The Lowercase

Lightning wizard-in-training - Still figuring out this "tumblr" thing - Gonna go to space later, once I figure out how I'm doing that b. front half of the 90s my posting rate is through the roof until further notice, check #tumblrpocalypse for more details

[victusinveritas]

[zoctopode]

you guys really liked that lineart preview so i figured id drop the first 4 pages. this is a wip comic of some lesbian robots comparing heat sinks and is shaping up to be eightish pages tops, will be done within the next 2 weeks or so!

[log6]

I'm not gonna lie the secret to success for a great many people is absolutely stimulant abuse

[luulapants]

Wait hold on what was that

[placeholdername-1]

[skiddlefable]

pizza and pie are two separate food items

[world-machine-os]

Prove it.

[skiddlefable]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN PROVE IT

PIZZA IS TOPPINGS ON A FLAT SURFACE LIKE A PLATE.

PIE IS FILLING IN A CONCAVE SURFACE LIKE A BOWL. and also sometimes the top is covered.

THEY ARE BOTH CUT INTO SLICES THAT IS THE ONE SIMILARITY. NOT INTERCHANGEABLE WORDS

[skiddlefable]

i think everyone involved in the creation of deepdish pizza should explode

[skiddlefable]

may 13th, 2023, 9:56 pm, on the dot. not off by a minute, second, or even a millisecond. i will be at your house and with me will be a butcher knife, a pizza base, tomato sauce, cheese, and a portable pizza oven. may god, gods, or whatever exists in the far beyond favour you that day.

[skiddlefable]

you can't do this to me

[vesperifer]

transphobes be like: "IT'S STILL A PIE THO"

[dracolunari]

Consider: pizza is a loaded bagel

[big-smiling-monkey]

this post:

[skiddlefable]

well guys. we did it.

my worst post ever. officially at 4k notes. we can all go home now

[zeemczed]

Pizzas: a related species to the savory pie, but a definitively separate branch.

Chicago style Pizza: the evolutionary throwback. Arguably a pizza, definitely a pie.

Calzone: a savory empanada, the same as Hot Pockets, related to pizza via the same damn ingredients.

[hugintheraven]

Via @zeemczed #and because it will come up:#a hot dog is legally a sandwich#BUT not philosophically

Okay, but is a New York slice of pepperoni pizza, folded in half and eaten one-handed, a hot dog?

[zeemczed]

Is there a tube of meat in the center, whole and intact, with a pleasing snap to the casing? If not, then no. If so, then yes. A hot dog cares little for what it is served in.

[kaviesbox]

men will literally encourage female hypersexuality until it stops benefiting them personally. then suddenly it becomes pathology, degradation, daddy issues, lack of self-respect, trauma, etc. they’ll consume sexualized women constantly, glorify them, fantasize about them, profit off them, even build entire cultures around them. but the second a woman embodies that sexuality too openly, too honestly, or outside of male control, she’s “damaged” now. like suddenly the thing they were rewarding becomes proof there’s something wrong with her like what?

[sugarhighanxiety]

made in a bout of frustration. online trans discourse simulator (I cannot find the original post this was based off if anyone has it please tell me)

edit: original is here!! ty to person in reblogs

[ameliarating]

I see a lot of leftists agog at the notion that Jewish communities are remaining “liberal” without joining their more revolutionary causes. At best they’re confused and irritated. At worst, they are using this as an excuse for anti-Semitism.

But here’s the thing. Historically speaking, Jews have been most safe under liberal moderate regimes. The far right and the far left have always targeted Jewish communities once they’ve been in positions of power. Even without gaining power, they’ve been likely to trade in anti-Semitic stereotypes, dog whistling, and fear-mongering.

So to the leftist (whether that’s Marxist, communist, anarcho-communist) groups out there, you need to clean up your own communities first. Jews have very little reason to believe that you have our backs. We haven’t done well when you’ve had any power. We’ve been murdered, sent to gulags, and assassinated. We’ve been scapegoated and had our ethno-religious expression punished and prohibited. Address that first. And maybe Jewish communities won’t be so wary.

[jewishtransdyke]

I’m very much a radical leftist (somewhere in the vicinity of Rosa Luxemburg), but this is painfully true. Leftist communities have a huge antisemitism problem. I never go to political meetings, because I feel unsafe in those spaces, and I’m far from alone in that.

Leftists, clean your shit up.

[is-the-fire-real]

These posts are from 2019.

