My heart an soul is with the people and refugees of Palestine. If I could, I would answer every ask for support with exactly what they need. But there's too many suffering. Too many people. And honestly, if you can give, you should not be waiting for someone to send you an ask.
Please believe me, I am giving what I can to Operation Olive Branch's go fund me on a reoccurring basis. It's where i feel most comfortable sending money and I hope it gets to where it's most needed.
If you disagree with supporting families displaced by violence because they're Palestinians, please kindly unfollow and save your responses.
Announcing Phase 2 of Operation Olive Branch’s Direct Aid Initiative:
Because of yo… Operation Olive Branch needs your support for Oper
it is so dang funny to me that there is this cultural pressure for artists to be modest about their art. 'you cant say your own book is five stars' WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO RATE IT FOUR? buckaroo if you create ANYTHING from your heart it has all the grand cosmic uniqueness you do. CELEBRATE YOURSELF
By using antibodies from a human donor with a self-induced hyper-immunity to snake venom, scientists have developed the most broadly effecti
By using antibodies from a human donor with a self-induced hyper-immunity to snake venom, scientists have developed the most broadly effective antivenom to date, which is protective against the likes of the black mamba, king cobra, and tiger snakes in mouse trials. Described in the journal Cell, the antivenom combines protective antibodies and a small molecule inhibitor and opens a path toward a universal antiserum.
This guy Tim Friede wasn’t any kind of researcher or doctor. He was just a snake collector who thought it would be cool to try and become immune to snake venom by injecting small amounts and working up. For 18 goddamn years. He nearly died at least once.
Later, actual scientists heard about him and realized that since he survived his blood must be full of antibodies that neutralize many kinds of snake venoms. Using a sample of his blood they were able to develop an antibody cocktail that seems to be effective against many types of tropical snake bites, a sort of universal antivenom.
Too many writers are using generative 'AI' to make their book covers, so I've written a guide on how to make your own cover for free or cheap without turning to a machine.
If you can't afford to pay an artist, you CAN make your own!
I hope this is a helpful overview that covers the basics and points to some free resources.
I almost made a post about this the other day (unless i actually did and totally forgot) but there’s so many
I was going to make a list, but then i realized this is a good time to share this book
Making Stuff and Doing things is a whole collection of old punk DIY zines about making and doing just about anything, even things you probably never knew you wanted to do.
Book binding? In there.
Making bowls from old vinyl records? I made a whole ton for my brother’s grad party last year.
Basics of guitar? Making rubber stamps? Silk screening? Composting? Homemade beer, root beer, and wine? Soymilk?? Quill pens??? All in there.
Since it’s more punk, it doesn’t have a ton of the folksy, cottage vibes/hobbies, but it’s all about being resourceful and sustainable, which they both have in common.
If i ever need to do anything I’m not sure of, I double check this book to see if there’s anything in there. It’s one of the only books on diy I’ve ever needed.
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
And when you gatekeep classics you get people who turn up their nose when people enjoy things ‘the wrong way’ like some (thankfully few) of the comments on the video of the girls playing Vivaldi on their marimbas with such joy.
A pack horse librarian delivering books in rural Kentucky in 1938. During the Great Depression, the Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in which the librarians, who were often called "book women" or "book ladies," delivered books to remote parts of Appalachia.
Librarians are amazing. They love reading so much, they will find a way to get books to people.
here's libreoffice, its similar enough to the microsoft suite to be useful to me.
its a free open source software. i downloaded this as soon as the AI shit rolled around and i stopped using MS suite & google docs because i was fucking tired of everything being online, but now if MS is gonna start charging for shit that should be free, only the more reason to use other programs. i know microsoft can be a little hard to escape but this is at least a start
notepad ++ it's free, it's slim, it has tabs, notepad but better in literally every way, you can customize it with tons of plugins, it's pretty much the standard in any IT company I've ever been at
So, I did another one. The 2025 F1 Season Beginner's Guide. Genuinely honoured that a few people requested it and sorry for all the mistakes I've missed. Please enjoy the many recycled jokes from last year and the 2025 exclusive slide "Paddock Pets".
I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.
I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.
My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.
Three years.
No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.
I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.
This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.
It is incredibly important to train yourself to have your first instinct be to look something up.
Don't know how to do something? Look it up.
See a piece of news mentioned on social media? Look it up.
Not sure if something is making it to the broader public consciousness, either because you don't see it much or you see people saying nobody is talking about it? Look it up.
Don't know what a word means? Look it up.
It will make you a better reader and a better writer, but it will also just make you more equipped to cope with the world.
So often, I see people talking about something as though it is the first time anyone has ever acknowledged it, when I've been reading reports about it on the news for months or years. Or I see someone totally misinterpreting an argument because they clearly don't know what a word means--or, on the other hand, making an argument that doesn't make sense because they aren't using words the right way.
Look things up! Check the news (the real news, not random people on social media)! Do your research! You (and the world) will be better for it.
A lot of leftist accounts are suspiciously quiet on the section 504 lawsuit, proposed medicaid cuts, and the "make America healthy again" executive order.
