if i look back, i am lost
Janaina Medeiros
Stranger Things
h
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No title available
Mike Driver
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
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Sade Olutola
titsay
shark vs the universe
untitled
Kaledo Art
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
JVL
cherry valley forever
★
taylor price
#extradirty
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@interludesanddaydreams
Here is a free pdf of the players handbook
Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything
Here is a free pdf to monsters manual
Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything
Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide
Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters
Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes
For all your dnd purposes
Here again.
Today in australia they started senate hearings on the bill the government hopes will make enough disabled people die or disappear to make us all less irritatingly expensive for them. We had two weeks to submit feedback on over 400 pages of complicated legal terms. They don't care what we have to say and they don’t care that this will kill people and disenfranchise disabled people across the country.
There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.
The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.
The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".
If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.
I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.
Sorry we're too expensive to have rights, I guess.
Look, it’s a weird hill to die on, especially when I don’t really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.
Media for children used to be scary and that’s important.
“Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.” ― C.S. Lewis
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
-- G. K. Chesterton
Sam Handwich.
If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.
I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)
Oh, wary dell vone
Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.
Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.
Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))
Where can one support the Pikiwedia, to further ruin the banes of actual information (also known as genai chatbots)?
if anyone wishes to support pikiwedia i would instead donate to the wikimedia foundation !! they are doing far more to fight for a free and unslopped internet.
also, i directly use their free (!!!!) api. pikiwedia relies directly on the wisdom and hard work of millions of wikipedia authors. protect this amazing source of collaborative open source knowledge for the many, many obvious reasons, but also so that pikiwedia can continue to scrongle it.
We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
You can donate to Amnesty International here
They’re calling emojis “hieroglyphs” again and I should be allowed to do a little grievous bodily harm as a treat. The only way you escape is if you can show me examples of a tense system, a nominal phrase, and an adverb using emojis. If not, well, then it’s clobbering time.
Where do we stand on the idea of emojis serving as determinitives (or however its spelled) can an emoji tell me if the sentence is in the past? Not really. But it can help me understand the intent and emotions behind the sentence
(Actually I'm not sure determinitive is the word I'm looking for but its the closest I can think of)
Determinative is the correct word, but no they still cannot be used this way.
Hieroglyphs are used to write only one language Egyptian. There is Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian, but these are all still progressive forms of the same language, even if grammar and spelling different between them. Culturally, the Hieroglyphic signs do not change meaning during this. A 𓀁 sign always means the word has something to do with something going into the mouth or speaking. A 𓄗 sign always comes with words to do with animal legs or certain types of power. They're relatively static.
Emojis are a global script. Anyone in any language can use them to convey an additional emotion or tone, but they do not have global meaning. As I've said before on this post:👌in the anglosphere and several other countries means 'okay', but you use that sign with someone from Brazil or various countries in the Middle East and essentially you're telling someone to 'get fucked.' The same goes for 👺 the Japanese Tengu, which, for years before 😈 was introduced, was used in place of 'the devil' as something evil, whereas Tengu are (more recently) troublemakers but more of a mischievous kind and can even be protective. Even 🙂 can have its problems. Many people will interpret it as a smile, that things are good, but some people will interpret it as a sign of dissatisfaction or upset because 😊 is used more commonly where they are.
Beyond cultural issues, the use of emoji to accompany or provide tone to an existing language is inherently personal. An individualistic use of a script, varying from person to person in terms of meaning and understanding, can never be considered to be a language in and of itself. It's not standardised, each country uses emojis for different meanings, and each subculture within those countries will have different meanings again. Hieroglyphs do not do this because they have standardised meanings.
Finally, we have to address the fact that emojis, while they might have an emotional meaning or represent a physical object, do not have any phonemes attached to them. They are not spoken, they do not have sounds (unless, pedantically, we're saying the letter/number signs do but then they're part of existing scripts and shouldn't be counted). There is the Rebus principle where signs literal meaning can be taken to make them have a sound like 👁️🐝🥬'eye bee leaf' or 'I believe' but that's still only forming a language that exists rather than emojis being a language themselves.
