M [Norristown High Speed Line], SEPTA, Philadelphia Metro Area, PA, USA
Have you been here?
I have been here
I have not been here

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@theartofmadeline
Cosimo Galluzzi
Monterey Bay Aquarium
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
EXPECTATIONS
KIROKAZE
d e v o n
YOU ARE THE REASON
Game of Thrones Daily

Kiana Khansmith
NASA
★
Cosmic Funnies
Xuebing Du

blake kathryn

ellievsbear

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h

seen from Germany
seen from Bangladesh

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia

seen from Vietnam
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seen from France
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seen from Malaysia
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seen from Türkiye
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@belladonna-rx
M [Norristown High Speed Line], SEPTA, Philadelphia Metro Area, PA, USA
Have you been here?
I have been here
I have not been here
i never really got it when people made posts about light pollution and seeing all the stars for the first time and crying. i always assumed that everyone has gone on a road trip to a bortle 1.0 place and seen stars like that, and it's fantastic, but not like life changing. and then i went to europe last month and was in a mountaintop village of like 300 people and could see about 5 stars in the sky. like fewer than i can see from my home in a big metropolitan city.
my apologies to the non-africans, i did not realise how fucked your sky is
The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
Op's tags
#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
after a couple hours chopping dried sea urchins into tiny pieces with a razor blade you start referring to the razor blade as yourself in your thoughts. a little while afterwards you'll inevitably think something along the lines of "i'm getting a bit dull, i'm going to have to throw myself out & get myself a new self" at which point your internal monologue has pretty much returned to baseline
This happens with mobility aids too. I bump into shit with my forearm crutches and say "ow" before I realize those are not, in fact, More Legs. Then when I get up and try to walk without them for a second there's a moment of feeling like a dog walking upright
If you find this interesting, look into extended mind/body theory :)
Author: Rachel Bourbaki Category: Philosophy of Mind and Language Word Count: 1000 Can your mind be outside of your body? Typically we think
I think there’s a teaboot(?) post about this with a huge security cam system
Yeah I get twitchy when I don't have my eyes
Listen, we know Bruce was traumatized by his parents’ death but I hold that even before they were killed Bruce Wayne was a little weirdo. Like his paranoia and difficulty with emotion and attachment are from that terrible night. But I imagine 8 year old Brucie was OCD as hell and painstakingly arranging and rearranging his things to his satisfaction. He was meticulous, even as a child, very detail oriented. Highly intelligent, showing a boundless curiosity and determination to understand everything from a young age. I bet he was hell to enforce bedtimes on, always to do much to do and too little hours in the day.
Bruce was that kid who dragged bugs in the house for study, pulled down all the books on one shelf so could arrange them in height order, skittered around the house’s many passages like a little rat. He was the kid who was happy and cheerful but a bit awkward from growing up a Wayne, he would much rather squirrel away somewhere with a book considered too old for him than talk with people he didn’t know. He loved the macabre in the way weird little kids too, he wanted to see Zorro for the action and the violent fight scenes. Thomas and Martha Wayne had to listen to their precocious son ask them time and again how they thought they would die and listen to his speculations.
I want the Justice League to have to go back in time for whatever reason and they expect Bruce to be a delightful, happy, normal child. Instead, they find a kid with a lovingly worn Sherlock Holmes omnibus under one arm, an entire bag of raisins in the other, dark circles under his eyes from late nights reading and he’s covered in dust and debris from getting stuck behind the drywall again.
“You’re not mom and dad’s friends,” he’d say in a petulant voice with a familiar set of his mouth. “I’m gonna call my butler and he’s going to kick your butt.” And the whole League loses their mind because Bruce really has always been Bruce.
Bruce Wayne was a weird wolf girl from the start.
next time you’re at the thrift store and find a nice solid thick pile area rug for a shockingly good price and you’ve been looking for an area rug for the office forever and the color goes really nicely with the office color scheme and you think this is it, this is what i’ve been waiting for, stop, and ask yourself: did i take the bus here?
next time you’re on the bus and see someone with an area rug and a look of deep disappointment in themself mind your own business
So today's mission is to modify Ollie's auto-feeder in a way that he can no longer knock it over to make treats fall out
Round 2: bolted it to the fridge
You reminded me that this exists, and it seems relevant.
oh my god
STORYTIME. Last February, I sold a mug on Etsy. Common occurrence. Great. After it arrived at its new home, I got an email from the woman who bought it. She thanked me for the beautiful piece and remarked that the handle was perfect—she struggles with arthritis and finds many mugs difficult to hold. I was so touched!
