Black-Billed Magpies are so cool looking like how is this a real creature I see on a daily basis
d e v o n

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Keni

Kiana Khansmith

oozey mess
occasionally subtle

tannertan36

#extradirty
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Xuebing Du

JBB: An Artblog!

titsay
Show & Tell
🪼
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Stranger Things
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

blake kathryn
Sade Olutola

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@bunnyscloset
Black-Billed Magpies are so cool looking like how is this a real creature I see on a daily basis
Tips for writing those gala scenes, from someone who goes to them occasionally:
Generally you unbutton and re-button a suit coat when you sit down and stand up.
You’re supposed to hold wine or champagne glasses by the stem to avoid warming up the liquid inside. A character out of their depth might hold the glass around the sides instead.
When rich/important people forget your name and they’re drunk, they usually just tell you that they don’t remember or completely skip over any opportunity to use your name so they don’t look silly.
A good way to indicate you don’t want to shake someone’s hand at an event is to hold a drink in your right hand (and if you’re a woman, a purse in the other so you definitely can’t shift the glass to another hand and then shake)
Americans who still kiss cheeks as a welcome generally don’t press lips to cheeks, it’s more of a touch of cheek to cheek or even a hover (these days, mostly to avoid smudging a woman’s makeup)
The distinctions between dress codes (black tie, cocktail, etc) are very intricate but obvious to those who know how to look. If you wear a short skirt to a black tie event for example, people would clock that instantly even if the dress itself was very formal. Same thing goes for certain articles of men’s clothing.
Open bars / cash bars at events usually carry limited options. They’re meant to serve lots of people very quickly, so nobody is getting a cosmo or a Manhattan etc.
Members of the press generally aren’t allowed to freely circulate at nicer galas/events without a very good reason. When they do, they need to identify themselves before talking with someone.
As someone who spent over a decade catering luxury events, let me add some back of house info:
These events are almost always open bar. They're not trying to make their money back on alcohol. They want you to drink and eat and donate generously.
If there are cocktails, there will be at most two on offer, pre-made in large tubs. You cannot order a different version, it is what it is.
There are two types of events: cocktail style or seated. The first includes roaming hors d'oeuvres or a fancy buffet with tiny plates called a grazing station. For a long night, the roaming food will get a little bigger throughout the evening and have a 'main' at some point based around a protein.
A seated event will usually be more structured and may include multiple courses. Silver service is not in vogue anymore. You are likely to get either alternating meals brought to you like at a wedding, or served banquet style. A good caterer can get a plate to everyone in a 300 person event in about three minutes.
Drunk people are the same no matter how expensive their suits. They still laugh too loud, spill their drinks and slip on the dance floor. They are usually less embarrassed about doing coke in the bathrooms.
A full scale event that starts at 6pm will have staff arriving at noon to begin setup. Earlier if there's a light show or pyrotechnics. Typically venues don't just have 30 tables and three hundred chairs lying around, let alone table cloths, chair covers, etc. It's all rented and brought in on the day. Bands and DJs will be running audio tests in the background throughout.
Most heritage buildings that host these things, like museums and manor houses, aren't really designed for them. They might put down mats so you're not walking in stilettos over two hundred year old wooden floors, the kitchens are weirdly far away, and there are not enough taps. There is never anywhere for staff to sit, so if you open the wrong door you might find half a dozen waiters sitting on upturned milk crates in a room full of million dollar paintings, eating the left over bread.
Really old buildings don't have enough bathrooms, which means the staff will be sharing with the guests.
Clean up starts the second the event ends, if not sooner. Unattended glasses will start to disappear first, then table decorations. When the timer ticks over, the lights come back on and exhausted staff strip the tables, pack up dirty glasses and unopened wine bottles and have to Tetris it all into the back of a van. The venue is booked for that day only, so everything has to be gone before anyone can go home. A large event that finishes at midnight might take until 3am to be cleared away.
These are very long and physically demanding nights for anyone working them. The staff all get to know each other, and will absolutely notice someone trying to sneak in wearing a borrowed uniform. They are not being paid enough to care.
Verified: Microsoft 365 gets massive 45% price hike — and it's all to do with AI tools (Tom's Guide - January 17, 2025)
oopsie i tripped and spilled my link to archive dot org's downloadable copy of Microsoft office suite for 2007, which features no AI tools and is a powerful word processor that still holds up just fine on windows 10!
