Cosmic Funnies
Xuebing Du
Today's Document
Stranger Things
pixel skylines
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
ojovivo
occasionally subtle
h
Game of Thrones Daily
Not today Justin
Sweet Seals For You, Always
noise dept.
Claire Keane
roma★
Misplaced Lens Cap
hello vonnie
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
$LAYYYTER
No title available
seen from Romania
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@blackblood
how many cats do you have???
0 (blasphemous)
1 :3
2 :3 :3
3! :3 :3 :3
4!! :3 :3 :3 :3
5!!! :3 :3 :3 :3 :3
More than 5!!!! (I love you)
Bonus: explain who your cats are and how you got them in the tags
TIL “Yankee Doodle” was written by the British to mock americans. “Doodle” is thought to come from the German “dödel”, meaning “fool” or “simpleton” and “macaroni,” a flamboyantly stylish type of dress, painting the Yankees as morons who thought placing a feather in one’s cap made them a “dandy.”
via reddit.com
so you’re telling me that “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni” would be like saying “wrote a G on his belt and called it gucci”
that’s…a pretty good analogy actually
US moron came to town
Hunting for some coochie
Wrote a G up on his belt
And this bitch called it Gucci
Seeing my notifications get flooded with this every July 4th is the only thing I respect about America
you say youre queer but youve blocked multiple queer blogs. whats the truth?
I hate to break it to you but queer people are still capable of being annoying
Hey, I found a beanie boo that I liked the design of but I can't stand those giant uguu eyes. Do you think it would be possible to replace them with smaller safety eyes akin to the old beanie babies? If yes, do you have any advice?
I was gonna answer this in a normal way, but then I got curious about trying it for myself and thought I might as well demonstrate!
So, I went and picked up a guy from the supermarket. The selection there was pretty barren today but I found a decent test subject:
Eye replacement procedure below!
surely this is a good idea that doesn’t have the capacity to end real fuckin badly
Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.
The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)
Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits…but in practice they don’t.
One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.
Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)
So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.
Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.
Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.
wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much
This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went “…….wtf?????” when I read it. So thank you.
Today I learned about civil engineering.
Fun fact! Civil engineers are pretty much the only engineering discipline absolutely required to take professional licensing exams before they even complete their degrees. They are held to higher standards because all civil engineering projects are going to have a safety critical portion.
Twitter users will not survive the winter
What do they mean it’s impossible to have conversations there’s at least three different ways to do so here
"It's impossible to have conversations there" -person coming from a website where DM'ing is now paywalled behind Twitter Blue.
Happy first day of summer! Welcome to #bellyseason! The pouch is definitely out!
Via Joint Animal Services
That’s my art, FYI. Please credit!
Had a dream that there was a furry subculture revolving entirely around popular cryptids where nobody knew exactly what anybody else's fursona actually looked like because they exclusively drew themselves blurry and out of focus and/or really far away.
Here we go! Fursona reveal!
KOROK FOREST
she’s helping
Herschel Has Discovered Tool Use. Again.
In january of 2021, deep in the throes of pandemic psychosis, we acquired a Corgi Puppy.
I would like to go on the record that we did not get a Corgi because they're cute. We got a Corgi because they're criminally brilliant and enthusiastic working dogs that were bred to bully cattle, which is the exact temperment a dog living in a house with three ADHD adults should have. Herschel does commit a lot of crime, but he also does his appinted service-dog job of "make everyone wake up, eat meals and go to bed at a reasonable and consistent time" extremely well, as well as his bonus jobs of "Keep the squirrels the hell out of the garden" and "Yell every time the cat does something". I didn't actually ask him to do that last job but it has helped in the "teach the cat to stay the hell off the stove" area.
But even with having a whole pack of humans another dog, and a cat to manage, this pales in comparison to his genetic capacity to manage several hundred sheep or cattle across the fields of Wales, and thus, Herschel has decided on further intellectual pursuits to occupy himself, namely, speedrunning the early phases of human tool use and terraforming.
I realized he has the brains of an entire hunter-gatherer tribe shortly after he got fixed, and within 24 hours and still dpey from anesthesia, he'd figured out that his plastic cone could be used to monopolize the water bowl and his favorite chew toys, and within a week, had learned how to carry three toys at once while leaving his mouth open by tucking the toys behind his enormous ears and under his chin. He also figured out that he could wiggle the cone to rest against his shoulders, and started using it as a shovel by literally running the bottom edge into the ground. But that wasn't making holes effeicently enough, apparently, and I ended up watching him figure out how to rotate the cone around so the two pieces of overlapping plastic were under his chin, then use his chin and the stairs to the deck to pinch both ends into a much more efficient V-Shape that let him gouge huge strips of dirt up in seconds. The anthropologists and animal behaviorists in the audience may recognize this as Tool Creation, a behavior normally only seen in higher primates, crows, and some parrots. Once a hole of suitable length, depth and temperature had been achieved, he very carefully rolled the cone around so the digging side was over his head and the smooth side under his chin, and splooted into his hole to cool his little tummy and stitches off. It was at that point that I realized that I was going to have to teach him how to garden, or he was going to teach himself.
