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Peter Solarz
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@biiyu
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I post art under the tag #my art
I make a lot of custom procreate brushes—if you liked some pretty effect on my art, it's almost definitely a brush I made and you can grab it for yourself on my Etsy
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luv how male animals gotta fucking dance around and cry and shit for female attention and sex. and then men irl complain about fat women and body hair like get on ur fucking knees and beg me actually
like these tarantulas dude?? the male has to tap out a rhythm she likes and if she doesn’t?? she’ll literally eat him.
Alpha males: "This is nature. You don't see animals acting like queers don't you?"
90% of nature documentaries: "Until now the female has been very impressed by the males drag performance of Orwell's Homage To Catalonia, soundtracked exclusively by Maria Carey songs. A demanding performance like that knows to impress. But... Oh No... One note in the final tune was one cent flat. It doesn't look good for the male now. She is ordering an orbital laser strike to burn his beautifully groomed plumage from space. It will take all year to regrow, effectively ending this one's mating season early. Better luck next time, little guy. Women are a tough audience."
The US army has increased its signing bonus to a max of fifty thousand dollars.
This is your reminder that no matter how good a $50k signing bonus from the army seems, it is not worth it.
First of all, the US army is bad. I know that sounds simplistic and obvious, but that's hard to remember when you're just looking to get out of a tough situation. But the army is bad. They're bad and they do bad things and you will do bad things for them. The US Armed Forces kill innocent people who want nothing to do with the wars we bring to their doorsteps.
If you think that having a Democrat in the White House means you won't be called upon to kill civilians, you're wrong.
You may tell yourself that we're not at war, that you'll never actually fire on another human, that you aren't going to be a drone pilot. But you don't know that. None of that shit is your choice when you're in the military. A war could start tomorrow. You could be sent out to kill people even if we aren't at war - we do it all the time - and you don't get to choose what you're going to do. Choosing to join the military is giving up the choice to not kill someone. As soon as you participate in that system, your options are to charge ahead or to be discharged.
If that's not a good enough reason for you, then remember that the military doesn't care about you. The army doesn't give a shit if you leave with PTSD so long as they still get their budget. The Navy doesn't give a shit what damage it does to your body. The Marines don't care about who you are and what they're taking out of you when they fill you up with a myth of brotherhood and a mountain of discipline.
Joining the military is going to be traumatic at some level. When you're done with your term you'll think that you're going to get support - medical treatment or a pension or money for school - and it's going to be like pulling teeth to get any of that, and it's going to be hard to get back into the swing of what life is like without the military making your choices for you. It'll be hard to find a job, it'll be hard to find support. It'll be hard to get along with people who don't have the same experience that you do because you took yourself outside of the normal experience of life in your country. You will resent the people you come home to and it will be because of a situation that you created, and nobody is going to be around to help you resolve that tension, which is going to make reenlisting look pretty attractive.
And if that's not enough reason for you, if you're trying to get out of a bad situation and this looks like the only way and the recruiter is telling you that you're gonna get fifty grand that you can put into savings and have it build interest while you're enlisted and you're going to get out and be rich and all your troubles will be behind you - that's bullshit too.
Almost nobody gets the high end of the bonus. It's not paid out immediately, and what most people DO get in the first six months is gone by the end of the first year because you signed up for that money for a REASON, so of course you spend the $8k you got instead of the $50k you signed up for, and of course you don't save it.
If you live in a city where the minimum wage is $15 an hour then a minimum wage job will pay more than your starting salary in the army, and getting a higher salary will depend on you staying in and working your way up the ladder, each increase convincing you to stay longer, to reach for the next rung. If you don't live in a city with a minimum wage that high, a bus ticket and a bunch of roommates are a hell of a lower cost than the possibility of being asked to kill people.
Almost all the vets I know are cops, are fucked up, are dead, or are some combination of those three things. You're not going to come out of the army rich, you may not come out of the army at all, and if you do make it out you're not going to be the same person on the other end. You will have learned some things about yourself and about discipline, and about how the world works, but those things aren't going to help you be a happier, healthier, better person.
Don't sign up. The bonus is a lie and the national pride is a lie and the job skills and fraternity and discipline is a lie.
Don't join the army.