[metanarrates]

the response to "your demographic is full of people who are ugly and weird and undesirable" should not ever be "not true! some of us are in fact hot and normal and desireable." you should stand with weird ugly bitches bc otherwise you're just playing a losing game with bigots.

[hardwrench]

to me, correctly using 5+ commas in a single sentence is like perfectly executing a combo in a fighting game. to me.

[little-theatre-fairy]

if you think a sentence needs 5+ commas it should be two sentences

[hardwrench]

it’s not about what the sentence needs, i’m afraid, nor is it about economy, clarity, or style. it’s about winning, little-theatre-fairy.

[r1x513]

sentence perfec t size for put comma in to und/erstand! inside very Good and Correct comma makes sense put comma in Sentence, Put Comma In Sentence, no problems ever in sentence because good Shape and Support for comma, Asentence yes a place for a comma put comma in sentence can trust sentence for giveing good love to comma, friend sentence

[pastperfectcontinuous]

bell hooks mentioned going through a time in her life where she was severely depressed and suicidal and how the only way she got through it was through changing her environment: She surrounded her home with buddhas of all colors, Audre Lorde’s A Litany for Survival facing her as she wakes up, and filling the space she saw everyday with reinforcing objects and meaningful books. She asks herself each day, “What are you going to do today to resist domination?” I also really liked it when she said that in order to move from pain to power, it is crucial to engage in “an active rewriting of our lives.”

[ritavonbees]

I have come to think of the suicidal impulse as the brain waving a flag to say three things:

something needs to change here

this is urgent

I don’t know how to do it

death is the ultimate metaphor for drastic change. it’s a general specific. whatever your problems are, it is very likely that dead people don’t have to deal with them. a real solution to your problems may demand a very narrow range of action that’s likely to be out of reach at this moment, but death is sold on every street corner, so it feels like a more realistic fantasy than happiness.

you don’t really want to die per se but it’s also not completely random chemicals swamping your brain for no reason. you want the pain to stop, you want to be somewhere else, you want to be someone else. it’s urgent. you don’t know how to do it. the end is not the end but a means that feels within your reach right now.

this is the wisdom of bell hooks: daily rituals of meaning and resistance and solidarity are part of slowly building a future where you can make the change you really need. and only alive people can do that. every step you take towards change and power is another step away from death.

[teaboot]

I feel like pirating media that isn’t sold or offered anywhere legally anymore shouldn’t be called piracy. Girl thats archaeology

[teaboot]

Wait what's a buildings fire evacuation plan if you aren't supposed to use the elevator to get down

[lazodiac]

You go down the stairwell/fire escape. Is that weird?

[teaboot]

But what if you have a walker or a wheelchair??

[durpacerangerrogjro]

in america at least, in this situation, there isnt one. either your loved ones or the firemen can get you out using the emergency fire escapes or stairs, or you die 

[teaboot]

That's fucking horrific, thank you

[official-lucifers-child]

“fun” little story:

last summer my friend who is an amazingly talented artist and i were in this super tall building, and she’s in a wheelchair and i’m pushing her around the room. it’s an art exhibit and some of her art was chosen to be showcased there and so it’s all fine and dandy until suddenly an alarm starts going off

a FIRE ALARM

everyone starts running for the stairs and my friend just looks at me with this forlorn look on her face

“i can’t go down the stairs”

but i’m a stubborn bitch “i’ll carry you”

“what about my chair? it’s too expensive for me to be able to get another one if i can’t get this one back”

“i’ll carry that too”

and i did. we went to the stairs (by then most people from our floor were gone) and i lifted her up in a fireman’s carry over my shoulder and then lifted her chair up and used the ridiculous amount of adrenaline that was coursing through my veins to make it down approximately 20 half-flights of stairs until we met some people exiting lower floors, one of which who kindly took the chair. I changed positions so i was holding my friend bridal-style which was, somehow, easier and the person who took her wheelchair (with her permission to handle it of course) accompanied me to the ground floor and then out the doors

basically there is no real protocol for people who can’t use the stairs in an emergency. it’s up to the people with them, if anyone, to help them or the person to somehow make it down the stairs alone, unassisted

thank fuck that it was just a faulty alarm system, because if i was unable to carry her down those stairs and the building was on fucking fire???? then i don’t know what would have happened to her, but i don’t think it would have been very good.

it’s fucking ridiculous and ableist to the absolute max.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

I use a cane. When I did a day-long fire safety training at my northeast American university (UMass Amherst), I asked that exact same question: “what am I supposed to do if the fire alarm goes off and I’m in my lab on the twelfth floor?” 

