Hi! I am a fat 40-something white introvert in NC. I worked in the NCSU Libraries for 13 years, then was an insurance agent working with Aflac (quack!) for about 9 months, and currently work as a substitute teacher in Roxboro & a repairer/maintainer of sewing machines out of my home.
My preferred pronouns are he/him/his; my preferred nicknames are Doc or Dok, or Science Squid (or Jon).
I am a fan of... things. So many things.
* Comics (DC Comics, Marvel Comics)
* Tabletop RPGs (Dungeons & Dragons/D&D/DnD, Eclipse Phase, GURPS, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, World of Darkness) (My OCs, my games)
* Video Games (Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Minecraft)
* Podcasts (Binging with Babish, Critical Role)
* Webcomics (Order of the Stick, Oglaf, SMBC, Schlock Mercenary, xkcd)
* Geek Culture / Geek Life / Misc. Geekery (including memes)
Basically, if it's got cosplay, fantasy, horror (esp. body horror and zombies), science (or SCIENCE!) & sci-fi, steampunk, or superheroes (or supervillains), I'll probably love it.
I also try to keep up with actual science and technology, especially body modification and transhumanism.
I also blog about libraries and library- & librarian-related things (including books), in part because I'd worked in a library for thirteen years, and about education (especially education in NC and education in America) due to my work in academic libraries and as a substitute teacher. And about language and linguistics, as those fascinate me.
Also about jobs and job hunting, since I've been unemployed or underemployed for an uncomfortably long time, and we could all use a little help there.
I also enjoy cooking (and food), which is a type of science. Here are some recipes I've collected.
This being the internet, I also reblog posts with cute animals. I'm especially fond of bats. And squid, cuttlefish, and other cephalopods. While I'm listing animals, I may as well provide a link to my cat posts. It is the internet, so there are a lot of them.
I'm a big fan of/believer in people being themselves, and of consenting adults being able to do whatever they want however they want with whoever they want, no matter what others think. (I.e., body positivity, sex positivity). I try to keep this blog SFW -- the only porn I'll be posting here are food porn and technology porn -- but I do sometimes talk about sex (esp. sex education) and burlesque (there are some great burly troupes in the Triangle & Triad area).
I struggle with mild depression and anxiety issues, so sometimes my blog may get a bit maudlin. But I also try to give advice on dealing with those, too.
-----------------------
Things I've Liked (Note: May contain some NSFW posts)
My Tumblr Crushes
My personal blargings
About Me / It Me
Getting To Know Me
My TMI Tuesday blargings
My Feels
Conventions!
* Animazement
* ConCarolinas
* ConTemporal
* Cosplay America
* Dragon*Con / Dragon Con
My Face
My Facebook
Art-related blargings
Music-related blargings
Most Fridays nights I’m at the Retro Film shows at the the Carolina Theatre in Durham. Come join me!
Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.
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
This is called a "superloo" and terfs are actively trying to steal this from you, in the UK they changed bathroom regulations to mean new buildings have to prioritise gendered toilets rather than build superloos.
This also upset a lot of architects and designers who like the superloos. They're also typically more like small rooms rather than having doors you can look under.
I have a friend who was strongly against inclusive bathrooms because he felt that “bathroom stalls are already really exposed due to how they’re constructed, so no wonder women don’t want men in the same bathrooms as them” and when I pointed out that we could just… build better bathrooms… with less exposed stalls, he got really quiet and then said “honestly that sounds so much better, but there must be some problem with building them like that, because otherwise wouldn’t we already be doing it?” BESTIE we are. WE ARE. Old-style bathrooms are cheaply made, poorly designed, and all around bad. Haven’t you noticed that men’s restrooms rooms get weirdly sticky? Haven’t you noticed that women’s restrooms end up with giant lines? This is because these rooms are architecturally awful. And we can do better now, because we know more! And we are!!! People are actively designing better bathrooms that address known problems, and guess what: those bathrooms are “inclusive” in the same way that curb-cuts are inclusive. It doesn’t matter if the ramp was built for a wheelchair or a stroller; it doesn’t matter if the bathrooms were designed specifically for gender inclusivity or just because fall-apart-if-you-sneeze-on-them metal stall dividers with giant ass peek gaps suck. We can in fact improve our built environment to better meet our needs. Stop cutting off your nose to spite your face; stop settling for less just because someone else might also enjoy it.
Seattle's SEA-TAC airport has an all gender restroom that's a row of about a dozen fully enclosed separated little rooms that lock, with a shared bank of sinks and it's great. Love it. Lot of very strange encounters at the sinks, feels odd the first few times! But people laugh it off almost instantly. Because it's not actually a big deal to share a sink.
The Trump administration is cynically exploiting calls for stricter AI regulation to pass broad censorship measures at the federal level.
So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.
So, if you live in the US and hate censorship and AI you know what to do, contact your congresspeople and tell them do not fucking dare let this through or so help us god...
I may end up needing to ask for donations at some point. Not only is my partners mom at the hospital, and it has been a lot to stress on my partner and I, and I haven't always been able to get ride from friends and had to use ubers to check on her... I won't be getting paid for being her aide for any time she was admitted which at this point has been almost a full week at this point. We have food in the house at the moment. But given that we live pay check to paycheck it will be rough loosing a week of pay.
Hey yeah, shes pre-stroke and the doctors are talking about a living will. I'm gonna put this out here now.
If she does die, I am not only gonna be dealing with the loss of a loved one, I will be out of work, and potentially out of housing. My gf and I have been trying to save to help move in with her partners but we are nowhere near that goal. Putting this out here now. Survival funds, paying off beds fun, potentially moving funds. I hadn't been asking for help because it felt selfish, that I should have been able to handle it all. But living paycheck to paycheck is scary and having to deal with this is scary. And it's not just me, its my partner who might be losing her mother. who is disabled and tries her best to help with the house but can't do traditional work.
Please consider helping two queer trans women.
Cash App: $rose2894
Venmo: @rose-sanchez-15
Paypal: https://paypal.me/rose2894?country.x=US&locale.x=en_US
idk if this is an usamerican thing or not but it always blows my mind as a small european country resident that yall have many names and types of apples???? what do you mean its not just red yellow or green??? why is it so complicated??? who is granny smith????
I need to catch up, I am 3 issues behind and it's crazy that I am cause I have the 3 issues in my bin. Thankfully I pick my stuff up frequently but I am playing so much catch up on everything. Now that the ultimate universe is over I will only have transformers to pick up so at least there's that.
WHO IS DOCTOR HENRI ARKEVILLE? Optimus’s team must help General Flagg with a new mission that brings them face to face with the man who may have discovered a way for humanity to fight back against Autobot and Decepticon alike.
Doctor Arkeville (voiced by Casey Kasem in the original [1980s] Transformers cartoon) was never given a first name. It was not until the 2009 Transformers: Shattered Glass comic "Eye in the Sky" that we got a hint at his first name, in the form of his SG counterpart, Professor Henri Arkeville. Looks like they're going with that!
(French? French-Canadian? A bit surprised they didn't go the stereotypical "German Mad Scientist" route and name him Heinrich...)
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.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
gummygunk
janainaart
pixelskylines
titsay
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon
