Another random on the internet.

I post whatever random bits of writing I do that I feel comfortable sharing, otherwise I share other people's stuff.

[catchymemes]

[logan43000-deactivated20150721]

[maureenjohnsonbooks]

This graphic is fabulous. It represents a tiny crash course in rhetoric. Learn these things. Put them on your wall. Whisper them into the breeze. These are THINGS TO KNOW.

[hollyblack]

Yeesssssssssss.

[navaeragreenleaf-deactivated201]

Interesting

[joehillsthrills-deactivated2019]

Bookmark this shit and the next time someone begins gobbling nonsense at you on a social network, instead of engaging, point them to this handy chart. Also useful: Thought Catalog’s “How To Have A Rational Conversation“ flowchart.

[neil-gaiman]

This.

[beyonce-knowles-carter]

“I always intended for Azula to have a redemption arc in the story of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Longer and far more complicated than Zuko’s. She had not bottomed out in the end of season three, she had further to go. At the deepest moment in her own abyss, she would have found: Zuko. 

“Despite it all, her brother Zuko would be there for her. Believing in her, sticking by her, doing his best to understand and help her hold her pain that she can no longer hold alone. Zuko – patient, forgiving, and unconditionally loving – all strengths he gained from Uncle Iroh. 

“That’s how she would have gotten out, and changed. With the faith and love of someone she had hurt, but who stuck by her anyway. Just as he had been saved by faith and love from someone he had hurt, who stuck by him. 

“And I always imagined that after coming out the other side, she would be one of those people who hilariously over-shares her own feelings all the time, and that she would be a bit over-apologetic. Like a Canadian version of Azula.” 

– Aaron Ehasz, head writer and co-executive producer of AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER

[valmoxium]

[graymoon2-deactivated20241009]

i will never not reblog this

i cannot stress how much it does for us

a while ago, one of my mutuals was considering quitting writing. her fics weren’t doing as well, and the algorithm wasn’t favoring her writing like it used to.

so as a collective 10-15 writers, we all reblogged her fic once each. that alone put her writing at the top of the tag.

it makes a difference. way more than you think. it doesn’t matter if people see it because of you, it still gets promoted by the algorithm.

please, reblog fics

[merosmenagerie]

What do you mean you hatched an egg you bought at the SUPER MARKET

Ohohoho

So there's this company in the UK, right. They brand themselves on producing fancy free range eggs and as part of that they have breed information written on the carton.

I did some snooping and found that every miracle news story of a supermarket egg hatching in the UK traced back to duck eggs, specifically the Braddock White duck eggs produced by this one company for the supermarket Waitrose.

And one day my mum brings them home and says "I bought these to eat but aren't they the ones that hatch?"

And it's spring and I'm hatching a ton this year so in they went.

On candling we had three fertile eggs! That's a fertility of 50% - the same as shipped eggs from a breeder!

Hatch day comes and we get 2 ducklings, Curie and Becquerel. Sadly, Curie contracts duck septicaemia from an infected navel and doesn't make it, but Becquerel is a healthy bird and growing like a weed.

I had put 4 breeder eggs in a week after them in case just one hatched, so Becque now has two Khaki Campbell cross friends called Tsuki and Hoshi so she isn't lonely.

And as of today's 7am Quacking - Becque is a female! Which means she's capable of laying eggs and therefore I have pirated a duck.

[merosmenagerie]

Okay whoa I’ve not been active because I’ve been building Becque’s run and this really blew up. Q&A time because I like to respond to people but god there’s a lot of people here.

How is this possible?: The company in question free ranges their flocks (usually, when it’s not HPAI flockdown). Imagine, perhaps, that you are a young drake without the distinctly curled tail feathers yet, or maybe you lost them. By complete coincidence you have never made a sound in front of the farmer that would expose the male not-quack your voice makes. Oops! Now you’re completely indistinguishable in the hoard of hundreds of identical white ducks.

Did you just impulse jump into owning this animal? /: No lol I have a very large flock of ornamental bantam chickens, waterfowl, pigeons, turkeys and was expanding to ducks anyway this year. I have a veritable complex of huge poultry runs I had built late last year and live on a small hobby farm so knew I had suitable outside space for her as an adult.

Why are your ducks named after radioactivity?: My very excited mother insisted they be named after scientists because they were an experiment. I chose Curie as a cute unisex name, and Becquerel came along when it became apparent that there were gonna be two so they were a matching pair.

Why are the other two names randomly Japanese?: There were a couple of days when Becquerel was on her own so she had to hang out with me so she didn’t get lonely. During the time the other two were hatching, Becque decided she had things to say and wandered over my tablet, writing a bunch of gibberish with my Japanese keyboard.

And, well, the word ‘Tsuki’ is in there and that’s a name. So I let the duck name one of her new friends and named the other to match lol

Wait that means they sell fertilised eggs for consumption? Is that legal?: There is absolutely no difference in eating fertilised or unfertilised eggs. I eat eggs from my mixed chicken flock and they’re all fertile. Eggs only develop after 24 hours of sustained incubation, before that they’re exactly the same, you’d never notice the difference. Also, pretty much every quail egg ever sold for consumption have all been fertile. They’re hard to sex.

