⁂
if i look back, i am lost
Peter Solarz
cherry valley forever
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
RMH
Game of Thrones Daily
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
pixel skylines
Cosimo Galluzzi
hello vonnie
Discoholic 🪩
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
styofa doing anything
#extradirty
Monterey Bay Aquarium
noise dept.
ojovivo
Love Begins
blake kathryn
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Mexico
seen from Japan
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from Ukraine
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Mexico
seen from Mexico
seen from Canada
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
@cearte
why go to the grocery store or to a restaurant when you can just get food delivered why go to the mall when you can get same day shipping on amazon why go to the library when you have kindle why make art when there’s ai why go to the cinema when you can stay at home and watch netflix. we are in a loneliness epidemic btw
the loneliness epidemic was invented by BIG SHIT to sell you more SHIT
ok note to self i gotta leave the house regularly so that i dont feel like im slowly transforming into an evil fucking shadow clone of myself
So as it turns out your sense of self doesnt exist in a vacuum. You gotta actually use it and bounce it off of other people like echolocation to see where you are as a person and shit. So if you dont regularly interact with other people the echoes just get weaker and weaker and before you know it your personality is a blurry fucked up fog clone of its former self. which it sucks because this makes it really hard to interact with people again but yknow
starting a collection of whatever this is
It's so important to acknowledge the very real and sometimes truly horrible failings of the healthcare profession and the pharmaceutical industry while never ever ever letting them drive us into the arms of pseudoscientific bullshit. This is something I feel really strongly about.
☝️☝️☝️
Frog Telephone, 1983
calling @phenakistoskope
oh ew is that really what i sowed? eww omigod i am NOT reaping that
📧 elektrobriefe
Oh igitt hab ich mir diese Suppe eingebrockt? Boah diggah nee alter die löffle ich NICHT aus
They did it again
Oh, cool! I love the behind-the-scenes stuff. If you’ve never seen the original (this version is narrower so you miss a lot that was going on) it’s here:
THANK YOU
i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.
there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.
anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.
A Better World - create an alternate history timeline
Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game
Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet
Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games
Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones
Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy
ZenGM - simulate sports
Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi
IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)
Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface
The Cafe & Diner - mystery game
The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game
Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions
Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game
Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game
Miniconomy - player driven economy game
Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes
BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators
Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil
Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.
if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.
since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.
anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.
Games
A Dark Room - text-based science fiction role-playing game.
corru.observer - science fiction adventure web game.
Improbable Island - old-school text adventure game.
Candy Box 2 - incremental clicker game that evolves into RPG.
Arcanum - open source wizard clicker game.
sandspiel, Powder Game, Powder Game 2, The Powder Toy - more sand physics games.
Orb.Farm - fishtank simulator.
Façade - experimental game with a real-time interactive narrative where you try to fix a failing marriage.
The Catacombs of Solaris - trippy art game.
Yume Nikki Online - online version of the surreal classic plus fangames.
The Barncle Goose Experiment - combine element/alchemy game based on antique theories of abiogenesis.
Fallen London - free-to-play text-based open world RPG.
Nested - very unique text-based universe expanding game. described as possibly @orteil42's favorite thing he's ever made.
The Process of Elimination - interactive web novel (by @hypertextdog)
Discworld MUD - multiplayer, text-based, online game (a MUD, or text MMORPG) based on the Discworld books.
Horse Master - surreal text game about training a horse.
EYEZMAZE - flash (RIP) or HTML5-based puzzle games.
You Are Jeff Bezos - text game. spend Jeff Bezos' fortune.
The Password Game - challenging puzzle game where you have to meet password requirements (by neal)
Universal Paperclips - incremental paperclip making game.
Half-Earth - planetary disaster planning game where you try to save the world using socialism.
ChooseYourStory - community-driven website centered on CYOA style story games.
PhD Simulator - random event based text game. make your choice each month and see if you can graduate on time.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - open source roguelike.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - turn-based survival roguelike set in the modern day.
Nethack - open source roguelike originally released in 1987.
FarmRPG - simple, mobile-friendly, text-based farming RPG.
Kingdom of Loathing - browser-based community MMORPG.
PokeRogue - browser-based Pokemon roguelike
Tools
Text Game Builder - works in your browser, with just a little bit of Python (by @grumpygandalf)
Twine - great (free!) tool for making text-based games quickly.
Ink - scripting language for interactive fiction (also free)
Flashpoint Archive - a community effort to preserve games and animations from the web.
PICO-8 - fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs.
Non-Games
Library of Babel - interactive illustration which attempts to simulate what it might be like to browse The Library of Babel.
Superbad - technically not a game, sprawling website full of secrets.
17776 - serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative about football in the far-future. beautiful, creative, legendary. created by Jon Bois, a legend and one of my favorite writers of all time.
Choice of Games - text-based, choose-your-own-adventure games (interactive fiction). some free-to-play, others can be bought like an ebook.