Fast forward to six weeks ago—I receive an email from her husband, explaining he broke the mug (lol) and asking if I’d be willing to take on a commission to replace it. He reiterates how she has arthritis but also shares she used to make pottery, herself, but can only really paint, now. I say of course! Come to find out, he wants a WHOLE SET of mugs to replace the broken one. Even better! I end up making the whole set twice (I wasn’t satisfied with the first attempt), but finally get them packed up and sent off across the country.
I just received the kindest message from the husband, saying “It is not often in today's world that someone does 100% of what they have promised,” thanking me profusely, and sharing that his wife is already happily using the new mugs.
Anyway, I guess the point is that making art is hard. And commissions always cause me a lot of undue stress, but things like this remind me why I love creating and connecting with people. 💙
Orcas are known to be smart and ruthless hunters. They've been observed hunting a variety of prey, with some species, such as whales, larger
I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is Jackass
That's absolutely insane.
Nature red in tooth and claw ain't seen nothing yet
In case anyone was bothered by the idea of them torturing the fish, it was already dead.
If you’ve ever walked through a bookstore with an author by your side, you may have noticed something peculiar: writers don’t check out new
Amazon has instituted a feature called “Ask This Book,” which allows you to interrogate the app about the contents of the text, and then, if you so choose, skip reading it altogether. A few months ago, the author and podcaster Tyler Cowan launched his new book, The Marginal Revolution, onto his website, in full, along with an “integrated AI assistant” that pre-digests the prose for you, like a mother bird regurgitating food into the maw of her chicks. As of the time of this writing, almost four months after its publication, the text still contains a typo in its opening lines, suggesting to me that no one close to the author has even bothered to read it with care. I recently embarked on a month-long book tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Along the way, I stopped off to meet up with friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. What nearly everyone I spoke with told me, in one form or another, is that they are feeling the effects of a holographic crisis that extends far beyond the publishing industry. I spoke with a friend who, unable to find time to read whole books, has begun to run PDFs through an AI program that converts them into podcasts, complete with two chatty humanoid voices. I talked with a literary agent who said that her clients, fearing their book proposal will be read first by AI before it ever encounters human eyeballs, are tweaking their proposals to suit robotic tastes, much as magazines tailor their headlines to game social media algorithms. And I talked with a Hollywood producer who caught a studio exec pretending to have read a script, when it was clear he’d used AI to summarize it. (She knew this for a fact, because the LLM had mistaken the plotline of a novel within the script for the plot of the film itself.)
[...]
Nearly every author and editor I know feels that our present holographic crisis is merely a wan prelude of what’s to come: a tsunami of texts wholly written by AI, flooding the earth with books without authors, holograms piled atop holograms, with no ground-truth beneath them. “A fool also multiplies words,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns. “At the beginning their words are folly; at the end they are wicked madness.”
15 July 2026
Fandom PSAs
Dont’ Like, Don’t Read
or DL; DR
You are responsible for curating your own online experience.
If something upsets you, makes you angry or queasy or triggers you, stop reading/looking at it. Avoid things that might make you feel that way.
Learn to use the Sort and Filter function on AO3, especially the Exclude tools.
On social media, block and mute accounts / tags / words when necessary.
If you hated something, you don’t need to tell that to the creator or start pointing fingers at them publicly.
The Back button is free. Use it.
Addendum:
Yes, for this to work, creators need to tag their works accordingly, so that people know what sort of content they are about to engage with and can nope out if necessary.
I will probably make another PSA about the importance of proper tagging later.
Ship And Let Ship
or SALS
You are allowed to ship whatever you want.
Everyone else is also allowed to ship whatever they want.
You are entitled to dislike or even hate a ship. If you want to do this online, in public, don’t use the ship tags for hate posts.
If you see someone posting about a ship they like and you don’t, there is no need for you to start arguing with them in their replies / comments / QRTs / reblogs. Don’t throw your hate in their face.
Do not harass fan creators or fans for shipping something you disapprove.
All of this also applies to liking / disliking an individual character.
Addendum:
”I agree with this, except when…”
No, then you are NOT agreeing with this.
Let me make this VERY clear. There are NO exceptions. None.
You don’t EVER harass real people over pixels.
If you disagree with this, kindly block and move on.
Your Kink Is Not My Kink
or YKINMK / YKINMKATO
The longer version is ”Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s Okay”.
People have different tastes. Not everything is for everybody.
Even if you don’t like a specific kink, other people are still allowed to use it in their creations.
You are entitled to dislike kinky content and think that it’s ”weird”.
Don’t kink shame or judge people based on their kinks.
