I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!
I'll share some of the info below:
Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.
What to do?
-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides
- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!
To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!
Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!
Your phone is about to stop being yours. In September 2026, Google will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with them.
the "rip ___ you would have loved ___" meme is inherently more fun with ancient characters. rip clytemnestra you would have loved morse code. rip theseus you would have loved the airtag. rip callisto you would have loved wearing shorts.
In case anyone finds it helpful because mobility aids are horrifically expensive and inaccessible…
And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…
Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.
He also is working on cheap, open source, accessible designs for beach chairs, off road chairs, motorized attachments (think smart drive), and so on. Plus he skateboards in his wheelchair. Cool dude, helpful info, pass it on.
It's incredibly sad people have to resort to this, but it's a damn good resource. Use it. Spread awareness. Maybe one day people with physical disabilities won't need DIYs like this. But until then, reblog and share.
I finished the last constellation tonight. All 40 of them are now done! Went through and double checked and every stitch is in place for them and all the beads are in place. Which just leaves the milky way part to do.
Started stitching the Milky Way in. Slowly making progress on it as I am hiding the travelling thread so the back will look nice.
Looks pretty cool and keeps the readability of the other stitches. Very happy with it. Just a thousand or so to do. As they are in a grid roughly every centimetre apart.
Update on the constellation quilt. I have gotten the last Milky Way stitch done now. Which means the quilting part of this project is done. My next step will be to baste the edges down, remove the pattern, trim the quilt square, and lastly attach the binding.
Progress on the constellation quilt has come along quite a lot now. Finished the binding on the quilt over the weekend. I prefer to machine stitch the binding to the front then hand stitch the back side. It gives such a nice finish to the quilt. Took the time to measure it also and it ended up being 72" by 72" (183cm by 183cm).
With that done I could finally start removing the pattern. Which is taking both less time and more time that I thought it would. As it rips really easily so that goes fast, but the tiny corners and removing it under the beads is slow. You can now see the difference in the glow effect with it against the dark front of the quilt instead of the pattern.
Behold the stars of the constellations of the northern sky! I love how this quilt has turned out. It was a lot of fun to work on and the effect is so cool in person. Overall I would estimate it took about 90-100 hours to complete. Give or take 10 hours if you want to count the time I spent custom dying the fabric.
I made sure to get a nice photo of it in daylight. For once I also remembered to get a quilt label on it. The back really shows the difference in readability of the quilting on the ice dyed fabric compared to the solid front. Thank you everyone that has followed this. I am glad you all found joy in it.
Those that are interested, here is the pattern I used by Haptic Lab. I made the large northern hemisphere version, and plan to make the matching southern hemisphere one next year. I also got your back for the less crafty people. Haptic Lab sells finished quilts in this pattern, both as a large quilt and a small one.
perpetuating the myth of a "nursing shortage" only benefits the healthcare administrators fucking us over, giving them an excuse to claim that they can't help but short staff the hospitals because there just aren't nurses to fill those roles
nurses literally make up a full 1% of the US population. there is no nursing shortage
my long lost husband returned from space obsessed with and devoted to some kind of extremely fragile alien blob. which is fine, i guess. building it a biodome was kind of fun at least.
My Disability Studies professor said something that I think was very good and explains a lot about professional attitudes toward people with disabilities. This is what she said:
“We [people with disabilities] are the last thing on the HR discrimination list. Companies always list things like, ‘we eliminate discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, nationality, identity… oh, and disability.’ It’s just tacked on at the end. The others are mostly about being nice, respectful, and treating people equally. Not discriminating against people with disabilities is more complicated. You need to change your environment, code, the way you design things. You actually need to make changes, and most companies do not want to do that.”
I thought this was a really good insight. We’re often thought about last, if we’re thought about at all. Accommodating us takes effort and a lot of people just don’t want to make the effort.
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????
🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces
(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)
So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented:
→ Three types of ceremonial jewelry
→ A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed
→ A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn
Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.
And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.
Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.
─────── ✦ ───────
🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style
Ask yourself:
→ Who’s in charge, and why?
→ Who has land? Who doesn’t?
→ What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?
Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.
Start there. Not at the embroidery.