Protect trans kids at all costs 💜
what. why? someone pls explain to me pls i wasnt born yet in 1999 why turn computer off before midnight? what happen if u dont?
y2k lol everyone was like “the supervirus is gonna take over the world and ruin everything and end the world!!!”
This is the oldest I’ve ever felt. Right now.
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN’T BORN YET IN 1999.
Ahh the Millenium bug.
It wasn’t a virus, it was an issue with how some old computers at the time were programmed to deal with dates. Basically some computers with older operating systems didn’t have anything in place to deal with the year reaching 99 and looping around to 00. It was believed that this inability to sync with the correct date would cause issues, and even crash entire systems the moment the date changed.
People flipped out about it, convinced that the date discrepancy between netwoked systems would bring down computers everywhere and shut down the internet and so all systems relying on computers, including plane navigation etc. would go down causing worldwide chaos. It was genuinely believed that people should all switch off computers to avoid this. One or two smart people spoke up and said “um hey, this actually will only effect a few very outdated computers and they’ll just display the wrong date, so it probably won’t be harmful” but were largely ignored because people selling books about the end of the world were talking louder.
In the end, absolutely nothing happened.
Oh gosh.
I’ve been a programmer working for various government agencies since the early 1990s and I can say with some confidence:
NOTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE WE WORKED VERY HARD FIXING SHIT THAT MOST DEFINITELY WOULD HAVE BROKEN ON 1-JAN-2000.
One example I personally worked on: vaccination databases.
My contract was with the CDC to coordinate immunization registries — you know, kids’ vaccine histories. What they got, when they got it, and (most importantly) which vaccines they were due to get next and when. These were state-wide registries, containing millions of records each.
Most of these systems were designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and stored the child’s DOB year as only two digits. This means that — had we not fixed it — just about every child in all the databases I worked on would have SUDDENLY AGED OUT OF THE PROGRAM 1-JAN-2000.
In other words: these kids would suddenly be “too old” to receive critical vaccines.
Okay, so that’s not a nuke plant exploding or airplanes dropping from the sky. In fact, nothing obvious would have occurred come Jan 1st.
BUT
Without the software advising doctors when to give vaccinations, an entire generation’s immunity to things like measles, mumps, smallpox (etc) would have been compromised. And nobody would even know there was a problem for months — possibly years — after.
You think the fun & games caused by a few anti-vaxers is bad?
Imagine whole populations going unvaccinated by accident… one case of measles and the death toll might be measured in millions.
This is one example I KNOW to be true, because I was there.
I also know that in the years leading up to 2000 there were ad-hoc discussion groups (particularly alt.risk) of amazed programmers and project managers that uncovered year-2000 traps… and fixed them.
Quietly, without fanfare.
In many cases because admitting there was a problem would have resulted in a lawsuit by angry customers. But mostly because it was our job to fix those design flaws before anyone was inconvenienced or hurt.
So, yeah… all that Y2K hysteria was for nothing, because programmers worked their asses off to make sure it was for nothing.
Bolding mine.
Absolutely true. My Mom worked like crazy all throughout 1998 and 1999 on dozens of systems to avoid Y2K crashes. Nothing major happened because people worked to made sure it didn’t.
Now if we could just harness that concept for some of the other major issues facing us today.
this meme came so far since i saw it this morning. god i love tumblr teaching tumblr about history.
As a young Sys Admin during Y2K, I can confirm that it was SRS BZNS. I worked for a major pharmaceutical company at the time. They spent millions of dollars on consultant and programmer hours, not to mention their own employees’ time, to fix all their in-house software as well as replace it with new systems. Sys Admins like myself were continually deploying patches, updating firmware, and deploying new systems in the months leading up to Y2K. Once that was done, though, the programmers went home and cashed their checks.
When the FATEFUL HOUR came along, it wasn’t just one hour. For a global company with offices in dozens of countries, it was 24 hours of being alert and on-call. I imagine that other large organizations had similar setups with entire IT departments working in shifts to monitor everything. Everyone was on a hair trigger, too, so the slightest problem caused ALL HANDS ON DECK pages to go out.
Yes, we had pagers.
For hard numbers IDC’s 2006 calculation put the total US cost of remediation, before and after, at $147 billion - that’s in 1999 dollars. That paid for an army of programmers, including calling up retired grandparents from the senior center because COBOL and FORTRAN apps from the ‘60s needed fixing.
Also note that there were some problems, including $13 billion in remediation included in the figure above. Some of these involved nuclear power plants, medical equipment, and “a customer at a New York State video rental store had a bill for $91,250, the cost of renting the movie ‘The General’s Daughter’ for 100 years.”
