Dunno

Main blog. I haven’t decided what to do with this yet. Stuff I like: travel, baseball, my family, Taylor, history, science, learning stuff, being right (I’ll even admit when I’m wrong, so I can be right.) Have travelled to 37 countries on 5 continents. Used to do a lot of adventure travel, hiking and stuff (South America, East Africa) but now mostly travel in Europe and NA (often for work.) Last trip: Barcelona and Porto. Next up: Shanghai and Osaka. My delulu side blog is where I do most of my posting

[apolladay]

would you read a fanfiction au set at your job? i.e if you're a barista would you read a coffeshop au for any media, hospital au if you're a doctor (?? i guess??? you get the point)

yes and i've actively sought it out

i wouldn't mind it but i'm not seeking it out specifically

no my job is boring and/or wouldn't work as a setting

no i hate my job and don't want to think about it in my spare time

it's nuanced

unemployed button

Would you read a fanfiction au set at your job? i.e if you're a barista would you read a coffeshop au for any media, hospital au if you're a doctor (?? i guess??? you get the point)

yes and I've actively sought it out

I wouldn't mind it but I'm not seeking it out specifically

no my job is boring and/or wouldn't work as a setting

no I hate my job and don't want to think about it in my spare time

it's nuanced

unemployed button

Voting ended onApr 4, 2025

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[fadingponycookiedream]

[andsorrowsend]

[werefeathers]

[cametotheshowinsd]

You Are In Love | Taylor Swift

[dct239394cvvd098dffgggp]

need more of this type of activism more than ever

[arabian-knight]

Can't believe I'm saying this but not all Swifties are bad

[pr]

elaborate????

[lifehacksthatwork]

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it'll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I'd recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn't read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can't for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You'll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It's genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

[commandtower-solring-go]

Get you a girl who speaks in parentheses. Get you a girl who includes information in a sentence that isn't necessary but adds additional context or commentary.

[bluehairedspideypolls]

How old is the oldest film you've watched AND enjoyed?

1990s or later

1980s

1970s

1960s

1950s

1940s

1930s

1920s

1910s

1900s or earlier

Voting ended onAug 2, 2023

Feel free to leave the film title and year in the tags! :)

[bluehairedspideypolls]

This post has gotten a bit of traction, so if anyone's interested I've been making a letterboxd list of movies from the tags!

[worflesbian]

sci fi is when women in tank tops are covered in grease and sweat and are shouting at people and racing against time to save lives

[cantanopeshitthatwastaken]

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

[thatgiraffebutt]

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

[literallyaflame]

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

[madd-catter]

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

[gen-is-gone]

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

The problem I have with AI art now, outside of any arguments about intellectual property, effort, or "creepiness," is that its success is still measured by whether it can pass as fully human-made . AI art was most compelling to me when it was more imperfect--that picture that confused a prompt of salmon in a river with salmon meat, those hazy dreamscapes generated by neural blender. Art movements are often informed by technological breakthroughs, and the possibilities and limits of a new medium--see the ability to paint outdoors and impressionism, or acrylic paints and post painterly abstraction. The medium is the message. I just wish more people making or consuming AI art viewed the limits of the medium and the mistranslations between human minds and algorithms as something to work with and explore, rather than a bug to be fixed.

[luntfontanne]

so i know in the past you have talked about the lotr movies used to be a comfort movie for you (still are...?) and also about how tolkien essentially took irl racism and created Fantasy Racism (TM) and i guess my question is i love the films but also absolutely recognize the representation of violence in those films and books is extremely racialized so like, what do i do with this knowledge? im not like TELL ME IM GOOD, i'm asking what should next steps be when you know something you like is ~problematic~ is it acknowledge and move on while keeping it in mind or...? this is where i struggle! what have you done in the past? sorry if this is a dumb question or if you've talked about this before but you think so deeply about things i'd love to hear your thoughts!

i mean i don't think i have ever like.. understood something to be problematic and then forced myself to make a conscious active decision to change my personal behavior around that thing in order to account for that. like i don't have set Next Steps to take, that's not usually how it works for me, i don't develop an intellectual understanding that something is Problematic and then proceed to consciously boycott that thing specifically Because It's Problematic? i just see things and make connections, and those things cannot be seen and those connections cannot be unmade, and consequently my ability to personally enjoy those things, at least easily and freely, is permanently gone. like you can't unring that bell you can't go back to your childhood when things were simple. and that's fine! honestly that's the nature of growing up and becoming an adult and understanding more things more deeply. you just gotta learn how to deal with that and move forward.

and i mean obviously i still do watch things that trouble me now and i either sit with my discomfort and lean into it and actively pull the work apart more because that is how i engage with stories. or honestly i do sometimes try to just shut my brain off and focus on ooh pretty mountains many horsies big battle!!! sometimes that works sometimes that doesn't. that's life innit. everything sucks and nothing is perfect and you take what you can from it all. how you engage with something privately is literally your own personal business and has no impact on anyone.