the fire marshal hemmed and hawed for a while and then said to take the elevator- you’re supposed to leave it free for the fire department to use and they want able-bodied people out fast not waiting for elevators. if the fire alarm has just gone off the building probably hasn’t suffered enough structural damage to make using the elevator dangerous, and modern elevator wells are heavily reinforced. many large and high-trafficked buildings on my campus have fire rated elevators that link in with the fire alarm system so they won’t let you off on a floor with a possible fire. 

if the elevator isn’t working, wait in the stairwell and call the fire department to let them know where you are. modern stairwells are also heavily reinforced- it might not be pleasant but modern building code usually requires fire-resistant stairwell doors in office and big residential buildings, also to help firefighters get in and out safely. older buildings’ stairwells may or may not be retrofitted with fire-resistant doors but a stairwell is generally the safest place to wait if you can’t get out. 

what happened to your friend was horrible, and i’m very glad you were there to help her out, but you can absolutely use the elevator to evacuate if it’s not shut down. those don’t-use-the-elevator rules are for abled people.  

[tisfan]

This is GOOD TO KNOW. why do they not tell people this??

[ravynfyre]

Okay, firefighter here. If you are not physically able to use the stairs, and the elevator is NOT compromised, use the elevator. But you MUST be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that the elevator is NOT compromised before you get into it, because there is always the chance that once you get into it, you may not exit it. Power could go out. The elevator may actually BE compromised and you just couldn’t tell from where you were until you were in there, and it suddenly shuts down on you. Something else could happen. 

Understand that once you enter the elevator, you could POTENTIALLY be taking your life into your hands there.

It is NOT LIKELY, to be perfectly honest. It’s only in a pretty catastrophic scenario - think the Twin Towers, USA, on September 11th - that the elevators will be compromised and out of service. But there is a NOT ZERO PERCENT CHANCE and you need to understand that and accept it.

As for leaving the elevators free for the firefighters, okay, here’s the deal. Unless your nearest fire station is literally right next door? Your first on scene fire truck is NOT likely to be there on scene and needing that elevator before you get to the ground. It takes us TIME to find the address, gear up, and drive to the building. Then we need to hoof it into where the elevators even ARE, so YOU HAVE TIME to use the elevator to get down to the ground floor... BUT ONLY IF THERE’S NOT A RUSH ON THE ELEVATOR! And THAT is WHY we don’t tell people this shit. That’s WHY we tell people to NEVER USE THE ELEVATOR... because every self-entitled asshole will use it because they don’t feel like walking, and then put YOU in danger by delaying the elevator’s arrival to you.

IF, however, the elevator IS compromised, or you just can’t get it to come for you, or whatever, and you either don’t have anyone with you who has the adrenaline fueled BALLS to be able to toss you over their shoulder and hoof it down the stairs with you - because, let’s face it, that is RARE AS FUCK, then HERE IS WHAT YOU DO:

You call 911 and tell the call taker that you are in the building that has a fire alarm going off, and you are not able to evacuate because of a physical disability, and you tell them what floor you are on, and EXACTLY what stairwell you are waiting at. And the very FIRST thing that the firefighters are going to do once they arrive, if it is, indeed, a REAL emergency, and not a false alarm, is come get your ass and bring you down. Whether that means carrying you down the stairs, or whether that means locking out the elevators so that no one else can override them and coming to get you themselves, they WILL come get you FIRST THING if it is a real event. And if it is a false alarm? You will probably be the first person who is not involved with the building to know, because the call-taker is going to stay on the line with you until you are under someone’s care and out of danger, or until the scene has been sorted out as real or false, and you are out of danger that way.

These are pretty standard operations in the fire service throughout the United States. There may be some minor variations based on specific municipalities, but, for the most part, this is pretty typical: LIFE BEFORE PROPERTY. So, as long as SOMEONE knows where you are - hence why you call 911 - Firefighters will come get you. You are NOT alone, and you have NOT been abandoned. I PROMISE. It’s like, our whole reason for doing the shit we do: to save lives and to break shit. Sometimes, we get lucky enough to do both at the same time.

High rise fires suck ass, and I always hated them. But the very FIRST thing I asked anytime we got one was if we had “any entrapments” - which is what we call anyone who could not self-evacuate for ANY reason. We ain’t leaving you behind. And yes, your friend who doesn’t have the stamina to carry you down can stay with you, too. Because I would never ask that of someone, honestly. 

