Things I do in the Dark!

Working during the day; Living during the night.

[nnjrwpu]

oh goodness! oh dear!! oh no!!!

[tomfoolerytotality]

Looking back on 2020, I think it's hilarious that Wellerman of all shanties is the one that blew up online. It's not a song about life on the high seas or adventuring

It's the "Where the fuck is my delivery" song

[stevishabitat]

[leonkennedysprostate]

"don't assign human morality to non human things" is so true except when it comes to printers. they know what they are, they understand dilemmas and ethics and morality. they choose to be how they are, they choose to be evil, at their very core they are rotten

[lord-of-the-noodles]

noooooo!!!!! printers are like a scared horse

you only think they're evil because you misunderstand them and aren't willing to horse girl up and win their heart

[leonkennedysprostate]

a scared horse can be won over with time and patience and only wants to protect itself. it can learn to love and to be loved

a printer only knows of malice and hatred, and can only be tamed by the swift force of a hammer or a 3 story building

[kaioty-summer]

Hey, did y'all see this?

I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!

I'll share some of the info below:

Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.

What to do?

-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides

- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!

To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!

Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!

Your phone is about to stop being yours. In September 2026, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.

[yellowmagicalgirl]

If you're in the US, I created a petition to make it easier to contact senators and congressmen.

Google Wants To Control Our Phones

Join 1 people. Google is trying to make people hand over government id in order to make an Android app. If they don't, then that app can't b

If you're not in the US, see if your country is listed here for whom to contact.

[agarthanguide]

Link to the article

We regret to inform you that the sunshine and friendship app is actually a children killing app.

[forestgreenandgray]

Hey do you know what rumination is?

Rumination is probably the most common type of OCD compulsion, but I rarely see anyone talking about it. I've talked to multiple people diagnosed with OCD who didn't even recognize it as a compulsion.

Basically, if you have OCD you have terrible intrusive thoughts. They can be about anything, but common themes are fear of being a bad person, fear of hurting someone, fear of contamination. etc.

Rumination is when you get stuck in a spiral. Rumination is when you spend hours catastrophizing, overthinking, analyzing, telling yourself it's going to be okay.

I'll say it again:

Rumination is a compulsion.

Rumination is a compulsion, and that means you have to stop doing it.

I did ERP (exposure response prevention) for my OCD with a therapist! For 9 months! And it did help, but the idea didn't really click until I found this website a couple years later.

And Oh My God. It made things make so much more sense, and I was able to pull myself out of an episode even though I wasn't in therapy or on meds at the time.

Genuinely if you have OCD, or even if you suspect you have OCD, I'm begging you to read some of these articles.

Like this was genuinely life changing for me.

Here are some of the ones that were most helpful to me:

Defining Rumination

How to Stop Ruminating

ERP Exercises for Compulsive Rumination

What to Do When You're Triggered

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

Just want to add that if you're on the spectrum, you may also experience Autistic Rumination, which is distinct from the obsessive variety, despite the two having some overlapping characteristics!

[itisiives]

[ilovedirt]

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Your fave is problematic: Pyaari Edition

[somestorythoughts]

"wait no queen"

[meyerlansky]

just. please know. that giffing scenes like that is a fucking nightmare labor of love.

to wit:

bottom's the raw capture, middle's just flat curve correction to make the footage visible, top is the final coloring with /counts seven adjustment layers to add back in Literally Anything But Yellow

every giffer i know does it out of love for the game, but for the record it's not... easy. it's not just slapping the footage in a cap grabber and posting whatever it spits out. "professional" lighting and color grading has only gotten waaay murkier and flatter in the fifteen years i've been giffing on here, so uh. don't repost gifs, please!

[infiniteeight8]

I thought the bottom was a black bar. I didn't even realize that was footage.

Everyone say thank you to your neighbourhood GIF maker! Giffers are so important to the fannish ecosystem, but to so many people the amount of work involved invisible.

[megacarapa]

ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves

back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore

if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??

[megacarapa]

don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM

so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!

this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together

and then in the end you put it together like this!!

and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy

EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!

[rathenarts]

Oh thank you OP this would be an excellent use for the huge amount of spare cardboard currently cluttering my house. Brb making twenty.

[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[made-in-manetheren]

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

[reasonsforhope]

Additional source and more details below. Absolutely thrilled to say that this is real. And yeah, it's huge.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A Munich court ruled Google's AI Overviews are its own words, making it liable for false claims, a decision that, if it holds, could reach e

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page... This is still a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling, and Google can appeal. But for publishers, brands, SEOs, and anyone watching AI search swallow the results page, the message is clear: if Google wants to be the answer engine, courts may start treating it like the publisher of those answers.

-via Search Engine World, June 10, 2026. Emphasis mine.

[soundoftheirwings]

Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)

[tlbodine]

From now on this is how all petty fandom disputes should be settled.

[flagellant]

[wanderingcoasties]

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post. (via 360degreesasthecrowflies)

[theknightlywolfe]

When the CEO of the company that didn't turn away Nazi business says "this isn't going to work" you know it's bad.

[we-are-knight]

You know, I don't think I'll ever get over how that one post I made about women as knights in history, made it all the way to Reddit only for a bunch of redditors to argue that women couldn't actually be knights because:

- "the term is gendered" (it's not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)

- "they didn't actually do things as knights" (who didn't? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)

...and a few other reasons that come down to "I don't like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties".

And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on "Knight", specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: "Wikipedia is not an academic source"--but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.

Knights were sometimes women. 🤷

[we-are-knight]

I saw this and needed to answer.

The gendered versions of 'knight' come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn't like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame', but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero'. This is the default masculine.

The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera'.

Similarly in French: "Chevalier" becomes "Chevaliére".

In Italian, "Cavaliere" becomes "Cavaliera".

Outside of Romance languages, "knight" is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).

So it's not a silly infantilisation, than using a word for the knightly class and gendering it in a binary, which means we can actually tell that, yes, women as knights existed, enough that the feminine form of the word pops up now and then, so we know it existed.

[jv]

ooh, where one could read that original post??

Just a note about translations and ... well, patriarchal bullshit.

When you say "Hatchet women fought the Moors" I was like "hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?", and when I googled it ... I actually have heard about it, it's the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But ... there's something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like "Order or the hatchet"? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there's no really a difference between "Axe" and "Hatchet": There's a single word for them, "Hacha/Atxa". But in English, there's a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:

So It's pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use "Hatchet" and not "Axe". I'm pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms:

So dear academic-who-translated-this-first: Does that look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?

[we-are-knight]

Important inclusion I was not aware of, thank you very much friend. :)

[heroineimages]

I’m going to be chuckling over ‘Does this look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?” for the rest of the day.

[importantcatpics]

[desolationlesbian]

my cat is completely obsessed with watching the bathroom sink drain and I have started calling this "her shows." as in when I'm in the bathroom and she meows and runs up I'll be like "oh you want to watch your shows?" and run the faucet for an extra few seconds so it fills a little. she will then sit there at the edge of the sink for ages totally entraptured by the drain. blorbo from her sink

[desolationlesbian]

her shows

[dragon-in-a-fez]

one of the funniest conversations I ever had with my ex was when they were still getting used to Celsius and asked me "what's 20 degrees?" and instead of converting it, I said "it's the highest your dad will ever let you set the thermostat and when you say you're cold he tells you to put on another sweater, we're not made of money" and they went "oh, 68"

the fact that this reference was that fucking precise was something they went on to tell people about for years.