Here and Queer

28, he/him/his (venomous), American, Queer AF, trans man, ADHD-PI, ASD

[inexplicifics]

Re: Taking care of the trainees in Kaer Morhen.

I'm imagining some poor sleep-deprived Crane who is desperately trying to find a way to put the chicks to bed, and at his wits end thought of a lullaby, maybe that'd help? Instead, he came up with the Witcher ABC's:

Arachas are awful and always aware, they lay in wait so always beware. Bruxa shriek loud and very achy, drink black blood and she won't wakey. Cockatrice come in many sizes and shapes, aard it down before it escapes. Drowners are dull and dreary and numb, kill them quick, don't be dumb. Endrega are seemingly everywhere, yes, even there. Fiends are frightening foes indeed, stab, then step aside with speed. Ghouls are common as sunrise, don't trust the dead, surprise! Harpies have high shrill voices, if you think they're pretty, you should rethink your choices. Imps inspire mischief and irritation, fuck, I need a vacation. Jumblehogs are just something I made up right now, but they look a bit like a cow. Kikimore will jump out of the ground to eat you messy, a tasty treat, fat and fleshy. Leshy will hug you very tight, but it's not a very nice hug. Myriapodans might be a mystery we should lay to rest, so they're not the best for a weapons test. Nekkers are nasty little creatures unloved by all, and they have this really annoying chattering call. Ogres are deep sleepers, wake them, and you'll sleep deeper. Plumards pluck pots and pans to beat you with, they're not very strong though, so take the hit. Rotfiends are rotted and dead, and I really want to go to bed. Shaelmaar are shiny and super adorable, but it's not worth it, wyvern hide is more affordable. Tomtar are a nice little daydream, they're not as nice as they seem. Ulv's are just really big wolves, really, but you should stay way from them, ideally. Vukodlaks are bigger than ulvs and werewolves to boot, stay at a distance to aim and shoot. Wadislaw is a bloke I saw in Novigrad once, he was a real ponce. Xylophones are instruments to play on, if you want witchers to stay gone. Yaguars are spelled Jaguars and are really big cats, I should've used that for J, alas. Zebras are striped horses and they don't exist, but if they do, tame one and bring it home. Q I forgot but lets say it's a quokka, smiley things who sacrifice their kids like I'm a'bout'ta'!

Jaskier puts a tune to it, and it's the greatest (worst) ear-worm that has ever existed.

This is delightful, thank you so much!

[wtf-scientific-papers]

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

[wtf-scientific-papers]

This study has been retracted:

The Editors have retracted this Article. After publication, concerns were raised about the animal work reported in this paper. The Animal Ethics Committee of Butantan Institute confirmed that the approval granted to the Authors for their research on snakes (Bothrops jararaca) did not include newborn snakes or the use of the “soft stepping” method. All authors disagree with this retraction.

[iced-coffee-chronicles]

openin’ the door to the microwave one second early because you don’t need all the hootin’ and hollerin’

[delta-orionis]

I'D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.

Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there's this phenomenon called a "fast radio burst", a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They're still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.

In the 2010's, astronomers working at Australia's Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.

However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal.... as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.

The signals tended to be clustered around midday... hmm...

Further evidence that the signals were man-made... this trend also followed daylight savings!!!

(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely...)

It took the astronomers several years, but they eventually tracked down the source to a microwave oven in the facility's break room.

They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.

The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.

I imagine they must have a big sign reading "LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING" hanging in the break room now.

TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.

(PS: I highly recommend reading the paper explaining the origin of Perytons, it's short and also pretty entertaining.)

[awwcutefuzzyanimals]

Thinking about something

[centrumlumina]

[gaarrus]

the trick for enjoying a new video game is avoiding the internet’s opinion on it 

[ichorsick]

[lazerblues]

Happy aniversary you dumb fucks @staff

[true-king-of-monsters]

Happy anniversary, you stupid fucks!

[homopower]

[backseat-burner]

happy anniversary

[dialupmodern]

happy anniversary shitheads!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[chalkboard-wolf]

Happy anniversary peebrains

[dankmemeuniversity]

[justsomerandomgaynerd]

[cognitohazardous]

at the mariners bar: sorry mates i cant go out today.. My boat's transmasc now. He's more comfortable with he/him. He just went through top surgery to get his sails removed and he's recovering. Bluebeard-and-Pronouns the woke pirate: arrg so he's gotten a mastectomy. well i'm glad that he's discovered himself.

[3000s]

after 2 years working outdoors all day i finally got stung by an onion for the first time yesterday and i wasnt even doing anything there wasnt even a nest nearby

[3000s]

a wasp. i was looking at a onion just now sorry

[teaboot]

Me: Yes sir I understand that the office door cannot be closed when two colleagues of opposite gender are alone together due to sexual misconduct concerns but as an openly bisexual employee I have to ask if leaving two colleagues of the same gender entirely unsupervised isn't a double standard

Me: Like. I feel I should also have my ass covered if a same-gender colleague accuses me of shit, you know

Bossman: Nahhhhhhh it's good

The morally grey cathedral goblin that lives on my shoulder and judges the value of my kneejerk impulses: If you grabbed his ass right now he would learn such an important lesson forever but we don't roll like that bro

Me: (out loud) Okay

[artcake]

a gift of a jewel for @formlessvoidbeast

I truly recommend their amazing story on AO3, for the want of a jewel. It has everything! Warlord Barbarian, Sorcery, Beauty as a Weapon (but not the way you think!), Sex and Ace Positivity, and just a wonderful world full of rich and interesting characters.

