
I mean, same spite, but actually getting something in return? Sounds like a deal to me...
GO DONATE TO WIKIPEDIA BEFORE ITS TOO LATE