I'm sure there are some trans people who are actively considering detransition given the political circumstances, and I'm going to level you: I don't think that will save us. Fascism doesn't work that way. The moment there aren't any out trans people to oppress, they'll go a witchhunt for the secret trans people and your name will be at the top of that list. The only thing that has a prayer of saving anyone is militant, out-and-proud solidarity.
In case you aren’t familiar, Michael Scott Moore and David Rohde are both journalists. Moore was held by Somali pirates for 977 days. Rohde was held captive by the Taliban for 7 months after being abducted in Afghanistan.
I would love to make one post about aotearoa without people bringing up hobbits on it to be so honest with you guys
listen I understand. they're amazing movies and I do think it's awesome that they were filmed here!!!!! but holy shit! it's the only thing anyone seems to be able to talk about when there is ANY discussion of these islands!! I would super love to be able to discuss our ecology, politics, culture, landscapes, and people without needing to hear about hobbiton every single time
I don't knowwww. it shouldn't be a huge deal but at the same time, the image an overwhelming amount of people have of aotearoa comes from those movies. our struggling ecosystems get overshadowed by fields and grassy hills and other non-native biomes that were explicitly chosen to depict the england-inspired fantasy land of middle earth. these same biomes only exist here because english settlers historically slashed and burned massive swaths of forest to create them, and now they're framed as famous and beautiful. mass deforestation of precious native forests. I don't know man. it annoys me juuuuust a little when every other post I make about this place gets a lotr joke plastered on it.
hey, do you have any cool facts about aotearoa i can pivot to when people bring it up in conversation
there are 53 volcanoes in the most populated city in the country
the largest eagle to ever exist (pouākai) was endemic to aotearoa
same with the tallest bird to ever exist (moa)
tuatara is only remaining species in the order sphenodontia and only exists here (for context- the other three extant reptile orders are snakes+lizards, turtles+tortoises, and crocodiles+alligators+caimans)
only two native land mammals and they're both tiny bats
kea is the only alpine parrot on earth
wētāpunga is the heaviest insect on earth
hard to condense into a quick "fun fact" but matariki is an incredibly celebration that has a lot of fascinating history and tradition behind it, totally worth researching!!
less of a fact more of a "check this out" but showing people photos of rotorua's geothermal areas is a favourite of mine
we were the first nation to give women the right to vote in 1893, almost a decade before any other country on earth!
we have the most colourful fungi out of anywhere on the planet!! this is due to our massive abundance of native birds. the fungi mimics the bright colours of fruit, causing birds to eat them!!
okay I'll bite
hawm
As a moderately technical person with an extremely good understanding of computers AND an extremely good understanding of the things that nontechnical people find frustrating about computers, it is always just a little exhausting to finish making a specific recommendation to a nontechnical person only to have people who are extremely technical and extremely bad at understanding the things that nontechnical people find frustrating about computers come in and make a recommendation that will require more effort and expense on the part of the nontechnical person or are literally exactly the opposite of what the nontechnical person is asking for because the technical respondent didn't understand what the nontechnical person was saying.
"My sister has had an expensive gaming machine and didn't use it and doesn't use it now but might do some light gaming stuff at an indeterminate point in the future and is currently using my personal laptop to do basic web browsing, I'm trying to ensure that my sister can keep doing web browsing but whenever I ask my friends for advice they start at a high price point and the people I know who have purchased used equipment have bad experiences with it that I'm not interested in duplicating; is it possible to get an inexpensive computer that will accomplish what I'm looking for here without it turning into a time suck because I'm not particularly good at computers?" is not what someone says when they want you to start speccing out a machine that requires a graphics card that costs as much as the machine that they actually need. The question was not "can you find me a less expensive gaming machine?" it was "is there such a thing as an affordable non-garbage machine my sister can use to look at Ao3 or are my choices 'used office machine old enough to have a driver's license,' 'cheap-but-trash machine that will have to be replaced annually,' or 'gaming rig that costs as much as a car'?"
It's like when people ask me for advice on improving their online security and privacy because their data was revealed in a breach and I talk about using bitwarden and protonmail and basic degoogling and then other people pop into the comments to recommend installing linux, buying a burner phone, and self-hosting an encrypted server.