Hieroglyphs on the other hand are logoconsonantal, which means they are logograms (literal depictions of what they are) but also have consonantal value (sounds). For instance, 'house' is written with a sign that represents a bird's eye view of a basic floorplan of an Egyptian house 𓉐. That sign (𓉐) has the consonantal value 'pr' which, on it's own with just that sign reads 'house' (usually with a single stroke (𓏤) to indicate just one). However, the two-consonantal phoneme 'pr' can be used in other words that have nothing to do with a house. For instance: 𓉐𓂋𓂻 'pr' with a mouth sign (that has the consonantal value of 'r') and the walking legs determinative (in this case it is unread because it's a determinative, but it can have the value 'jw' that on it's own means 'to go forth'). Those three signs combined mean 'pr' 'to come'. For evidentiary consistency's sake we'll do another example: 𓅭 this sign on its own, or accompanied by a single stroke 𓅭𓏤, has the consonantal value of sȝ and the meaning of 'duck'. However, combine 𓅭𓏤 with 𓀀 and you get 𓅭𓀀𓏤 sȝ 'son'. The man functions as the determinative in son' to separate reading sȝ as 'duck' because the phoneme is the same. Then, if I want to be really thorough, I can just write 𓀀𓏤 's' 'man' if I take away the 𓅭. For a full reading I'd add a one consonant sign 𓊃 's' and then the man would go back to just being a determinative.
All this is without getting into grammar with the use of pronouns, suffixes, and tenses, which I could do, but I think I've made my point pretty clear.
Emojis are a script of ideograms that represent emotions or a literal object rather than sounds, though they can be manipulated using the Rebus principle. The meaning of each of them is heavily dependent on the users current language, country of origin, and cultural background. Hieroglyphs are a logoconsonantal script, where each sign has consonantal value or phonemes that when stood alone or grouped with other signs form words within the various stages of the Ancient Egyptian language. These meanings are set, they do not differ over various parts of Egypt, and are not dependent on the individual using them.
That is why emojis and hieroglyphs are not remotely the same thing.
here is a master list of great art tools that can make your workflow easier! 👇 (updating, please consider supporting me on kofi or check out my other works)
“I was on a strict diet during Episode VIII, and she was like, ‘Kid, get into that fridge and take some chocolate bars. I have many there.’ And I did,” he recalls. “I failed my diet because Carrie Fisher told me to. And it [felt] great.”
-John Boyega on Carrie Fisher
This is the Carrie Fisher post of body positivity reblog for a chocolate bar from her fridge
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2609/
theres ALWAYS a relevant XKCD for everything huh
reminds me of how artists flip the canvas to make sure their art looks good
Just flip the genders real quick and check if you accidentally made a cult
so one of the largest open source data communities on the internet, data.world, got bought out by a company called ServiceNow, who has decided to fucking delete all of it by July 11th. they've given users barely any notice, no emails, just a fucking banner at the top and a blog post from June that gives barely a month to download your data before they fucking delete it all.
a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.
i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.
the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)
and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.
an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:
Have you posted this to r/datahoarder? They would probably be most prepared for preservation efforts on such a short time frame
I haven't, I don't really have a reddit anymore. if somebody else would be willing to do that, that would be great. I'm pretty sure it only lets you post with a certain amount of karma now which is annoying
It looks like this has gotten onto Reddit and people are saving the data - but I can imagine researchers who uploaded assets won’t know this, so hopefully can reach some.
Related to my previous tags
https://www.re3data.org
There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there
Home | re3data.org
I’ve been emailing folks at my university about this today, and no one that I have talked to has been previously aware that this is happening.
Here are some of the scripts I’m using to email University Research Librarians and department chairs/assistant and associate deans who I know oversee faculty who use resources from data.world for their lessons:
Thank you so much for providing this resource ❤️
The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.
Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"
The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.
Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."
THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026
This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.
This torches everything. And I do mean everything.
A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):
ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives
allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason
preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies
requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.
What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.
Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.
Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.
Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:
"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"
But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.
Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.