The Deep Sea - scroll to the bottom of the ocean. encounter the humble squid and his friends (by neal)
Space Elevator - like The Deep Sea, but up instead of down. you can equip your avatar with a scarf (by neal)
Internet Artifacts - an interactive history of the early internet (by neal)
If The Moon Were Only One Pixel - scroll through an accurately scaled model of the universe.
r/incremental_games - reddit community for incremental games.
r/WebGames - reddit community for web games in general.
thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.
John Oliver gets it, as usual. AI Slop is one of the best episodes of Last Week Tonight I've seen so far. Gen AI is theft. Those who use it are not authors or artists, they're grifters profiting from real creatives.
This should be required viewing for anyone defending AI as "helping normal people create art".
We need to do what we can to protect the Internet Archive. Here is a petition that you can sign.
Defend the Internet Archive
This petition alone might not be enough, but everything we can throw at this counts.
This is current- it was posted on 8/25/2025
I bet being a man and needing to tell your guy friend you love him but not being able to talk about your feelings so you beat the crap out of each other instead feels good as fuck
interlocking fingers during the pin. holding hands during the pin. is driving me insane
I don’t even go here but this is bout to make me fill out an enrollment form and show up with my lisa frank trapper keeper and pencil case.
I can understand how "modern person thrown into the past gets by pretending to be a healer/doctor" is as surprisingly common of a trope as it is. I mean I'm fluent enough at bullshitting to be pretty sure I could pull it off to impersonate a doctor in any time pre-1800s. If I have no idea what something is or how to treat it, I could just get the opinion of the other whatever-passes-as-medical-professionals around, but if their suggestions sound like bullshit I'm not doing it. And I'll beat the shit out of anyone suggesting bloodletting or mercury. With my healing stick. I've tied little bells on it, that jingle comically with every smack.
The awesome curative powers of my healing stick come from two separate sources: Placebo, and me using it to beat anyone trying to give my patients mercury.
Ooooh you reminded me of that protocol I wrote about how to reinvent penicilin with only alchemical tools. You know. Just in case I did end up dumped in the past and needed a stable income.
w
what's the protocol?
I am so glad you asked! I unfortunately lost the protocol because it was probably on my laptop, but I remember the broad strokes. So! In case anyone does end up stuck in the middle ages and can find a kindly old alchemist willing to lend you his gear, here's the revamped Penicilin (Re)Discovery Protocol!
0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.
We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.
Find some Penicillium mushrooms!
Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.
First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.
Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?
So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:
Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.
2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms
Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.
First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:
Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)
1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)
1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)
If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)
3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)
Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.
Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.
When you're done, you should have something like this:
Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.
Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!
You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).
3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms
If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:
Well, realistically, it will look something like this:
We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.
IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.
Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.
Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.
The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.
4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom
We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.
(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)
You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.
Ideally you get something like this.
This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.
Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.
Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:
This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.
So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.
The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.
Since I lost the original protocol I'm going to need to do research all over again how to do that with alchemy equipment (or at least a microbrewery), so that will be in the next installment.
Fascinating.
You have ro ferment that shit, it's actually pretty hellish and difficult.
The other fun fact is that the strains we started using for maximum effectiveness were irradiated to produce extra effective strains after a global search, which you won't be able to do so you'll be making low dose antibiotics, keep that in mind, and also having to breed it.
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/penicillin.html
Being real inventing penicillin is off my list of historical time travel shit to do and I'm going to be inventing a washing machine instead.
I have no idea how accurate all of this is, but I'm reblogging it just for the demonstration of how HARD this medicine stuff was to figure out.
I'm uncertain whether glass of the sort you would need would even be available. That seems like the most difficult part of this process. You might get stuck with pewter, which is, you know, lead.
Meanwhile I'm over here going, "Wait, what do you mean 'if you're in a place where soap hasn't been invented'? If they haven't invented soap, invent soap, that's SO MUCH EASIER than the rest of this."
HOW 2 INVENT SOAP:
INVENT TALLOW. Get some animal fat. Chop it up, add some salt and water, and cook it for a few hours. Scoop the melted liquid fat off the top and filter it through something to get any meaty bits that might still be in there out. When it cools down, it will turn back into solid fat, and you can repeat the process as many times as you want to get more non-fat stuff out.
INVENT POTASH. Fill a container with wood ashes (hardwoods work best). Then pour in rain water. Then let it soak. After a while, collect the liquid, which will now be a horrible caustic alkali solution. If you dry this out, you'll get crystals of potassium hydroxide, but you don't really need to, because the next step is...
MELT THE TALLOW AND PUT SOME POTASH WATER IN IT. This will be stupid hot and there will visibly be chemistry happening. Stir it up good for a while while absolutely not getting it on your hands.
Congratulations, you have now invented soap. Aren't you glad you did this part before you tried the penicillin?
I have no idea why I'm thinking about this post again, but I am, so even without penicillin, some thoughts about how a modern person could be the past's greatest doctor* with minimal effort:
Sanitation: besides knowing about washing your hands, you know to boil water or filter it through several layers of cloth to make it safer to drink. My previous reblog said how to invent soap, and distilled alcohol is also pretty easy to invent- you heat an alcoholic liquid like wine in a container that's sealed other than a pipe/tube in the lid, which is attached to another container that isn't heated, allowing the steam to condense. The first little bit that comes out will be methanol and some other horrible poisons, but after that you'll get mostly ethanol, because alcohol evaporates much more easily than water.