Y2K was anything but nothing.
@figure-forever
tfw you do your job so fucking well that everyone thinks you weren’t necessary in the first place :(
salute our COBOL cowpokes and other Y2K wranglers, they saved all our asses
another important lesson we learned: a shitload of stuff in the ‘90s was still running programs from the ‘60s and ‘70s. it’s hard to justify the expense and trouble of a massive upgrade when things are working “fine” – easier to say “well, I suppose we’ll need to change at some point, but not now”
and if things really are working “fine” you can let them go on for a while but every so often you run into something like Y2K where the software simply wasn’t designed to handle certain eventualities. can’t really blame the programmers, either. if you were writing shit in the ‘60s, would you expect people to still be using it in the science-fiction year of 2000? that’s not a real year! you might be dead by then!
so, y’know, you don’t always need the latest and greatest for everything you’re doing – how much power do you really need for an inventory system? – but regular upgrades are a Good Idea
nerds quietly saving the world. this is superhero nonsense i love it
Holy shit so THIS was why my older cousins were saying all the computers were going to die and four year old me was like “what.”
Within a certain FTSE 100 retailer, I worked on the millennium bug project for over 8 months to make sure that none of our 2,400 mainframe programs would crash. Out of those, over 900 needed changing and testing.
On New Year even while others were out drinking and being merry, my colleague and I sat in a dark room together until 5am keeping one eye on our computer screens, and the other on a large TV I’d brought in for movies.
Rest of the world: Nothing went wrong! hahah
Me: You’re welcome.
Thank you for your service
Add my voice to the “nothing happened because people made sure it wouldn’t” brigade.
I was married to someone in a bank’s IT department back then, and I remember helping him run updates on individual computers (stick in a floppy, run a .exe, repeat for the next computer…and the next…and the next…) several times near the end of 1999, and then he was at work all night on New Year’s, and I ran into someone I kinda knew at the store the next morning and she said her husband had spent the previous night babysitting computers, too.
But.
People–the kind of people who would eventually go on to fall for the most outrageous, unbelievable, sensationalist stories on FB–didn’t understand what the problem actually was. They thought that every electronic thing with a clock would become useless at midnight. Microwaves. Alarm clocks. Coffee makers. And the fact that those things kept working–those things that never had a chance of not working to begin with–probably has as much as anything to do with convincing them that Y2k was a false alarm.
I was not actually in the industry in 1999, but I was adjacent, and the amount of “they think we did nothing wtf” had to be seen to be believed.
I did have a tshirt that read 19100. Because that was what Perl did, as a fair number of websites found out.
The previous government proposed changes to the NHS constitution which would mean transgender hospital patients in England may not be treate
Well fucks? Get to it!
41.7k notes and as of 7th April, the signatures are only 14,817.
The deadline is 9 July 2025.
Trans rights are always wavering in safety and are not stable and well protected in the UK. Please sign.
Trans rights in the UK is my rights.
cunt dykeula. is this anything.
Japanese stage play 'Dracula: The Musical' with its all-female cast. In particular, Wao Yoka as Dracula.
She is serving.
Tonight House Republicans voted 217 to 215 for a budget that'll take $1 TRILLION dollars from Medicaid, attack food benefits for kids, hurt seniors and vets.
but I don't want to talk about that, I want to talk about these two Democratic members of Congress you've never ever heard of.
Democrats, Congressman Kevin Mullin of California and Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen of Colorado.
Congressman Mullin had knee surgery that didn't go well, two surgeries, a life threatening blood clot and a week long stay in the hospital, and the moment he was discharged from the hospital he got on a five hour flight to DC to vote against the Republicans evil budget, using a walker to get to the floor of the House
Congresswoman Pettersen gave birth to her son Sam, in the picture, exactly one month ago on January 25th. They flew from Colorado to DC after Republicans refused to allow her to vote by proxy after having a baby. Congresswoman Pettersen took Sam onto the floor of the House to vote to protect the Health care of 400,000 Colorado kids.
why talk about this? because so much of the conversion is about telling people there's no one good, no one worthy, no one fighting. I promise you there are people undergoing personal hardship to do the right thing.
cant stop thinking about this video
For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty
oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.
"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.
To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.
And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...
(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)
...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...
