Amuse Me

[animentality]

[neil-gaiman]

Hullo Mr. Gaiman,

This question is about how you approach ‘Audience’

When I was in art school our profs would ask us “who is this for?” or “who is your audience?” besides being kind of annoying and vaguely sounding like a question asked by a team of marketing directors I’ve remained a bit haunted by the proverbial Audience. Over the years, and after following your work I often find myself asking this question and being interested in knowing your thoughts on the subject of audience. How do you think being aware of your fans/ audience (especially now with social media) has affected your art making?

All good things to you and yours.

(Happily waiting to see Good Omens S2)

I mostly write for the same audience I've always written for. Me. Or a version of me in an alternate universe who hasn't read this story, or a version of me who is 10 years old, or a version of me who is hoping to read more of a story. I know what I like. I don't know what anyone else likes, and if I try and guess I'll probably guess wrong.

[thoughtkick]

“Just because you took longer than others doesn’t mean you failed. Remember that.”

— Unknown

[dankmemeuniversity]

[mayfriend]

king i think it is not fucking sufficient at all. wolftopia or bust

[anxiouscryptid]

Also Wolftopia is gorgeous by the way

[lierdumoa]

Wolftopia is nearly the size of Saturn and orbits two stars that closely orbit each other!

[modmad]

Wolftopia is OPALESCENT are you KIDDING ME

[weirdcultstuff]

To myself, raised in an environment that glorified and romanticized restriction and suffering:

There is no victory in skipping dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, or morning coffee, or dessert.

There is no victory in refusing heaters and air conditioners and fans and heated blankets.

There is no victory in denying yourself sleep, or showers, or movement, or water, or a comfortable bed, or taking the elevator vs. the stairs.

There is no victory in refusing pain meds and heating pads and ice packs and medical help.

There is no victory in punishing yourself needlessly, in telling yourself that this pain you feel is because you are bad to the core and deserve it.

There is no victory in choking back your laughter and your tears, to keep an imagined equilibrium of safety that is really just a dry, cracked, empty, endless emotional desert.

You are here. You are in this body, and this body is yours. You deserve good things. You are alive, and that is messy and loud, and messy and loud are okay.

It’s okay to live abundantly. It’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to indulge. This paralysis of self-punishment, self-restriction, self-loathing is not healthy or good for you.

[themoonluvr-deactivated20241223]

one thing i have been trying to teach myself lately is that i am enough whenever. i am always, all the time enough. i am enough when i don’t like myself, i am enough when i don’t look presentable, i am enough when i’m not ready to face my demons. you don’t have to do certain things such as working out 5x a week, journal and meditate every night or be good at school to be enough and worthy of love. whatever state you are in right now is enough. you are deserving of a relationship, a good life and everything else at any given time.

[springflwer]

My heart 💔

[men-in-knights]

Idk why

[men-in-knights]

Sound on!

[ceekbee]

[itsloudinmyhead]

March - it even sounds bossy😈

March – it even sounds bossy😈

Is your brain screaming ¼ of this year is almost gone? Is your list of responsibilities and goals getting longer instead of shorter? Are you feeling suffocated or maybe stuck? I am! I feel like I’m losing or getting way behind. But that’s just my Mind Monster being an a**hole. I learned a valuable lesson about how to get my MM to shut up. I simply had to do nothing. That’s right, nothing. Let me…

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[anxietyproblem]

[freshfurygardener]

15 ways to manage stress according to scientists

[itsloudinmyhead]

“What Do You See?” Personality Test – Valentine’s Day Edition 💖

Take a look at the above drawing? I mean really look at it. What do you see? If you answered Cupid: CONGRATULATIONS! You see a cherubic angel who will ping you with an arrow intended for your heart and you still believe in love. I’m so proud of you! Now you can move along this article isn’t for you. If you answered An Armed Naked Baby: You ain’t wrong. I’m sorry you’ve been hurt. I’ve been…

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[guerrillatech]

[annoyingalchemist]

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

[commiemartyrshighschool]

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

[brokenmachine3553]

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

[white-throated-packrat]

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

[ralfmaximus]

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

[smute]

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

[hotvampireadjacent]

Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7

Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.

[commiemartyrshighschool]

To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.

[blackwoolncrown]

Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:

These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.

[only-tiktoks]

[witchesbe-like]

When I first started reading tarot I had all these reservations and newbie mistakes that I sometimes made for YEARS. Don’t be like me, learn how to read tarot, be confident and understand that the good comes with the bad. And you’ll be an expert tarot reader in no time. 

Tarot is a tool for YOUR intuition - I don’t know why, but this really didn’t resonate with me right away. I would second guess, re-read, and not use my intuition when interpreting  the cards. In the end that cause some really inaccurate readings then if I would have just used tarot as a tool to grow my own intuition and spiritual feeling. 

Don’t stress read - I know I know we all do it. Madly shuffle the cards then start pulling whenever things start to go array. Let me be the first to tell you that is not an accurate reading. That is just you stressing out pulling cards in a fury that will only lead to more stress. 

Take time to meditate and clear your mind beforehand - Don’t come into a reading with a cloudy head. If you really want to get a good read, spend a few minutes clearing your mind before you shuffle your deck. 

There are no bad readings - I repeat, there are no bad readings. Even horrible tower falling outcomes are just the start to something new and better. If you do get an outcome from a tarot spread that is less than favorable breath and take it one day at a time. 

There are also no bad tarot cards - Just like there are no bad readings, there are no bad cards. Endings are just beginnings in reverse. So even if your BFF is stabbing you in the back with the 5 of Swords, don’t worry it’s just your spirits getting rid of them for you. 

Get to know your decks beforehand - Each deck sometimes has a little personality. Spend some time with them, know them, see how they read for you before you jump in with all the important stuff. 

Meditate with cards you feel drawn towards - Do you really vibe with the High Priestess? Or maybe it’s The Hermit for you. These cards could be your archetype. Pull them out, meditate, feel their answers and seek guidance from them. 

Take breaks from reading - I am a huge advocate from taking a break from tarot. Sometimes you need to change it up, put it down or just step away for a few days or a year. Whatever it is take time away if and whenever you feel the need to. 

Use tarot as a tool for manifesting - Ask questions, lots and lots of questions about different outcomes. If you don’t like the outcome, change your question or change your mind and ask again. Once you get the desired results stick to it. 

Don’t read for free, but practice - I see so many new tarot readers reading for free online. Don’t do it! Your time is precious and if someone wants a free reading, they can lean it themselves. 

Don’t skip knowing your shadow self in a reading - One of the best things you can do is learn exactly who you are, and you can’t do that without knowing all the parts of yourself you’ve rejected. Use the tarot to get to know yourself in the shadows too. 

The cards never lie - Never. Ever. 

Reshuffling won’t bypass a reading you didn’t like - Don’t get yourself trapped into ‘clarity’ cards. That’s shuffling and asking the same question again and again for clarity, or until you get the answer to the question you want. Sure ask for clarity ONCE when you don’t really understand, but don’t ask again and again just to see what you want. 

Don’t wait to start tarot - If you feel called to read tarot, start now! You don’t have to wait for someone to gift you a deck (who started that bad rumor anyway?!) 

Confidence is key - This also took me a long time to ‘get’. Read with confidence. You are a badass witch. You have stepped outside to do so much spiritual growth, why would your card reading reflect any different? 

Your tarot reading is not the end all be all - Tarot is subjective, not prophecy. So change your mind and change your future. Nothing is set in stone.