Also, just a little FYI... MOST fire alarms are false alarms. Not to make anyone complacent or anything, but, yeah. Most of them are either system malfunctions, someone accidentally hit a pull station, or someone burned popcorn in a break room. So don’t let a fire alarm freak you out until you need it to - by smelling or seeing smoke or flames. 

[gentle--riot]

i have had multiple nightmares about this very thing because NOBODY BOTHERS TO ACTUALLY TELL WHEELCHAIR USERS THIS STUFF

[downwiththebad]

I am loving these additions!

If you're disabled, this is worth the time and focusing energy to read through!!!

[kyraneko]

Short version:

If disabled and the fire alarm is just happened, you're allowed to take the elevators down but there's a small possibility you could get stuck if the elevators are compromised.

If you can't use the elevators or don't want that risk, go to the stairwell which is reinforced against fire, close the doors, and call 911 to let them know you are in that particular stairwell and can't get down.

Fire will strongly prioritize finding and rescuing people who might be still in the building during any actual structure fire. This is a major component of their job.

Fire people won't arrive in the course of one elevator run and actually half the deal with "don't use elevators" is supposed to be "leave it for people who need it in the emergency" which is both fire AND disabled people.

[identittycrisis]

a fire is my worst nightmare as a disabled person, thank you to everyone who helped put this post together

[yeehawpim]

I can be the ship and its sailors

[april]

women are like diamonds: synthetically-produced women are not meaningfully different from naturally-formed women, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise is probably trying to justify keeping their women mines open

[gayluigi]

[prokopetz]

The serious reason I have reservations about referring to someone doing art or writing in response to a shitpost as "fanfic" of that post is it feels like it's contributing to the erosion of the term "fanfic" to mean "any media that's in conversation with any other media", which is functionally meaningless because all media is in conversation with other media. At best it's a prompt fill.

The unserious reason is that if doing some writing in response to a Tumblr shitpost counts as as fanfic of that post, the list of people who've written fanfic based on my work includes Eliezer Yudkowski, and I'm not 100% sure how I feel about that.

[sistersorrow]

Accept that this your legacy

[prokopetz]

Honestly, as contemptible legacies of my online presence go, "had a prompt filled by the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality guy" probably ranks somewhere below "coined the phrase 'humans are space orcs'" and "convinced people to start shipping Tony the Tiger with the Grinch".

[kittenwriter]

... wait, people ship Tony the Tiger with the Grinch?

[prokopetz]

You tell me.

[roboticnebula]

Pros of re-reading your own fic

a good time;

Has exactly the tropes you like and the characterization you want to read;

Gratification: yes you did finish a thing and yes you did do good;

just a very fun time all around.

Cons of re-reading your own fic:

Is that another TYpO

[bisexualbaker]

Pros of listening to a recording of your own fic:

All of the same pros as above

Entertainment while you do chores or drive

Cons of listening to a recording of your own fic:

No longer being able to fix mistakes/inconsistencies or re-word things without inadvertently making the podficcer look bad

[discoursedrome]

I am really just coping and seething about my lack of soldering ability here, but it's infuriating that even devices people call "easily repairable" require you to solder, something 99% of people don't know how to do and which requires not just specialized equipment but also a fair bit of practice. I have repaired a few oldschool devices from the era where you had to manually attach the bare wiring to a connector, and it was quite a bit easier to deal with than devices where replacing the battery requires soldering, which is to say all consumer electronics from the past 20 years.

[gender-trash]

> specialized equipment

sure, but i've spent more on fucking knitting needles than i have on my entire soldering station and it's not even close

> a fair bit of practice

a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?

> replacing the battery requires soldering

i'm struggling to think of a single electronic device currently in my house where 1) replacing the battery requires soldering and 2) soldering is the hardest part of replacing the battery. it's all either laptops and larger items with battery connectors, or phones and wireless earbuds and bluetooth speakers and shit where the battery is really solidly In There and either requires gingerly prying out 18 other components to get at, or is just straight up potted in gunk and can't be removed without destroying the whole device.

the other problem with connectors in full generality is that their favorite thing to do is Wiggle Loose. i feel like people don't appreciate this enough. the more connectors are in your nice repairable device, the more times you ARE going to have to take the lid off to re-seat one of them. (then again, i guess most people's electronics are more sessile than the kind i primarily work on...)

