Things that Catch my Eye

I ave no idea what I am doing

[parkayquarts]

hbo max blocks screenshots even when I use the snipping tool AND firefox AND ublock which is a fucking first. i will never understand streaming services blocking the ability to take screenshots thats literally free advertising for your show right there. HOW THE HELL IS SOMEBODY GONNA PIRATE YOUR SHOW THROUGH SCREENSHOTS. JACKASS

[parkayquarts]

somewhere out there is a guy who meticulously takes screenshots of every individual frame of his favorite tv shows and then painstakingly etches each one onto a roll of film which he puts into his old timey projector and recreates the footage as a silent film with his own lavishly hand-lettered dialogue cards and original score that he plays on his upright piano and charges audiences one shiny penny a play. at last, big media has finally outsmarted ol' Zachary Zoetrope

[theheroheart]

PSA for everyone who doesn't know, explained simply

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

you can fix this by going to your browser settings, searching for "hardware acceleration", and turning that off.

[team-thickness12]

This also fixes screen sharing to other screens. It has been GODSEND

[lucarleigho]

type this in the toolbar to find this setting in firefox: about:preferences#searchResults

[mctreeleth]

ol' Zachary Zoetrope is back in business!

[gayskrillex]

No one wants to admit this but you don’t actually have to eat eggs and dairy for breakfast. Farmers just did that because they’d milk the cows and collect eggs in the morning. You can literally make a sandwich or a bowl of pasta or really anything you want for breakfast. There isn’t some medical reason you have to eat cereal and milk or fried eggs in the morning—our idea of “breakfast food” is an entirely artificial construct. Do what makes you happy.

[teathattast]

[patterns-pets]

When cats put their whole body into making a sound. Only to be squeak.

[nyantara]

someone whose never lived anywhere where malaria / dengue / chikingunya is endemic: we need to love mosquitoes more!!! they're so important to the ecosystem you just need to get over those massive death tolls, the only disease that really needs to be cured is cancer

[nyantara]

i know its mostly contrarianism, but the rates at which mosquitoes breed in major cities in the tropics is just as destabilising to local ecosystems lol. surprisingly, every shallow pond, sewer and garden in new delhi was not meant to breed mosquitoes.

[nyantara]

to the people in my notes, no the problem with the vaccine against malaria is that it isn't very effective. its about 40% effective and reduces mortality only by 13%. there is basically no treatment for the viral illnesses like dengue or chikingunya. the widely agreed upon option is controlling the spread of the pathogen by its vector. these illnesses lead to about 600k deaths in 2023.

aedes aegypti the specific species that spreads about 53 pathogens is invasive outside north africa. the cutting edge of eradication efforts trialled in brazil is releasing genetically modified male mosquitoes (only the female bites) which self limits the population since their offspring can't survive to adulthood. similar trials for female sterility have been trialled with the malaria causing anopheles genus. these methods have neither the downsides of mass poisoning that insectides do, nor the widespread insectide resistance that mosquitoes eventually develop.

[afloweroutofstone]

My favorite category of government program to run across is "program you've never heard of doing extremely important work to solve a major problem which you have also never heard of." On that note, the US drops millions of pounds of sterile bugs over Panama each week in order to prevent a parasite infestation from moving into North America. Everyone say thank you to the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of the Cattle Borer Worm (COPEG)

[afloweroutofstone]

This program had its funding cut during the DOGE cuts last year and now the parasitic worm they were trying to slow the spread of has officially arrived in the United States.

[bebsi-cola]

actually pigs shouldn't be at pride even outside of uniform. fuck those guys

[bebsi-cola]

if you decide to become a police officer then that outweighs any other marginalised identity you can rustle up like. not sorry, who asked you to willingly become a pig

[pekkhum]

I have heard of black people warning their kids that the race of a police officer is cop and you should not expect solidarity from them. The same applies to other types of minorities.

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

If you want solidarity with those the system hates, you cannot be the system's servant and defender.

[sparrowlucero]

the among us show being a total gorefest on par with john carpenter's the thing is a really fun choice

[sparrowlucero]

the among us show having a gay orgy in the middle of it is another really fun choice

[sparrowlucero]

realizing many people don't know about infinity train creator owen dennis' among us show from years ago, which has been trapped in unreleased limbo all this time and was just dumped on streaming this morning with no advertisement. they don't even know about its weirdly stacked cast

[lionfloss]

by chasingtheshiftinglight

[gatheringbones]

“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”

— Beyond Words, by Carl Safina

[vulcartist]

OH MY GOD. I DID IT. I ACTUALLY DID IT.

The sky, gong, and most of the mountains are colors from Terrafibres on etsy!! Specifically Vulcan’s Forge, Shran, Tulaberry, and Imzadi. 😁

I took a great many artistic liberties lol but I’m SO happy!! I actually did it!!