He no longer has the cone (He was beginning to experiment with it as a battering ram), but his morning ritual is now "Wake everyone up at 8AM by screaming, locate everyone in house and jam my nose up theirs to make sure they're alive, go outside and scream at the squirrels. Now that Yard is Secure, go get Fun Parent who has hopefully taken their meds by now, and supervise them while they rifle through the plants (this is apparently KEY to their mental health), eating any pest animals Fun Parent points out, chase squirrel AGAIN, go inside and get Breakfast cookie." and BY GOD if we deviate from it there will be much screaming and destruction. If I am not home, it has been reported that he walks round the garden beds and sniffs the plants in the order I usually check them in before he will agree to come in. He doesn't quite know what the deal with the melons is, just that they need to be checked.
But we're out of the labor-intensive parts of gardening and now into Harvesting Season, and this is a bit boring except when I give him snap peas right off the vine, and he has decided to work on the complex physics problem that is Doorknobs.
And last week, he had a breakthrough.
Sometime in 2020, my mom sort-of taught her horrible crime herding dog Arwen how to open the back door so she could let herself out as she pleased during the day and stop interrupting Mom's Zoom calls. Arwen is a Kelpie, which means she's about 60lbs with full-length legs and horrible monkey paws that are one joint away from being hands, so when Arwen wants to open the back door, she sits up, leans on the door for purchase/to push it, and uses her terrible crime hands to *push* on the knob until it turns. She can pull the knob open by pawing and catching it on her toes, but she's 11-13 years old now and has mild arthritis, so she prefers to catch it on her central pad instead. She taught Charlie, the other equally brilliant but less criminally inclined dog, to do this but he doesn't like to go outside alone, so he rarely does this.
Herschel, ever the observant student, immediately tried copying them, but even though he is actually tall enough to reach the knob, his toes are just too stubby to get a decent grip on the knob, pushing or pulling, and the first few times, gave up and sat down to scream until one of the fullsize dogs or humans came to open the door for him.
Last week, we were up at my parent's again, and I watched him hunt around the living room until he found his slightly-sticky orange rubber ball (It's clean, it's just a kind of rubber that's always a bit tacky), carry it across the house, stand up on his hind legs at the back door, put the rubber ball on top of the gap between the knob and the wall, and then push down on the ball, which caught the doorknob and turned it for him, thus opening the door. He let himself out, had a merry time yelling at the squirrels, came back in, stopped a few feet inside the door, went back out, grabbed his ball, and brought it back into his kennel, a place he can leave toys if he doesn't want the other dogs playing with them.
This means he somehow worked out how doorknobs work, how fucking levers work, and that his orange rubber ball specifically was the one that would work (none of his other toys are the correct size/texture), that he'd need that ball specifically to open the door again, and yesterday he did the same trick with the bedroom door, so he knows that the rubber ball/skeleton key can be used on all doorknobs, not just that one.
I wonder if I can teach him to sweep.
___
If you want to fund Herschel's research into Tool Use and/or get me therapy for the ensuing chaos, please feel free to donate to my Ko-Fi, or get further Dog Content by subscribing to my Patreon.
I can't believe I wrote this and then forgot to include a picture of the little man for a solid 24 hours:
Behold, my Crime Tube.
It's two and a half in the morning and I have no words or brain capacity to process the joy I feel right now, so I'm going to reblog it and look at it again later.
Thanks for reminding me about this post because The Crime Tube has bullied me into doing a garden this year, with the kind of patient positive re-enforcement and blatant emotional manipulation that would make a dog trainer or Hannibal Lecter would admire.
I wasn't planning on doing a garden this year because we just moved house, had an extremely expensive plumbing event and I got spayed this spring, so I had neither time, money, nor core muscle fortitude for starting a garden this march, which is usually when the beds have to go in if you're trying to establish a garden out here. But we have had an extremely wet spring so everything's running a bit late and I was on the fence about starting a little one, and put some of the plastic bins from the Pandemic Patio Garden out to see what kind of sun exposure they'd get.