I get where you're coming from here, almost everybody CAN become technical if they want to, but most people who are not CURRENTLY technical can't generally become technical in the timeframe that they would need to in order to manage whatever problem they're having.
If someone is saying "My friends insist the only bread I can eat is fresh-made croissants from a boutique patisserie, and my dad only eats stale wonderbread, is there something other than that out there that I can have for lunch?" the answer isn't "you should start making sourdough, everyone can learn to bake."
One of the things that happened with my start-to-failure linux stream the other day is I was looking up the steps for how to verify the checksum for an ISO file in Windows (because I always forget how to) so that I could trust the file that I downloaded was safe to install. The file that was the download of Ubuntu Studio. Which is, to be clear, linux.
So I search for information about how to do checksum bullshit in Windows and the instructions I come to from the Ubuntu site say "If you aren't using linux on windows, why on earth not? You should do this by installing linux."
THAT IS THE THING THAT I AM TRYING TO DO I NEED AN INSTRUCTION FOR HOW TO DO A STEP IN THE OS THAT I AM CURRENTLY USING SO THAT I CAN INSTALL LINUX.
Seriously, follow some links with me. From the link above to this:
From that to releases:
From the release download you can get info on how to burn the images to disk:
Which tells you that you need to verify the image:
and then links you for info on how to do that in Linux!!!!!
THIS CHASES NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE AWAY. THIS IS WHY NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE THINK LINUX IS SCARY. BECAUSE WE GO 'OH NO YOU HAVE TO VERIFY YOUR DOWNLOAD IT'S A VITAL SECURITY STEP' and then the non-technical people go "Okay how do I do that" and the instructions say "Why aren't you already using linux, dipshit?"
THIS IS POOR TECH COMMUNICATION. NERDS, I LOVE YOU BUT THIS IS WHY PEOPLE USE FUCKING WINDOWS WINDOWS SUCKS BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE FUN OF THEM FOR USING WINDOWS.
I am literally describing part of the fuss.
I have installed Linux on something like 20-30 machines in the last ten years, but my daily use computer is a windows machine so if I'm flashing an ISO i am doing it on a windows machine. I don't do this frequently enough that I remember how to do checksums between installs, so I tend to look up instructions every time. I found instructions on how to do this elsewhere, but the ubuntu site with instructions for how to do this is *tremendously* unfriendly for non-technical people.
Once you have selected a distro and gotten it installed and the drivers are updated and it's talking to your peripherals reliably, there isn't much fuss with linux. At that point it's easy to use. It's an OS, no more difficult to navigate than Android or OSX or Vista.
But picking a distro, ensuring that you've properly configured the tools for installation, and installation are NOT easy to do for non-technical people who are taking the chance of making the second most expensive thing they probably own into a useless chunk of plastic (as far as they understand it).
So, yes, once you've gotten the gym membership and done the safety class and have worked with a trainer, benching 100lbs is easy. But if you don't have gym access, or equipment, or know how to position yourself on the bench it's impossible.
Sometimes it feels like tech people are telling people to just lift 100 pounds and ignoring the fact that the person they're talking to owns an 8lb medicine ball and a treadmill and is simply not equipped to just lift 100 pounds.
I'm a brand new linux user and there is <i>absolutely no way</i> I could have done the install myself. I had to get my wife (professional programmer with a degree) to walk me through the entire thing. I can't parse what's happening in any of the screenshots of the process above. I'm not even from the walled-garden generation of computer users--I learned how to use computers long before the first iPhone was dreamt of. I learned how to type and use html about the time I learned to read. But that's like, it. I didn't learn to code in school and was never interested enough to learn it later (and that's fine! Some-but-not-all technical people treat that as a failing akin to lacking basic curiosity about the world, but it is really a specific hobby. Many tech nerds lack my specific hobbies and I don't think that's a moral issue on their part.) Anything I have to open the command line for I make my wife supervise, and I wouldn't pick a computer or operating system by myself. Very middle of the road, average level of tech literacy--slightly above average for younger people now, and slightly below average for people my own age.
The "Verifying ISO Integrity" section above is <i>literally a different language</i> for me. I would have to look up almost every word in that paragraph as I went, the way I do when I read a text in a human language I don't speak. I don't expect other people to start trying to read in a language they don't speak, so I don't see why the aforementioned some-but-not-all technical people think it's like, fine and normal to expect me to pick up a new language for something I allegedly have to do once and then forget about.