Cholera and dysentery: what actually kills people with these is dehydration, which means even cholera is very treatable even without antibiotics. The most important thing is making sure the sick person drinks as much clean, boiled water as they can keep down and gets some electrolytes and calories in there too, such as by drinking broth, thin soup, or water some sort of grain has been boiled in.
Scurvy: you know this one. Cooking destroys a lot of Vitamin C, and copper stops it from being absorbed. Besides the kind of fruits and vegetables you might think of, rose hips have a crazy amount of Vitamin C, tea brewed from pine needles is pretty good for it, and while there isn't very much of it in meat, some Arctic expeditions managed to recover from scurvy by eating nearly-raw seal.
Rickets: Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe sometimes calcium. You can literally cure the first one with sunlight.
Goiter: often iodine deficiency. Seaweed and eggs are the foods of choice here.
Malaria: quinine is extracted from the bark of a tree native to Peru, which Europeans were smart enough to immediately bring over to Spain when they found out about it. Enough cloth to make mosquito nets would probably be way too expensive to be practical for normal people in most of the world until the Industrial Revolution, but at least you know.
Smallpox: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM SMALLPOX, SMALLPOX IS TERRIFYING, IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE A DISEASE TO KILL AS MANY HUMANS ON THE PLANET AS POSSIBLE IT WOULD BASICALLY JUST BE SMALLPOX. It's insanely contagious and frequently fatal, and you probably aren't vaccinated. However, you can become inoculated, and developing a true smallpox vaccine is way easier than discovering penicillin. People in China were practicing variolation for centuries before it became a thing in Europe- it consists of taking a scab from someone with smallpox, keeping it in a bottle for a week or two to make sure most of the virus is dead, and then having someone inhale the dust or using a needle to prick their arm and get a little of it into the wound. This generally gives them a mild case, which still isn't a good time, but will make them resistant to getting the real thing afterward. Vaccination is the same procedure, but using the much less deadly relative cowpox, which is why the word "vaccine" is from the Latin vacca, "cow." The vaccine that was in use when smallpox was declared extinct in the wild was developed by deliberately passing cowpox between test animals to get it to mutate and selecting for the mildest strains.
Syphilis: the only good treatment for syphilis is antibiotics. However, syphilis is such a bastard that there are a couple of bad treatments that are, somehow, not the worst thing you can do. Insanely enough, this is the one time that mercury actually sometimes helps- like with chemotherapy for cancer today, if you catch it early and poison the bejeezus out of it, sometimes the disease will die before the person does (it's useless once the syphilis goes systemic, though). The other most effective treatment for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin was- I shit you not- giving the person malaria by injecting them with blood from a sick person. Malaria causes extremely high fevers, which kill off a lot of the syphilis bacteria. The drawbacks to this one are, uh, pretty self-evident.
As a bonus, since you probably know how a lot of these diseases are spread, you know when it's worth bothering with the full plague doctor getup! No need to bother when it's cholera or syphilis! But don't skip the mask if there's actual plague though, it's not just the fleas, plague can spread through the air and it can literally kill you in under 24 hours, don't fuck around with the plague-
*Besides time period, how much you would have it made as Superdoctor would also depend heavily on where you land. The Islamic world and China, for instance, were both working off fundamentally incorrect models of health and disease but were still generally a lot more competent than European medicine until the last century or two, while there are Inca skulls with marks from healed brain surgeries from 400 years before European doctors started to consider whether they should maybe consider washing their hands before sticking them in open wounds.
it comes and goes in waves
i can't be the only one who's just straight-up ... bored with women hating themselves. my mom keeps lamenting to me how upset she is about her gray hair. my friend stares at her laugh lines every day in agony. my sister loses sleep over the horrible unbearable thought of looking fat. and every time these women i love open up to me, i can't help but think ... then stop staring at yourself? stop drowning yourself, narcissus, and just fucking live your life instead of sitting in front of a mirror obeying cosmetic corporations' lies. just stop it. this is getting ridiculous. you're too smart to be falling for this bullshit. "oh no but these men who hate women told me that if i'm ugly i'm worthless!" girl if you actually believe that then good luck. but i am getting worse at being supportive of people whose nonsense worldviews keep them trapped in pain. stop looking at yourself start fucking living i am pleading you deserve to be happy and it is stupid that you disagree
Someone in the comments said "you really said just stop being insecure" and yes :) make an effort to stop spiralling about your looks, challenge insecure thoughts and stop doing things that lead to you feeling insecure.
I always come back to this: Do your insecurities match your morals?
Do you truly believe that having belly fat makes people disgusting? That the media should have final say on how you feel about yourself? If you don't believe it and there is a mismatch between your moral beliefs and your gut reaction to your appearance...
Then yeah. Stop being insecure. It's work but it's worth it.
Promoting @sarkywoman 's tags as that's a perfectly distilled mantra:
I am not the exception to my beliefs
I’m not lying when I say “I am not the exception to my beliefs” has rewired my brain.
