Adventures of a Virtual Consulting Criminal

Hello, I'm Jim, a chaos gremlin. I'm also a fandom obsessed weirdo with too much time on his hands. My current fandoms are complete chaos (please see: chaos gremlin) but I'm always happy to talk to people, because other people's interests fascinate me.

[grumpygryphon]

[psychotic-gerard]

met a really racist person who was like all non-real british people should be deported and i said what makes someone real and he was like if both their families have been here since the 1700s and i said you know what. i can get behind deporting the king. and he didnt like that response.

[cannibalchicken]

[hotvampireadjacent]

Environmental storytelling

[dollsahoy]

another mistake that people new to sewing often make—that they don't realize is a mistake—is using low quality thread

because it is not at all obvious, when you don't have experience with higher quality materials, how badly it behaves when sewing, which makes it easy to think it's just your own lack of skill causing the problems

I used to hate sewing those synthetic jersey knits with the foil designs on them. I was positive that they were, by their nature, just impossible to sew well.

After sewing for a while, I tried sewing that kind of fabric again, and it was no problem! I figured my skills must have improved so much that I could handle it, and that was why.

Years after that, I was working on a project with nice quality cotton knits, and having no problem at all. I decided to switch to a really cheap brand of thread (the thread Walmart used to sell at 2 spools for $1), because the color matched so much better than my other, nicer threads. I used to use that Walmart thread all the time, so I didn't think twice about it.

All of my old problems with sewing knits immediately returned. I spent some time being confused and frustrated, before thinking of switching back to a worse match but higher quality thread, and everything went back to sewing as nicely as it had before.

I have been ordering my thread from Wawak for years, 1km spools of Saba or Gutermann brand for about the same price you'd pay in Michaels or Walmart for a spool of Coats & Clark a quarter the size, but I understand that isn't an option for everyone, and Coats & Clark is fine. It's the ~super value~ 99¢ (or less) stuff to approach with caution

[queenofsquids]

Wanna add on here as you've mentioned before that old thread can also be degraded and cause issues, something to be aware of for folks thrifting thread of indeterminate age (this has caught me out before)

[iriswestscoffee]

something i dont think enough speedster media mentions is that the things around them take the same amount of time to do stuff, so you couldnt like super speed rapidly interact with most any kind of average modern machine. like on a phone you cant do that, on touch screens because it takes nanoseconds just to register your touch, and on button phones bc the buttons have to register being pressed down and then display the number on the screen and theyre even slower, so really you cant text much faster than the fastest an average human could text, which i think would kill me. the same principle applies to food which i think would be even more frustrating somehow. imagine being faster than anything on earth and STILL having to wait a minute for instant noodles, even if you can prepare and cool them in tiny fractions of a second. not being able to text at super speed would kill me but waiting for food to cook would make ME kill MYSELF

[phoenix]

And now you now why Quicksilver is the way he is.

X-Factor v1 #87 (1992)

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

In my opinion it's a lot more healthy to be able to own that you dislike someone for petty reasons than to do all kinds of mental gymnastics to make everyone you don't really vibe with out to be a bad person actually

[sage-nebula]

[veronicaleighauthor]

[thelawfulchaotic]

"oh I'm gonna add a cute little court scene excerpt in this part of the novel"

to

"I can't just have a random case number, those are assigned according to systems"

to

"I can't just have random statute numbers, that needs an organizational structure"

to

"well I know who wrote this code; which title of the intraplanetary system legal code would be the criminal code?"

to

"what are all the titles in the intraplanetary legal system code?"

to

to

"Okay, the criminal code is Title 6. I know I have battery, murder, perfidy, terrorism, and some sort of adulteration of air supply. How would these be classified?"

to

to

"ok now I guess I can write the actual dialogue in my head"

[what-even-is-thiss]

It’s crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles

[what-even-is-thiss]

The ground in these places is too compact for water to soak in during wet season which leads to flooding but digging these holes gives the water a place to stop and soak in. And they’re pushing back the desert with this. By just digging holes.

[what-even-is-thiss]

The new plants also help even more water soak into the ground which reduces flooding even more.

These places also give people places to grow food and graze animals like people are turning completely dry compact desert into a refuge for wildlife and plants and solving regional food insecurity just by digging holes.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Guys it’s reversing desertification. Not destroying a naturally occurring desert. They’re restoring what used to be there.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I see "deserts are good" has become the latest no-nuance catchphrase that Tumblr has adopted and now tries to apply to every single situation possible with the subtlety of a sledgehammer

[bviralmedia]

Curious Tiger Chews on Cardboard Tube in His Outdoor Enclosure

[albva]

[ntll]

[speaklolita]

[prewars]

New York Magazine

[cuppatealove]

Oh these are lovely! Posts about hilariously bad punctuation become depressing after a while. How joyful to celebrate the witty and masterful!

[taraljc]

still me

[enriquemzn262]

[transgenderer]

what the fuck

[argumate]

sweet, might base an agricultural civilisation on this river, hope it behaves itself

[theaudientvoid]

[argumate]

might just fuck around and find out

[andmaybegayer]

Diversity win! This river has ADHD

[crazy-pages]

Nile: You would not believe how long term you have to mismanage agriculture on my banks to start experiencing soil depletion. I will always be here for you Egypt.