Once sighted, Herschel realized that A Garden was a possibility and started on a campagin of psychological manipulation.
Herschel loves the garden, because he likes green beans off the vine but more than that, the garden attracts squirrels to the yard and his bloodlust has been left wanting of late. He also loves activities and I think was maybe a little sad that he wasn't getting to do his morning patrol of the yard with me this year.
So he stopped going out in the mornings.
He clearly wanted to. Charlie, who very much likes having his little helper dog around, wanted herschel to come out too. but instead, Herschel would run to the far end of the house where he can still see the back door, and watch me.
...he wants something. I try offering a treat. Nope. I try calling Charlie over and heaping attention on him, something that usually makes Herschel's jealous little ass hustle on over. Nope. Still waiting for something. I put my shoes on. ZOOM. Ah. My presence is wanted outside. I step out with them. I step back in. Herschel stops MID-PEE to turn around and come back in, and stands at the far end of the house. I go back out. Morning yard activities resume as normal.
He continues this nonsense of running away from the back door until I put on my shoes and go outside with them, and immediately stopping what he's doing if I go back inside before some internal metric of his is met for the better part of a week.
Then it's herding me outside, and jumping on me for attention, running nine feet away, stopping, and looking over his shoulder at me, which has previously been established as his "Are You Following Me? Please Follow Me." I follow. He has shown me carrion instead of just eating it before and I gave him a whole piece of turkey about it because that was VERY good behavior and I am eager to re-enforce it. Instead, he patrols around the plastic bins, doing a "Follow Me?" check every few feet.
Yesterday I returned from the nursery with 70% off annual plants for a mini-garden and not only were there extreme yard zoomies of excitement, I got three toys piled on my foot as a reward for the desired gardening Behavior.
Now, This is the kind of behavior I got and trained Herschel for- Herding dogs are good at remembering load-bearing rituals like "Take your meds" and "It's time for food!" and other stuff my ADHD Brain struggles with. So I'm very proud of him.
...I just didn't realized this memory and enforcement behavior extended all the way to "IT'S TIME FOR THIS ANNUAL BEHAVIOR I'VE ONLY SEEN TWICE BUT IS APPARENTLY CRUCIAL AND I WILL BE A LITTLE ASSHOLE AND ALSO FLAGRANTLY DOG-TRAIN YOU TO DO IT, BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU TEACH ME THINGS".
Great job, little Crime Tube. I got extra green bean plants for you.
Just saw this on Twitter. An awesome idea for players who are stuck and for DMs to foster more involvement from your party in the world. @probablynpcrpgideas
The Storypath system actively encouraged this sort of gameplay as part of its core design.
Is reading cursive writing your superpower?
Join a special transcription challenge featuring Revolutionary War Pension Files!
The stories of over 80,000 men and women who lived through the American Revolution are waiting to be told. Will you help us tell them? Help
Image description: One half of image is a form from a Revolutionary War pension file, filled out in cursive writing. The other side says "can you read this? Help us transcribe pension files of the first veterans of the US military." There's the same link as in this post, and the National Archives logo.
@ltwilliammowett @focsle you may be interested
I am, thank you very much for sending <3
I am honestly curious: is this a problem? Can so little people read cursive?
When the Common Core educational standards were introduced in 2010, cursive handwriting wasn't included. Some states added it to their standards later, but there are a fair amount of people who were never taught cursive.
The documents in this project can also be tougher to read than some other cursive documents, due to quirks like use of the "long s" (those s's that look like f's), the quality of the image (these documents were microfilmed and the scans come from the microfilm), and plain old sloppy handwriting.
Transcription is also helpful for:
Making our catalog search work better
Making it easier to read the documents
People who have low or no vision, and use a screenreader or other assistive technology
People who want to cut and paste document text into translation software, research notes, or something else
So if you can read 19th Century handwriting, you can help out a lot of people by taking on some transcription!
If Revolutionary War records aren't your jam, we have other tagging and transcription missions on our Citizen Archivist page, or you can tag and transcribe any record in our catalog, even the ones that are typed.
You cannot possibly guess where this is going
I ain't even ashamed how many times I watched this.
Lmao this is the content I am here for.
can’t find the post that’s already circulating about this now but there really is no medical privacy in star trek whatsoever. imagine if a stranger walked into your doctor’s appointment and asked for your medical details, your doctor obliged without question, and then the stranger demanded you be killed. bonkers
the rest of this scene is hilarious btw
Futuristic insurance provider
Have you ever heard a tiger sneeze?🔊
Source
I HAVE NOW
MY GOODNESS
EXCUSE YOU!!