but then. if you maintain that you can keep publicly engaging with that thing in the exact same way you used to and not ever acknowledge The Problems then that IS actively perpetuating harm. for example, i am simply unable to talk about lotr without talking about race because it is SO crucial to the foundation of it, even all the positive wholesome aspects of it that people love, and there is no middle earth without white supremacy. but that is not something that i am actively trying to do or keep in mind or bring up in every conversation, it just inherently is. like it has its roots and its tendrils in every part of the story and the world so it's not about actively trying to be woke or even trying to actively call out ~problematic~ aspects of a work, imo it just naturally is a part of any and every meaningful and complete discussion you might want to have about it. like what you do with this knowledge is just that… you have it now. you let it guide the way you interact with or think about or publicly discuss the work every single time you do so. that's it.

i mean this really is just the nature of literary analysis (vs Fandom, i guess). academics and scholars spend their whole careers analyzing works that are ~Problematic~ (lol) and it doesn't necessarily mean they are endorsing or ignoring those beliefs (though sometimes it does… see tolkien studies lmao). but just because something is ~problematic~ it doesn't mean we throw it away and never think about or touch it again, it just means that that context and understanding should drive and ground all of your analysis of it. you situate that work in the world in which it was made and the world you live in now.

(i mean. sidenote. it doesn't mean we should throw it away but i DO think it means we should just fucking leave it be and hollywood should stop making new adaptations of tolkien's work and sequels and prequels and spinoffs in order to desperately keep milking that cash cow. like. when it comes to NEW media that is being made, tell some new fucking stories!!! but that's a whole other conversation lol)

anyways. this is from a half-finished thought that i saved in my drafts weeks ago but i think it is relevant here, and it's about one of my favorite passages from the orkish manifesto (search my blog for that title if you don't know what i'm talking about)

For the genocide of the orcs is, of course, part of the climactic victory over Sauron and Mordor. Yet if it were to be suggested to the average reader of the book that it ends with a great crime, the claim would probably meet with complete bewilderment. The killing of the orcs generates no moral concern (either for the Allies or the vast majority of readers and critics) because, of course, the orcs have been successfully depersonized by Tolkien, rendered as ontological zeros. The pen here prepares the way for the sword. Indeed, a case could be made that LTR should be required reading for courses in the literature of genocide, for precisely because of the celebrated “reality” of Middle-Earth, it becomes possible to watch, in synoptic overview, the construction of an epistemology that makes mass murder possible.

mills wrote this several decades ago but that last part of it seems really prescient when it comes to what i'm talking about here and just in general to the conversations we're having constantly now As A Society about censorship in the name of political correctness (i.e. Cancellation). it really encapsulates how i feel about many of these instances when people are like "why are you trying to cancel this beloved work of fiction written by a man who is long dead and was not exceptionally horrific as an individual but simply reflected the bigotry of the time" and that's the thing. i'm NOT trying to Cancel tolkien. i honestly literally think it should be required reading, as mills says in the bolded portion of the above passage, for people to understand the rhetorical justification of genocide and the way we can construct worldviews that not only enable but morally require it. like i think that is where the real value of these stories lies—it is no longer about making you Feel Good, your personal enjoyment of it is a whole separate thing that is your own private business, but instead it is about how you can use this text with this specific contextualized understanding of it to illuminate how you view and understand things that are happening and narratives that are being constructed in the real world.

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

sometimes I see an awful take online but then i'm like WAIT, barely anyone in real life thinks this. very relieving honestly

[shitpostinguniverse]

[hypnoticwinter]

[slashercatz]

[lixiesbabyhands]

how does it feel to be the funniest person on earth

[itwasntasingle]

"Do you know the price of eggs ?"

[asterism343]

ok so i watch a lot of youtube videos about chess despite barely knowing how to play and something really funny happened on chess.com which is the site people go to to play chess online

basically they have a bunch of chess bots you can choose to play against at various different power levels (~100 is total noob, ~2500 is like, mega grandmaster). and recently they released a bunch of…cat themed bots?

but the noteworthy one is the cosmic horror known as Mittens.

Mittens has a listed power level of 1. However, that is a deception. Mittens is actually incredibly powerful, defeating top players with ease, and actually holding his own against the most powerful chess bots in existence.

also he sends you these weird messages like

absolutely wild

[asterism343]

chess youtube is full of these videos now lol

[jackdaw-kraai]

FINALLY someone is talking about this! It should also be noted that Mittens is characterized by an extremely chaotic, extremely aggressive play style that nonetheless exploits a player’s psychology ruthlessly. Mittens is known for forcing you into absolutely sadistic positions that you only realize you’re trapped in after being confused by her (yes, she’s a her) utterly batshit three prior moves. She likes to open with the Sicilian and she’s an absolute beast.

[garadinervi]

León Ferrari, Untitled, (Xadrez series), 1988 [Museo Moderno – Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. © 2021 León Ferrari]

[killjoyfabulous]

What if I formatted my resume like one of those porn bot bios?

[killjoyfabulous]

😝Massachusetts🎀Bachelor’s degree in biology🍉’17/😘🍑♑️/💎Microsoft Office💯