─────── ✦ ───────
2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict
Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?
→ What was destroyed and mythologized?
→ What do the survivors still whisper about?
→ What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?
No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.
─────── ✦ ───────
3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists
Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about:
→ Death?
→ Love?
→ Time?
→ The natural world?
→ Justice?
Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.
You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.
─────── ✦ ───────
4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)
Culture shows up in:
→ What people apologize for
→ What insults cut deepest
→ What people are embarrassed about
→ What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately
For instance:
→ A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?”
→ A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.
This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.
─────── ✦ ───────
5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals
Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about:
→ Breakfast routines?
→ How people greet each other on the street?
→ Who cooks, and who eats first?
→ What’s considered “clean” or “proper”?
→ How is parenting handled? Divorce?
Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.
─────── ✦ ───────
6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture
A culture isn’t a monolith.
Even in deeply traditional societies, people:
→ Rebel
→ Question
→ Break rules
→ Misinterpret laws
→ Mock sacred things
→ Act hypocritically
→ Weaponize or resist what’s expected
Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.
─────── ✦ ───────
7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap
Worldbuilding gets boring fast when:
→ The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure
→ The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric”
→ Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like
You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy.
→ Let ugly things be beloved.
→ Let beautiful things be corrupt.
→ Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.
─────── ✦ ───────
📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy):
→ Culture is not food and jewelry.
→ Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction.
→ Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter.
→ Let your world feel lived in, not curated.
The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list.
It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.
Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)
—rin t.
// writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range
// thewriteadviceforwriters
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🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:
A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.✎ Write the Darkness ✎A 75-prompt horror
Health classes really ought to teach people what the beginning stages of addiction are like because a lot of people don’t realize they’re addicted to something until they’re years deep into it.
If you go without it you feel unwell in a way that you never usually feel unwell. Sweating, tired, sleepy, headaches, irritable, depressed, etc. For example when I was in opium withdrawal I got incredibly depressed in a way that I’ve never been before or since. When you quit caffeine you might get super bad headaches even if you never usually get any headaches.
Thoughts of it regularly bother you and the thoughts go away once you’ve taken it but only temporarily. Unlike with a food craving which usually stays away once you’ve satisfied it or distracted yourself from it.
You find yourself rationalizing with yourself why you should break your own rules about how much you can take and how often. For example you might only let yourself drink alcohol every four days but start thinking that three days is actually close enough to four days, right? Especially if this happens regularly.
You’re using it so often that you feel the need to lie about how much you use because other people might think it’s concerning
If the substance or activity is nearby it’s genuinely difficult to not consume it or participate in it in a way that’s really frustrating.
You feel bad when you’re not on it and your brain tells you “if you just take the thing you wouldn’t feel this way”
You can only feel “whole” or “normal” when you’re on a substance even though it’s a recreational drug
And if you read this and think you might be addicted to something, don’t panic and don’t feel ashamed. Realizing you’re addicted to something isn’t a failure. It’s more information about your health that you can use to manage your condition, whether you want to get rid of your addiction or not.
it’s been said before and it’s not even close to the worst thing but it sucks how our current robber barons are such philistines. like these guys aren’t even building libraries or concert halls. they can’t even pretend to enjoy art, and they don’t see any value in signaling that they appreciate art
this current batch of the fithy-rich is BORING. They're BORING. Oh you have a yacht that's bigger than anybody else's yacht but functionally no different from one of your fancy houses? BORING. You have yet another fast car? YAWN. You ate a burger but like, a special burger? whatever. FUND AN OPERA ABOUT ANOTHER RICH GUY YOU HATE, DIPSHITS. How about you put a concert hall with your name on it in every city in the US and fund their operations for the next decade, if you're so rich????? unless you're too poor to afford that????? How many people do you, personally, directly employ, and what are their salaries? Do you pay well enough to command the loyalty and willing service of any masters of their craft? It would be so easy to win the absolute love and adoration of the masses in this climate but no, they wanna build bunkers and play politics in order to save a few more miserable nickles.
It’s difficult to tell - typically light fixtures are installed using some combination of screws and brackets to affix them to the wall, but in this case the actual point of connection is obscured by a cat.