A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City em
"Privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media."
Can we please not do this. The lesson from this is not "so long as your payment can't be traced to you you're fine." The lesson here is that Proton will give the FBI (via the swiss govt or not) whatever info they ask for.
in order to exist they have to comply with local laws, the benefit of proton and signal and other similar platforms is that they straight up do not have the majority of the information they could be subpoenaed for. finances are the exception legally, you still need good opsec
The lesson here is not "Proton pretended to be good guys but secretly they were bad guys :( "
The lesson is that you cannot just find a "privacy focused" email or message app and assume that means you can say whatever you want because no one will ever know it was you.
Email is inherently insecure communication. Proton is a decent company that mostly avoids collecting the kind of data the fed wants. But you are not invisible behind a proxy or a vpn, encryption is not a magic ward, and you need to have at least a basic understanding of opsec before you got doing shit the fed might come looking at you for.
I saw somebody be wrong on the internet and I didn’t respond (don’t want to get involved) and I’m being SO brave about it
I should never have made this post because now every time it gets a new note I’m reminded of how wrong that one person on the internet was.
reblog to remind them how wrong that one person on the internet was
THEY WERE SO WRONG. ON THE INTERNET.
What were they wrong about?
NO I AM BEING SO BRAVE ABOUT IT
It’s been a year- I do believe that the silence has been expired
THEY SAID STORIES DON’T NEED CONFLICT BECAUSE HAYAO MIYAZAKI MOVIES ARE GREAT AND DON’T HAVE CONFLICT IN THEM
THEY SAID MIYAZAKI MOVIES
DON’T HAVE
CONFLICT
op you were in fact braver then any marine what the sam hell
AI generated videos are so good at replicating doorbell cameras. i can't imagine why
the way ozempic has finally made the fact that eating healthy and exercising doesn't necessarily make you thin well known and society's reaction to this is not "oh i guess being thin or fat doesn't actually show if you're healthy" but "oh i guess everyone should be on this drug"
u can lift it bunny
I hope its ok i painted your bunny
UNGRATEFUL tech companies are saying things like "turn off your ad blocker" and "we need your photo id" instead of "thank you so much for not just pirating our shit, youre so handsome"
bring back shame
peer reviewed tags
The worst person you could ever meet in your lifetime still has a favorite breakfast cereal.
I knew a rapist who was an absolute ride-or-die friend to his gamer bros. Like, give the last dollar from his pocket to a friend who got a flat tire, and then turn around and go rape a Freshman that evening.
I knew a vicious child abuser who wept like a baby when her dog died.
The nastiest human being on the planet nevertheless feels obscurely melancholy sometimes, or has high spirits when they step out doors on the first warm day of spring, or has opinions on their favorite TV show and which side the toilet paper should hang on and whether or not the room should be cold or warm when you go to sleep.
We're all still just people. Complex, with fully-realized interior worlds.
None of that will save you from becoming a monster, if you decide to do monstrous things.
None of it makes you exempt from the consequences of monstrosity.
"i would kill a pedophile to protect my child" ok but would you teach your child how to say no? even to adults? even to adults you like? would you teach your child the words "penis" and "vulva" and then use them? would you let them ask questions about their body? would you answer them honestly? would you learn how to cope with your feelings when you talk about human bodies, so they don't feel ashamed? would you set a positive example for how you talk about your body? would you tell your child they don't have to hug or kiss anyone? would you tell your family the same? would you stand by them when they refuse to hug someone? even someone you know has never done anything to hurt them? would you let your child avoid food they don't like? would you let you child avoid people they don't like? would you believe them? would you sit in the discomfort of not knowing all the answers and not take it out on them? would you love your child the same if someone did hurt them? would you make them feel valued just as they are? would you let them talk to doctors or nurses in private? would you let them express their feelings? would you show interest in their life? would you let your child say no to you? would you help your child feel safe coming to you when they make a mistake? would you apologize to your child? would you believe them? would you put aside your anger to focus on what would make your child feel safe and loved? would you put your ego aside for your child? would you take your child's concerns seriously? would you listen to your child? would you believe them?