This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.
This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.
So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.
Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.
As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.
[id. A twitter post by @/Bennieeexyz Jury duty letter came addressed to my cat. Not a mistake. "Felix Martinez" - that's his full name according to his vet records. My last name. His first name. Somehow he's a registered voter now. Called the county clerk. Me: My cat got summoned for jury duty. Clerk: Is the name correct on the summons? Me: Yes, but he's a cat. Clerk: Is Felix Martinez a legal resident of this county? Me: He's a legal cat. Clerk: Sir, if the name matches our records, he needs to appear or file an exemption. Me: He can't file anything. He has paws. Clerk: You can file on his behalf. Me: Under what exemption? There's no box for "is a cat." Clerk: (pause) Check "unable to serve due to medical reasons." Me: What's the medical reason? Clerk: He's a cat. Me: That's not a medical condition. Clerk: It is if it prevents him from serving. Sent in the form. Got rejected two weeks later. "Insufficient documentation. Please provide medical professional's statement." Took the letter to my vet. Me: I need you to write that my cat can't do jury duty. Vet: Why is your cat summoned for jury duty? Me: Excellent question. No good answer. Vet: This is the weirdest request I've gotten. Me: Can you just write that he's medically unfit to serve? Vet: On what grounds? Me: He's a cat. Vet: (started typing) "Patient is unable to serve due to species-related limitations including inability to speak, read, or comprehend legal proceedings." Me: Perfect. Sent it in. Got another rejection. "Summons is mandatory. Failure to appear will result in contempt of court." My roommate thought this was hilarious. Roommate: Felix is going to jail. Me: This is serious. Roommate: Bring him to court. See what happens. Decided that was actually the only option left. Day of jury duty, put Felix in his carrier. Brought the entire paper trail of rejection letters. Checked in at the courthouse. Clerk: Name? Me: Felix Martinez. Clerk: (looked at the cat carrier) Is that Felix? Me: Yes. Clerk: (long stare) He's a cat. Me: I've been saying that for six weeks. Clerk: Why didn't you file an exemption? Me: I filed three. All rejected. Showed her the letters. She read through them, expression shifting from confusion to disbelief. Clerk: Someone rejected the veterinary documentation? Me: Twice. Clerk: (called her supervisor over) You need to see this. Supervisor read everything. Looked at Felix. Looked at me. Supervisor: How did a cat get registered to vote? Me: You tell me. Supervisor: This is a data error. Me: Took you six weeks to figure that out. They dismissed Felix immediately. Apologized for the inconvenience. Supervisor: We'll remove him from the voter registry. Me: Appreciate it. Supervisor: (pause) Out of curiosity, how would he have voted? Me: Probably whatever party supports universal treats. Got a formal apology letter a week later and a voter registration card. For me this time. Apparently I wasn't registered, but my cat was. Roommate: Felix committed voter fraud. Me: Felix committed nothing. He's innocent. Roommate: That's what they all say. Felix is sleeping on the jury summons now. Fitting end to his legal career. end id]
Don't leave your friends and even acquaintances to go to the hospital alone. If they don't have someone already going with them and don't explicitly tell you they don't want you there, go to advocate for them. Outcomes for sick people change dramatically when they have someone else there to observe doctors (making them know they can't get away with negligence) and note symptoms from an outside perspective.
Going to the hospital is scary and even someone totally unprepared to be a medical advocate or physical support will be better than nothing, purely from their presence. You can grab food, be there with your phone to search if theirs dies, go in search of a doctor, distract them from pain or discomfort... go with them.
perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night
this is what i mean
Via @bulbaderp
To be clear, THIS is how nights of the future should be lit
This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.
orange and especially white lights deter bats and prevent them from reaching feeding grounds at nighttime. Please if you can, write to your local council and encourage red street lights!!!!
ALSO! red light doesn’t fuck up human night vision much so you can go in and out of lit areas without readjusting
the red light not fucking up human night vision is also why a number of older cars had gauges that lit up red at night
i legit miss red lights in cars and appliances n stuff. red city lighting is goated