I haven't read OG works in a very long time and I'm so glad to have ftwoaj as the one that broke my streak!

Cannot rec it enough especially for anyone who enjoys @inexplicifics Warlord AU!

[formlessvoidbeast]

*muffled screaming*

Oooh, I love your take on Damian! <333

[link to the fic for those interested]

[inexplicifics]

Oh, beautiful! And For Want of a Jewel is a jewel of a fic, shining and perfect.

[scromch]

i think maybe we could spend less time thinking about things that make us angry and more time thinking about other stuff

[scromch]

YEAH EXACTLY HOLY SHIT

[scromch]

oh my god hes perfect. replace the faces on us currency with him

[jamesv-t]

@elodieunderglass this feels like your sort of thing but I can't put my finger on why

[elodieunderglass]

Maybe the legs

[foxes-in-love]

[whatmeaningfullessthings]

A perfect newborn leafcutter ant was recently born at a zoo but nobody cared because it wasn't a piece of shit hippo

[islamprotestan-blog]

only 5 seconds

[zanyflowerpizzatrash]

i wasn't ready for that..lol

[lamentablesquonk]

Immediately recognized that look

[peacevine]

You Are Not Immune To fanart of characters who die in canon that has them alive and well, with scars from the wound that originally killed them

[peacevine]

[ms-demeanor]

I would like to address something that has come up several times since I relaunched my computer recommendation blog two weeks ago. Part of the reason that I started @okay-computer and that I continue to host my computer-buying-guide is that it is part of my job to buy computers every day.

I am extremely conversant with pricing trends and specification norms for computers, because literally I quoted seven different laptops with different specs at different price-points *today* and I will do more of the same on Monday.

Now, I am holding your face in my hands. I am breathing in sync with you. We are communicating. We are on the same page. Listen.

Computer manufacturers don't expect users to store things locally so it is no longer standard to get a terabyte of storage in a regular desktop or laptop. You're lucky if you can find one with a 512gb ssd that doesn't have an obnoxious markup because of it.

If you think that the norm is for computers to come with 1tb of storage as a matter of course, you are seeing things from a narrow perspective that is out of step with most of the hardware out there.

I went from a standard expectation of a 1tb hdd five years ago to expecting to get a computer with a 1tb hdd that we would pull and replace with a 1tb ssd to expecting to get a computer that came with a 256gb ssd that we would pull and replace with a 1tb ssd, to just having the 256gb ssd come standard and and only seeking out more storage if the customer specifically requested it because otherwise they don't want to pay for more storage.

Computer manufacturers consider any storage above 256gb to be a premium feature these days.

Look, here's a search for Lenovo Laptops with 16GB RAM (what I would consider the minimum in today's market) and a Win11 home license (not because I prefer that, but to exclude chromebooks and business machines). Here are the storage options that come up for those specs:

You will see that the majority of the options come with less than a terabyte of storage. You CAN get plenty of options with 1tb, but the point of Okay-Computer is to get computers with reasonable specs in an affordable price range. These days, that mostly means half a terabyte of storage (because I can't bring myself to *recommend* less than that but since most people carry stuff in their personal cloud these days, it's overkill for a lot of people)

All things being equal, 500gb more increases the price of this laptop by $150:

It brings this one up by $130:

This one costs $80 more to go from 256 to 512 and there isn't an option for 1TB.

For the last three decades storage has been getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, to the point that storage was basically a negligible cost when HDDs were still the standard. With the change to SSDs that cost increased significantly and, while it has come down, we have not reached the cheap, large storage as-a-standard on laptops stage; this is partially because storage is now SO cheap that people want to entice you into paying a few dollars a month to use huge amounts of THEIR storage instead of carrying everything you own in your laptop.

You will note that 1tb ssds cost you a lot less than the markup to pay for a 1tb ssd instead of a 500gb ssd

In fact it can be LESS EXPENSIVE to get a 1tb ssd than a 500gb ssd.

This is because computer manufacturers are, generally speaking, kind of shitty and do not care about you.

I stridently recommend getting as much storage as you can on your computer. If you can't get the storage you want up front, I recommend upgrading your storage.

But also: in the current market (December 2024), you should not expect to find desktops or laptops in the low-mid range pricing tier with more than 512gb of storage. Sometimes you'll get lucky, but you shouldn't be expecting it - if you need more storage and you need an inexpensive computer, you need to expect to upgrade that component yourself.

So, if you're looking at a computer I linked and saying "32GB of RAM and an i7 processor but only 500GB of storage? What kind of nonsense is that?" Then I would like to present you with one of the computers I had to quote today:

A three thousand dollar macbook with the most recent apple silicon (the m4 released like three weeks ago) and 48 FUCKING GIGABYTES OF RAM with a 512gb ssd.

You can't even upgrade that SSD! That's an apple that drive isn't going fucking anywhere! (don't buy apple, apple is shit)

The norms have shifted! It sucks, but you have to be aware of these kinds of things if you want to pay a decent price for a computer and know what you're getting into.