What breed is she?: The ducks this company use are a utility mix referred to as ‘Braddock Whites’ derived from Aylesbury ducks, hence the very pale pink beak compared to the yellow orange you usually see on the more common Pekin and Cherry Valley Pekin breeds. Likely she’s got Pekin in that mix as well though, there’s only so many white ducks to cross together. This does mean that, as she is a production breed, she’s more prone to the health issues that production ducks have so that’s something I will be keeping an eye on.

How’s Becque?: She’s doing great! She has feathers and looks like a proper duck now. She lives outside with her friends in a huge run now (: Ducklings are very very stinky and loud and I’m very glad she isn’t in my house anymore even if I did overwork myself getting the run finished to escape the smell.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[memeuplift]

[devontae]

[afeelgoodblog]

“May I?” “You may.”

[callemreine]

I saw this last month on twitter and took a screenshot! Heres an addition

[oriolida]

[fuck-usag]

Sometimes real life beats the shit out of movies can you imagine LIVING THIS

[stimman3000]

instagram.com/p/Bl-7EmXAyFi/

[zanmor]

watch this one dog become FOUR DOGS!

[supreme-leader-stoat]

They fucking pixelated him.

[evoedbd]

Disclaimer: Do NOT try this on your actual dog!

If you want more dogs and can afford them, Shelter dogs are in need of loving, sensible homes… Also the cleaning bill would be immense.

[bewbin]

LETS BRING BACK 1337 SPEAK 

[bewbin]

why do i even try 

[bunney]

I THoUGHT YOU MEANT THE YEAR

[esoanem]

my l0rd, t3h p34s4nt5 4r3 r3v01t1ng! W3 mu5t s411y f0rth 4g41n5t th3m 4thw1th!

[blueskittlesart]

Pink Prison, a comic I did for my color theory class this semester! we had to pick a color, research it, and do a piece related to it somehow. i chose pink :)

[afeelgoodblog]

I’m not crying you’re crying

[sasquapossum]

Every once in a while, technology does good things. It does things that resonate with us as *humans*, not machines or abstractions. I love stories like this.

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[wireslide]

@wiredandrewired

[alwaysscreechingbasement]

[angelicdevil]

[Image ID: a Twitter thread by Robert G Reeve that reads “I’m back from a week at my mom’s house and now I’m getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I’ve been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that.

As a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening. 🧵

First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. It’s been debunked over and over again.

But frankly they don’t need to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful.

Your apps collect a ton of data from your phone. Your unique device ID. Your location. Your demographics. Weknowdis.

Data aggregators pay to pull in data from EVERYWHERE. When I use my discount card at the grocery store? Every purchase? That’s a dataset for sale.

They can match my Harris Teeter purchases to my Twitter account because I have both those companies my my email address and phone number and I agreed to all that data-sharing when I accepted those terms of service and the privacy policy.

Here’s where it gets truly nuts, though.

If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people I’m in regular contact with.

The advertisers can cross-reference my interests and browsing history and purchase history to those around me.

Family. Friends. Coworkers.

It will serve me ads for things I DON’T WANT, but it knows someone in regularly contact with me might want.

To subliminally get me to start a conversation about, I don’t know, fucking toothpaste.

It never needed to listen to me for this. It’s just comparing aggregated metadata.

So. They know my mom’s toothpaste. They know I was at my mom’s. They know I have Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for mom’s toothpaste.

Your data isn’t just about you. It’s about how it can be used against every person you know, and people you don’t. To shape behavior unconsciously.

Apple’s latest updates let you block apps’ tracking and Facebook is MAD. They’re BEGGING you to just press accept and go back to business as usual.

Block the fuck out of every apps’ ads. It’s not just about you: your data reshapes the internet.”/ end ID]

[fangirleaconmigo]

Angst fics can help people come to terms with their own grief, begin healing, or give people that good cry that they need.

Smut fics can help people affirm and accept their sexuality. It can help them explore their sexuality in a safe way. They can also just be fun, and having fun is a drastically undervalued way to improve your mental health.

Dark fics can help people face their fears or process their trauma. It can make them feel safer and more secure. It can help them find their courage.

Fluff fics can give people rest and respite and comfort. It can give them hope that soft places exist and that maybe there is one out there for them. It can bring up their mood, which, if they have depression, can be a life saver.

And every fic people write makes someone feel less alone.

Point being, just because a particular thing doesn’t serve you, doesn’t mean it lacks value.

This is not to say that we have to consume all fic uncritically. Of course not. It is just to say that entire “genres” aren’t trash or lacking value just because they don’t serve you.

[syntheticavenger]

This part:

Point being, just because a particular thing doesn’t serve you, doesn’t mean it lacks value.

[llbwwb]

As cute as a puppy by ~Khevyel .

[woodedwolf]

If You LOVE Wolves Follow Us! 

Visit our online shop for wolf items! Clothing, gifts, jewelry, home decor and more! 

https://woodedwolf.com

[darz-amores2-blog]

Mi animal favorito😻

[marceline2174]

[goodatyugioh]

surely this is a good idea that doesn't have the capacity to end real fuckin badly

[dragoninthedesert]

Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits...but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.

[goodatyugioh]

wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much

[fandomsandfeminism]

This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went ".......wtf?????" when I read it. So thank you.