[tpwrtrmnky]

I do think "literally zero evidence indicates that gatekeeping medical transition does anything to prevent regret, but the harm done by gatekeeping is extensively documented" is a much stronger argument than "regret isn't real" cause there's always going to be some anecdote that puts you in a weak-looking rhetorical position for the latter, but the former is pretty unassailable.

[headspace-hotel]

tags from @queerical

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

If you like comedy where every sentence is a combination of words that has never been spoken before in human history, a la chris fleming, may I turn you on to Saya Meads

[spiderbitesandvampirevenom]

can we bring back the term "fair-weather friend" bc I feel like if fair-weather friends got called that more this whole argument about whether or not you should be there for your friends when it's inconvenient/at what point of personal inconvenience it's ok to bail on your friends would kinda fall apart bc like. we literally have a word for "friend who's only there when you don't need something from them" because the baseline expectation is that a friend should be there even when it sucks. like we used to make fun of people for bailing on their friends.

[orphanedsource]

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

[yvesdot]

I have seen a young lady with her table loaded with volumes loaded of fictitious trash, poring day after day and night after night over highly wrought scenes and skillfully portrayed pictures of romance, until her cheeks grew pale, her eyes became wild and reckless, and her mind wandered and was lost — the light of intelligence passed behind a cloud, and her soul was forever benighted. She was insane, incurably insane from reading novels.

-- an anonymous pastor in 1864, on the greatest threat to young women

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

"Clearly I wasn't talking about disabled people-" yeah part of the problem is that the existence of disabled people just isn't considered in your worldview like that's the problem we're criticizing not a get out of jail free card

[mckinlily]

Plot armor but it’s Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

But by GOD is he trying.

[ave-aria]

TV Show Host: Welcome back to MoneyTalk, I'm here with Bruce Wayne, Owner of Wayne Enterprises and, as many of you know, the richest businessman on Earth. So, Bruce, tell us - what's your secret?

Bruce: I don't know.

TV Show Host: Oh don't be coy--

Bruce: No, I seriously don't know. I GENUINELY don't. I was actually hoping for some advice? I can't seem to get rid of my money.

TV Show Host: '...Get rid of'?

Bruce: I've tried raising salaries, investing in infrastructure, forcing green initiatives, donating to charities, paying extra taxes--

TV Show Host: "........Extra" taxes??

Bruce: --doing giveaways, setting up trust funds, naming multiple inheritors--

TV Show Host: I'm sorry, can we back up a bit? I think I've lost the thread of this conversation...

Bruce: Listen, I made a bet with a reporter from the Daily Planet ten years ago that I could legally get my net worth down under one billion,

TV Show Host: That's... a very cute joke, Mr Wayne, I,

Bruce: --and the deadline is COMING UP in a few MONTHS,

TV Show Host: what

Bruce: --And not only am I not even CLOSE, I'm still in the GODDAMN TRILLION Range--

TV Show Host: oh dear god he's not joking.

Bruce: I keep shoveling money out the door and it keeps showing back up inside!

Bruce: I've updated EVERY public building in Gotham but THAT DIDN'T EVEN MAKE A DENT in my SALARY--

Bruce: I dumped money into R&D but my company ACCIDENTALLY INVENTED TECH THAT'S NOW TURNING A PROFIT--

Bruce, grabbing the mic: I WANTED TO BUY THE JUSTICE LEAGUE AN INTERSTELLAR BASE ON MARS BUT THEY WOULDN'T LET ME

[The tv crawl at the bottom of the screen reads: Wayne Enterprises stock rises 13%]

Bruce: WHAT'S A GUY GOTTA DO TO LOSE MONEY AROUND HERE

TV Show Host: Perhaps we could sit down,

Bruce: I'D SAY SOMEONE SHOULD TRY TO ROB MY ACCOUNT BUT I HAVE A SNEAKING SUSPICION THAT MY INSURANCE WOULD PROBABLY COVER IT BECAUSE LAST YEAR I TRIED TO PAY OFF THE JOKER TO TAKE A VACATION, AND THE NEXT TIME HE GOT ARRESTED, ARKHAM REFUNDED THE MONEY,

TV Show Host: Sir, please,

Bruce: --ACTUALLY, LET'S TRY IT! WHAT'VE I GOT TO LOSE, A COUPLE TRILLION?

Bruce: ALRIGHT GUYS LISTEN UP, MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS 555-

[Screen goes blue] ["Apologies, we are experiencing technical difficulties; MoneyTalk will be back on air shortly"]

Lois, sitting at home watching the TV: ...So.

Lois: A bet with Bruce Wayne, huh?

Clark: [slowly sips his coffee and says nothing]

[chaoticmistake]

I can’t breath.