This goes both ways: your kink is not someone else’s kink, so don’t push it onto those who are not into it.
Be Kind
or Don’t Be An Asshole
Focus on the things you like instead of the things you hate.
Create and unite instead of destroying and dividing.
Don’t harass real people over fictional things.
Stop stirring up petty drama just to get some attention on social media.
Stop trying to ”win”. Fandom is not a competition.
Remember that your own experiences aren’t universally shared. Your perception of things can differ from someone else’s, but that doesn’t mean either of you is necessarily wrong.
Scooped this molecule of a snake off of the bike path
Illegally smol
It's @fertilefloor
you see me :>!
'minion' -too closely associated with those yellow things
'goon' -linguistic drift gave her a new meaning. i hope her new life is good for her. i miss her.
'henchman' -too gendered. can be shortened to 'hench' in a pinch, but lacks punch.
'servant' -too domestic to apply to all those who serve evil.
'underling, subordinate' -this one only works if they get off on being beneath you and/or you don't properly pay your workers.
'associate' -this one's good for grizzled mercenaries or lone agents but doesn't work good for broad swathes of an organization.
'slave' -same as underling but more intense. really fun for some of the group. unsavory for others in a way that limits the scope of the thing.
'thrall' -only really applies if you're brainwashing them and that's not something i've learned how to do en masse yet
'flunky, toady, stooge, lackey' -these are just insulting, and that isn't conducive to a healthy work environment. imagine going to work and your job title is 'stooge'.
'acolyte' -works for those that worship you, but again. lacks the scope.
'supporter, follower' -unspecific and vague
'assistant, helper, aide' -not sinister at all. just means you're doing things for me. swagless in this manner. could be good if used to describe someone who's so clearly more that as a way to emphasize their obedience via understatement, but that's only useful for a few members of the organization. and even then, 'associate' works better.
'cohort' -untested in the field. suggests an equal footing in the affair, ideal for post-structuralist evil organizations with a bottom-up power structure that's held in the hands of the evil workers themselves. perhaps we'll explore it together?
may I suggest: 'grunt' – time-tested by crime bosses with a variety of goals and organizational mandates. implies a subservient position with none of the innate baggage of lackey et al.
GRUNT IS PRETTY GOOD
The “encrapification” of the American pint — a chemist’s plain-language dissection
Really good article by a chemist on why most ice cream sucks now— it’s because it’s not really ice cream.
part of me wants to be like "do people really not know this" and part of me knows full well i only read the labels because i have gut problems and don't want to suffer
anyway i've had my eye on the fat content for years. actual ice cream made with real cream won't trigger my lactose intolerance, because the higher the fat content of dairy, the lower the lactose content. my personal tipping point is around half-and-half so if you make "ice cream" with with skim milk, the enshittification i experience is unfortunately literal
“This month, Finland launched the world’s largest sand battery, enabling residents to remove oil from their district heating network and reduce emissions by nearly 70 percent, as reported by Euro News. If it continues to operate as efficiently and affordably as expected, sand batteries could become common worldwide. Developed by Finnish company Polar Night Energy, this battery uses excess clean electricity to heat sand to high temperatures, storing thermal energy that can later be released to heat homes and power local industries. This is not Finland’s first sand battery, but it is significantly larger. The facility in Pornainen is an insulated silo that stands 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, containing 2,000 tonnes of crushed soapstone. The sand retains heat remarkably well, losing only 10 to 15 percent during storage and recovery, according to The Cool Down.”
—
Sand batteries are a significant advancement in clean energy technology.
Holy shit, this is incredible.
“This new facility can hold 100 MWh for about a month in summer and a week in winter. That’s enough for the town of 5000 local residents.
TechCrunch estimates the Finnish battery’s costs are under $25 per kilowatt-hour, compared to around $115 for leading lithium-ion batteries.90% efficiency.It doesn’t use any “rare earths” or critical materials. Instead using locally sourced, recyclable materials.Units are scalable and modular to fit different needs and uses.
Suits small towns (like the current facility) and large scale industrial uses.
13 meters tall and 15 meters wide. Independent of geography.
No supply issues due to any geo-political problems.
Designed to store energy when it’s cheap and plentiful and supply when it’s expensive.“
the replacement of websites with apps sounds so backwards when you actually describe it. like hmm you have to download an entire program onto your device each time you want access to a portal, where it takes up storage indefinitely. somebody should invent an app where you can "browse" any portal just by typing in its address... 🥴
I’m not saying it’s wrong to take care of yourself but when I see posts praising old women for having good skin and no wrinkles because they never sunbathed or smiled or ate sugar it makes me sad. what’s the point? I think if you get to 80 and you have lots of wrinkles and you’re a bit fat it’s a sign of a life well lived