Huang He: *kicks in the door* FUCK YOUR DYNASTY IT'S FAMINE TIME!!!

[theprofessional-amateur]

I took two semesters of Chinese history in college. The first thing the professor started with was “getting to know the rivers, Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers. You need to know them because they will play very important roles in the history of China. The Yangtze has been crucial to trade, movement, culture and more. The Yellow river, the Yellow River can’t be trusted as you will repeatedly see.”

[theprofessional-amateur]

If you got stuck on a question during a test or whatever you could start with “the Yellow river jumped the banks causing instability and chaos that quickly spread” and would be correct more times than you would be incorrect.

[im-adrienne-deactivated20260216]

I love geographical chats when it completely devolves into dragging a landform.

[kittiesarecuter]

[the-real-seebs]

i genuinely had no idea the yellow river switched which side of a fucking mountain it went to

[bubobubosibericus]

that's not A mountain, seebs. That's a mountain range about the size of florida.

[the-real-seebs]

i... thought it was a mountain range? but then i thought "no i'm probably exaggerating in my head"

god damn yellow river go home you are drunk

oh shit the yellow river forgot where home is and is just wandering around yelling at windows

[victusinveritas]

[ned6-go-away]

Here y'all go pitting two bad bitches against each other for no reason.

[secundus-cinaedus]

no more brother wars

[yokelfelonking]

why would you hide this in the tags

[bace-jeleren]

It is your sworn duty, when you're in your 30's, to do something every day that would have gotten you viciously bullied in high school.

[bace-jeleren]

Getting a lot of comments and tags on this that are like "they bullied me for just existing:/" SO EXIST!!!! GET OUT THERE AND LIVE AND KEEP LIVING!!!!!!! KEEP ON BEING YOU!!!!!!!!!

[sparrowlucero]

dire wolf drama has led me to learning that one of the most major anatomical differences between them and all living canids is that they had Massive Dick Bones indicating their swinger lifestyle

[kaijutegu]

Oh yeah, one of my favorite thing at the tar pits museum was seeing one mounted with its baculum! you NEVER see that in museums, they usually don't mount specimens with it!

Seriously, the tar pits are the best thing in LA.

[pseuddamntired]

Prev, re: your tags…. I want to know about the mastodon having an existential crisis at the la brea tar pits

[kaijutegu]

WHO thought it'd be a good idea to make a statue of a mastodon actively dying in tar while her mate and child look on

WHO thought it would be a good idea to give the baby this facial expression?

The male looks on, impassive. This is not the first wife he's lost to the tar pit, and she won't be the last. Such is the way of the tar.

But the baby???

This is his first encounter with death. Nothing is ever going to be the same again. He and his mother scream silently against the LA skyline. They've been screaming since 1968, and they will continue to scream until they decay into the tar, collapsing into their inevitable destiny.

[pseuddamntired]

Oh. Oh no. I don’t regret asking but Jesus Christ.

I kind of do agree with the decision to have such statues though? Like. Emotional connection to the specimens and the past. Like seeing video of elders when they were young and thinking “wow, we have had overlapping experiences. I recognize myself in this record of you, and this can see myself clearer in your current self.”

Probably trickier to explain that to small children though.

[kaijutegu]

Oh yeah I absolutely LOVE these statues. They're so incredibly evocative and make you instantly feel things and connect to the dangers these animals faced. And it's so DIFFERENT than what you typically see with death in paleoart, because it's so very often at the teeth of another animal.

But this? This is an accident. This could happen to anyone, and the tragedy of that moment kinda sums up like, a lot of the narrative of extinction to me. Until the anthropocene, that's what extinction was, a series of accidents, right? It was this story of inevitability, but also a story about animals that couldn't predict it, never saw it coming.

And it also, I think, highlights the tragedy of the human-driven extinction events: we do see it coming. Unlike the Chicxulub impact and other drivers of extinction, we keep having these chances where we could turn back! We could do something differently! But time and time and time again, we choose not to, or rather the powerful people who don't consult the rest of us when making decisions choose not to. Our march seems inevitable- maybe this time we'll hit the brakes, maybe this time we'll make the right decision. Maybe this time we'll look up and see what's coming. Maybe one day we'll be in the service of mammoth, not mammon. Maybe we're the mastodons. Maybe we're the tar pit.

BUT THEN ON THE OTHER HAND this is at the same time a very strange decision, because it's the kind of story that public art usually shies very, very far away from! It's grief and loss and existentialism all wrapped up in fiberglass mastodons on Wilshire Boulevard! It's this forced juxtaposition of death and the natural world fenced off in the middle of a city of almost four million people! It's... man, I don't even know where I'm going with this, I just think it's ridiculous and beautiful and moving and a bunch of incredible, contradictory things all at once.

There is a reason I love the La Brea tar pits so much. It's not just that they're a cool paleontological site with a fantastic museum- it's that when I look at the way people think about them, the way the museum educators talk about them, the way the city grew up around them, I think that conceptually the tar pits can represent a lot more than what they are.