I know other leftists are not the enemy but if we don't have able bodied allies and general population support, there's no hope of pushing back against these ableist policies. These big accounts ignoring a massive minority at risk is scary. The current admin is the problem but there's no hope of a solution without allyship.
The suit challenges a Biden administration decision that considered "gender dysphoria" a disability and goes even farther in questioning ass
"(*The 504 plan) *That law has turned out to be hugely important in education, offering an even broader definition of students with special needs than the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration in September 2024, saying that it was “abusing executive action” to sidestep the law. Under the Biden administration the Section 504 definition of disability was expanded to recognize that “gender dysphoria . . . may be considered a physical or mental impairment.”
The state was suing, Paxton said, "because HHS has no authority to unilaterally rewrite statutory definitions and classify 'gender dysphoria' as a disability."
The suit spends over 30 pages objecting to the addition of gender dysphoria to the Section 504 definition. It argues against the rule’s understanding of gender dysphoria. It argues against the characterization of Olmstead, a 1999 case that found persons with mental disabilities have the right to live outside of institutions. It argues that the new definition conflicts with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It asserts many negative impacts for each of the states that have joined the suit, including, in many cases, challenges with Medicaid compliance.
Then, on page 37, as it reached its third of four counts, the lawsuit switches gears, arguing not for an excision of the new language, but the elimination of Section 504 entirely. The suit argues that Section 504 is “coercive, untethered to the federal interest in disability, and unfairly retroactive” and therefore unconstitutional.
When confronted with protestors, the communications director for the Iowa Attorney General’s office told Michaela Ramm of the Des Moines Register, “The Iowans who were fed lies to show up at our office today in freezing temperatures deserve the truth, and the truth is that no one’s 504 plan is being changed or removed.”
But the language of the lawsuit is clear. The fourth item under “Demand for Relief” says “Declare Section 504, 29 U.S.C. § 794, unconstitutional.”
It’s followed by: “Issue permanent injunctive relief against Defendants enjoining them from enforcing Section 504.”
this is your periodic reminder that for all the artifacts and errors and "tells" one could possibly list, the only reliable way to actually determine if an image is ai generated is to investigate the source. it is becoming increasingly common for "fake classical paintings" to circulate around curative aesthetic blogs, and everyone should be using this as an opportunity to not only exercise their investigative skills but also appreciate art more in general. you're all checking out the artists you reblog, right? 🫣
so what are some signs to look for? let's use this very good example.
what a lovely late-impressionist piece blended with evocative leyendecker-esque themes! why haven't you ever heard of this artist before? surely tumblr would be all over an artist like this. who is justin brown?
your two options from here are to do a search for the name, or a reverse image search. i prefer reverse image searching, particularly when it comes to a common name like "justin brown". so what does that net?
Immediately, without looking at any text, something is wrong: it barely exists. an actual historical piece would turn up numerous results from websites individually discussing the piece, but no such discussions are taking place. Looking at the text, though, does show the source-- and at least in this case, the creator was honest about their medium.
But let's also look at the "exact matches", in case a source doesn't make itself apparent in the initial sidebar results like this.
This section will often tell you post dates of images, and here it can be seen that the very first iteration of the image was posted 15 days ago. It did not exist online prior to that.
Seeing how long an unsourced image has been floating around is a skill applicable to more than just generative images! See a cool image of an artifact or other intriguing item with a vivid caption? Reverse search it! If all the results are paired with that caption and only go back a few months, you might just have viral facebook spam.
Sometimes generative creators are dishonest about their medium and do not tag it like in the example, so that's when establishing "jpeg provenance" becomes important. While it can be a little trickier to determine if someone is using generative images and not admitting to it if they aren't trying to pass it off as a classic, something to consider is the age of their account and the frequency with which they post. Here are some account red flags:
-Did they only start posting art after 2022, or if they did before, did their style/skill level WILDLY change? Not gradual improvement-- I'm talking amateur graphite portraits straight into complex digital renders. Everyone starts somewhere, newness is not a red flag alone; it's newness combined with existing in a vacuum away from any community.
-Do they post fully-finished paintings several times a week?
-Do many of these paintings seem iterative of a similar theme or subject matter ("three well-dressed young men face each other under shade and dappled sunlight")?
-Does their style change in inconsistent ways? An artist that can swap between painting like Drew Struzan and Hokusai should be pretty well known, right? Why is no one hyping this guy?!
-Do they have social media besides the source instagram? If so, what are they posting about? Are there any WIPs? Doodles? Interactions with other artists? Gallery dates? 3am self-doubt posts? Or is it all self-promo? Crypto? Seemingly nothing art-related at all for someone pushing out 3 weekly paintings?
Basically, if it's important to you to omit this stuff when you curate, please don't just smash reblog if the source doesn't seem to be the OP themselves. Seeking out sources was important even before this became an issue, now it is more than ever.
hey chat did you guys know there's a whole website with informational videos on the rights you hold when interacting with ICE or witnessing interactions with ICE. all written by immigrants and for immigrants. idk man it'd be a shame if people watched these informational videos y'know.