[discoursedrome]

I don't really have a reference point for what knitting equipment costs, but allowing that every hobby has a range of quality and prices, soldering seems like a case where it's dicey to have bad equipment when learning the ropes, given that the downsides includes destroying the thing you're trying to solder. It isn't a forgiving thing to do badly!When I originally researched it, the impression I got was that if you had zero experience and were practicing entirely at home, it was unwise to to try to learn with cheap tools, and the expensive ones might cost more than the things I want to solder. If that impression is wrong, it's a reflection of the inaccessibility of the hobby to newcomers!

That said, okay, hobbies are just kind of like that. Knitting is a good analogy in the sense that there's, like, a tacit social contract that it's is either a hobby or a job, and you will never find yourself in a situation where you need to knit unexpectedly -- contrast with sewing which everyone needs a little of from time to time, but it's low-stakes if you screw up and you can muddle through the urgent parts with a garbage sewing kit you bought in a convenience store. I'd be even unhappier if people changed how they designed appliances such that routine maintenance required me to knit!

a dyspraxic seven-year-old can do it. do you have better hand-eye coordination than a dyspraxic seven-year-old?

I mean I have no doubt that I can do it (though I will not presume to judge what percentile of seven-year-olds I beat), but I doubt I could do it well on a blind first try. Again in the relatively short bit of research I did, I found plenty of failure stories from adults, some of which were expensive! It sounded though like the complexity was less in putting things in the right place and more in the mechanics and chemistry of the process and the behaviour of the ingredients.

None of this is really that bad in an objective sense -- I've done lots of things more difficult and expensive -- but it's that tacit social contract thing. Society tricked me into thinking I would't need to solder unless I wanted to go into EE, then changed the rules! If I learn to solder under these conditions, I'm letting the terrorists win.

I do suspect we might just have different feelings about what counts as a bigger hassle, though. In my mind, there's a huge gulf between reversible mechanical operations and destructive or chemical ones -- as long as it's there's not much risk of screwing it up, it bothers me much less to spend half an hour disassembling something than it does to reapply adhesive, which means that replacing a laptop's actual battery feels mild, but replacing the CMOS battery feels like a big deal. Soldering is on a whole other level from all that, though I will concede that something like earbuds with tiny embedded batteries fully cocooned in glue are probably even worse. I have many devices where the battery requires soldering and that's the only part that isn't trivial, though, and I've rarely had issues with connectors (though some of the very tightly-fitting ones can be scary to change). These tend to be somewhat old devices (since they're now unusable due to battery death), but the devices even older than that are often better off, because they came from an era where "obviously customers need to be able to change the battery" was still the prevailing norm!

[gender-trash]

*looks at notes* good lord what is happening in there. why is it always the posts i banish to the drafts for being too mean that blow up when released into the world

anyway! thank you for going into depth on the tacit social contract thing. that makes sense now that you've explained it but is definitely not an intuitive mindset to me. (i love it when i have an excuse to learn a new skill and buy tools about it 😔) once you know how to do it soldering definitely feels like much less of a hassle than e.g. prying up things that are glued down, and i think most people who care about Repairable Electronics are unfortunately in that camp, where easy soldering is like a fun quick little task and not an unbridgeable gulf.

my mindset (and this is not necessarily endorsed) is more like: there's a list of tools that Every Adult Should Know How To Use, and if someone mentions they don't know how to use one of them it's like. oh… they let you out of the house like that? and a soldering iron is, uh, one of the things on my list. sorry. i've definitely seen posts on here where people are like that about cooking but i have a disease where i think it's normal to not cook and weird to not know how to use a drill.

It sounded though like the complexity was less in putting things in the right place and more in the mechanics and chemistry of the process and the behaviour of the ingredients.

yeah i think this is directionally correct: successful soldering is mostly about Heat Management. the trick is to 1) put enough heat into the things you want to solder together and 2) not put too much heat into adjacent things; a cold solder joint is fixable but melting the insulation off a wire or lifting surface mount pads off a PCB is game over. this is why everyone cautions you to spend enough on a soldering iron that you can get one with good heat control. relatedly, though, you can prevent Bad Things From Happening at basically any point where it seems things are going wrong by removing the soldering iron and optionally blowing on your work to cool it down. (this is another axis that makes Tasks feel intuitively easy vs. hard to me: if something bad is happening, how easy is it to hit the brakes? i really didn't like oxyacetylene welding because being able to Set Down The Fucking Oxyacetylene Torch required turning off the two gas lines in a specific order, which i had to then remember in a state of panic while holding a live oxyacetylene torch.)

I'd be even unhappier if people changed how they designed appliances such that routine maintenance required me to knit!

i'm so so sorry but this is hilarious and we need to do it. repairable electronics is out knittable electronics is in