...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...
...only for the ropes to snap...
...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.
(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)
Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.
Or at least the wrecking ball.
But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.
Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)
Wait NO-
Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.
Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...
...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...
...and be fueled up.
"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.
Look at that thing, you say.
Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.
And again, you are right.
The battery was disconnected.
Sorted that, tho
"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!
I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.
The Toyota Hilux is absolutely the small god of endurance and defiance (and possibly masochism).
yes I'm reposting about a small god truck are you kidding me
I saw one in real life for the first time and it was made up of 90% wheels, suspension and defiance.
Reading is political and it always has been. Here are some of the classic books on the banned list that you should definitely check out.
Reading is political and it always has been. Here are some of the classic books on the banned list that you should definitely check out.
Change my meme (a replacement 'Change my mind' template) - template post - Imgur
[ID: an edited Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin sits, smiling, at a lemonade stand with a sign taped to the front of the table. It reads: It's time to retire that other meme and replace it with this template. Change my mind. Next image is the same meme but the sign reads: Steven Crowder does not deserve a meme format. Change my mind. /end]
See this just feels so much better. I’ve read enough of those comics to know that Calvin has some really deep insights rattling around in his head. And look how happy and attentive he looks. You could absolutely have a polite, intelligent, and enriching conversation with this kid. Meanwhile Steven Crowder is so financially incentivized to always look like the smartest guy in any given room that the only way to change his mind is with a 2x4 to the side of the head. Which, I admit, would be enriching in its own way.
Attaching the blank because the imgur link was being temperamental for me. Saved you a click.
in the spirit of sharing blank meme templates, don't Drake when you can LaForge!
Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author
if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reason—like it being banned—they can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?
How to Download Your Kindle Books (with screenshots)
From your Amazon homepage, click "Account & Lists" then click "Content Library"
Click "Books"
Find the book you want to download and click "More actions"
Click "Download & transfer via USB"
Click the button next to your device, then click "Download"
That's it! Your book file is now downloaded to your device. To my knowledge there isn't a way to bulk download everything, which means that your have to download books individually. (If anyone knows how to download multiple books at a time, please let me know!)
I use the free software Calibre to organize my ebook files. This video gives a good basic overview of how to download your ebooks from Amazon to Calibre, and also goes over how to use Calibre to transfer your ebooks to Kobo. I recently got a Kobo and have slowly been transferring my ebooks to it, and it is actually pretty easy!
If you're looking for ways to get ebooks without supporting Amazon, check out Smashwords, Bookshop.org, or see if your favorite author/publisher sells ebooks directly from their website.
Go forth and read!
[transcript: Cameron Klein, seated: I’m not going to launch those ships. Captain’s orders. Brock Rumlow, draws firearm: Move away from your station. Klein closes his eyes. Sharon Carter crosses the room, her weapon raised to aim at Rumlow: Like he said… Captain’s orders. Uniformed security teams (presumably Hydra) and jacket-and-button-up office workers all draw weapons in a stand-off. Rumlow: You picked the wrong side, Agent [Carter]. Carter: Depends on where you’re standing.
/end transcript]
I want to share this analysis of this scene from cakeisnotpie
Because we are seeing that right now with the world situation and the fight against the Orange Fucker and Muskrat. All kinds of people gumming up the works, including people within the government itself, saying “no, I’m not doing that.” and many of them will be fired or removed. But people are digging in their heels for the small moment of mercy it will grant us.
May everyone with the power to resist find the will and courage to do so. Be like Cameron.
Oh.
OH.
I’m crying @comicgeekscomicgeek because I needed to hear this right now. To see my own words, to know that someone read the thought I shouted into the void and remembered. Thank you for being my Sharon Carter and reminding me that I do have a choice.. there’s always a choice.
So, Cap’s orders, I’m not taking my pronouns out of my email signature or pulling Nimona from my class. I can’t change anything, but I can plant myself like a tree, let my students take shelter behind me, and say, “no, you move.”
I love my job, but reblogging employment jelly for someone else I love.