No title available
Keni

Origami Around

Andulka
One Nice Bug Per Day

#extradirty
Peter Solarz
AnasAbdin
Sade Olutola

if i look back, i am lost
Cosimo Galluzzi
NASA
Today's Document
Monterey Bay Aquarium
almost home

⁂
Game of Thrones Daily
will byers stan first human second
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Kiana Khansmith

seen from United States

seen from France

seen from Germany
seen from Japan

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from Kenya
seen from Türkiye
seen from South Korea

seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Philippines
seen from El Salvador
seen from Morocco
@catmother0ffredrick
The rare two-punchline EWC comic (because both made me laugh)
Your DA love interest probably never brushed their teeth in their life.
Let that sink in.
Oh my god
I can’t believe it
All that obsessive research into medieval dental hygiene actually paid off
I was spending all this time thinking “Literally no one cares about Thedosian dental hygiene, Amy, why are you wasting your time on this” but HERE IT IS
So yeah, this isn’t actually true! While the toothbrush itself is a fairly modern invention, there’s a well recorded history of people in medieval Europe using a combination of various sweet-smelling mouth rinses and scrubbing their teeth clean with a cloth and a mild abrasive herb paste of some sort. Some common rinses included mint and wine or mint and vinegar, and pastes included things like marjoram and mint, rosemary and charcoal, and vinegar, pickling alum, white salt and honey.
Someone even tested a bunch of historical remedies out and found out that they were mostly pretty effective.
So rest assured, your DA makeouts are probably reasonably minty fresh!
at some point in being autistic it becomes really clear that everyone wants you to come up with solutions to problems you've never been helped with
i don't know how to fix our communicative problems, you're the source of it and it's exhausting to be treated as irrational for not responding correctly to small talk, do you think you could help a disabled bitch out and not put the onus of solving the problem on me, the one who is constantly excluded and treated as a freak
and then when you point this out they're like "but we literally put up with you, could you do something for us please?" and it's like. you put up with me?
I love how Zohran Mamdani is wearing a suit everywhere. And if he has anything else he puts it ON TOP of the suit. A basketball jersey. A high-vis vest. All worn over the suit. He’s like the mayor character in a cartoon who’s always dressed as The Mayor. If I didn’t know who he was and he biked past me in NYC I’d be like holy shit was that the mayor
I know his tailor is stressed bro look at this man wearing a suit to fix a pothole
I bet he opens his closet to the same suits with some slightly different ties like SpongeBob.
I bet if he took off his suit there’d be a suit underneath
important update
the issue with growing up in the 2000s and 2010s was like there was this really big push toward "accepting your weirdness" overall but they meant like idk wearing mismatched socks or something not being tangibly beyond the norm in any way shape or form
I started using Head and Shoulders ten years ago for itchy scalp and dandruff, and then for ten years I have not had itchy scalp and dandruff, so I thought “why do I still buy shampoo to combat itchy scalp and dandruff when I do not have itchy scalp and dandruff,” so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? It’s alright if you can’t because apparently I fuckin couldn’t either
Cutting something out of your life because you think you don’t need it any more only to realize that it was in fact working as intended and preventing a problem that will return should you stop doing this is a good experiment to run periodically with something small like dandruff shampoo, lest you start to think it would be a good idea to do this with like let’s say public health and the social safety net and vaccines
I had a liver transplant when I was 14 and like six months later I was chatting with my surgeon and he said “there’s gonna come a time, probably when you’re a teenager, where you’re gonna think, ‘I feel great, why am I still taking all this medication? I haven’t needed it in years.’ and you’re gonna want to stop taking all this medication. Guess what’s gonna happen then? You’re gonna go into rejection and your liver is gonna start failing, and you’re gonna be dying again, and we’re gonna have to find you another liver. So don’t do that.” And I said “why the fuck would anyone do that?” and he said “people are stupid.”
every once in a while when I get annoyed by a pharmacy or don’t wanna get out of bed to do my drugs I think “ugh, this is dumb, why do I do this?” and that conversation slams into me like a truck and I remember that I am, in fact, stupid
#you are not immune to the recency bias(via@arrows-for-pens)
Every person on earth needs to read this post. It will make people’s lives a lot better and lessen the crises everyone faces in day-to-day lives.
I reblog this every time I see it because I am not immune to the recency bias
KOSA again, with a different name… and they’re trying to sneak it past you before July 4th. CALL YOUR REPS!
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation p
Like the man said…the shadow takes another form and ruses again. Time to make some calls and let them know we’re watching.
The Motherfucking Lizard King
No one at work trusts my boss.
He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town.
Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse?
I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed.
He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now.
So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it.
---
My job has glue traps.
No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life.
If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just
You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you.
People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out.
I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me.
I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps.
And just because of that, they're willing to follow me.
---
My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.
People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was:
Do NOT mess with animals in the building.
So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences.
I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop.
Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve.
And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went
I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover.
So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell.
So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair.
I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.
I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.
A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right?
And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes.
And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said
Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil?
I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question.
Who grabbed the snake? I asked.
Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right.
ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No.
---
The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago.
We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again.
You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think.
But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be.
That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.
---
The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.
Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read
"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."
I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.
How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.
You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.
I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.
Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.
---
The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.
We'll see if he squanders it.
Today a woman pulled through drive thru. After examining the menu, she asked, "What's the difference between the blended version and the iced version of that drink?"
My barista on the headset tried. "Uh...one's blended and one's...not."
A note of impatience. "But how are they different?"
My barista turned to look at me.
I switched on my mic. "The blended version is more like sweet treat milkshake vibes and the iced version is better if you're looking for a caffeinated going to work moment."
And somehow it was the correct answer.
Half of my job is responding to nonsense with nonsense and I think it's truly beautiful that that's communication.
Plate, chainmail, swords, and straps ⚔️
Look, it’s a weird hill to die on, especially when I don’t really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.
Media for children used to be scary and that’s important.
“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” ― C.S. Lewis
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
-- G. K. Chesterton