I haven't had anything in my decription for so long, but all these bots are forcing my hand. So here's my disclaimer, I am a real human person, I just don't come to tumblr to interact with people.
if you keep stepping on somebody's toes for a long time at minimum they're probably going to start really hating you and at maximum you might cause them lasting damage.
if you do it on purpose you're a dick. if it's on accident but you keep doing it that person is still going to be mad at you because you don't care enough to try not to step on their toes
if you give a grovelling begging apology after accidentally stepping on somebody's toes one time you're going to make the whole thing awkward, but not giving a quick "sorry" before moving on is still kind of rude.
If you're an American with a disability who receives government assistance, you likely qualify for an ABLE account, or you may starting next
The age of eligibility for an ABLE account, allowing USAmerican disabled people to save up money without losing their government assistance for having “too much,” is going to go up to cover disabilities diagnosed by age 46 (currently it’s age 26), meaning a much larger number of people will be able to access them. As the article notes, many Americans don’t know these accounts exist, let alone whether they or someone they care for could qualify for one, so please share this information around.
It seems to me it would obviously be better if the “no more than $2000 a month” limit were simply removed and disabled people could have whatever savings accounts they chose, but this is heaps better than nothing.
I don't need the chatgpt random algorithm to write emails for me because I already have a custom and 100% flawless algorithm called "writing the exact same three emails with the names changed"
#1: "hi [landlord], hope you're doing well! [apartment thing] is [broken/a problem]. we need it [fixed/replaced/handled] by [date]. let us know when you'll send someone over so we can be here to let them in. thanks so much, [op]"
#2: "hi [professor], hope you're doing well! unfortunately, I'm [sick/stuck at work/dead] and won't be able to submit [assignment] by [due date]. could I please have an extension? if not, is there anything else I could do to make up this credit? thanks so much, [op]"
#3: "hi [customer service person], hope you're doing well! unfortunately, [product] [didn't arrive/is broken/wrong color/gave me a rash/poisoned my crops] and I'd like to receive a [refund/replacement]. here is the documentation of the order and photos of [broken thing/wrong thing/my rash/dead crops]. thanks so much, [op]"
Writing an email is so easy and I will tell you how it's done. This is the advice is for everyone with an email job, but you can apply it to normal human interaction.
The FIRST SENTENCE is the thing you want the recipient to do. Do not make them guess.
I want to let you know about ... (This email is to inform someone of something not to ask them to do anything)
Could you please do ... (This is a request. You want them to do something).
I'm looking into x and wondering if you can help me (this is also a request but for information instead of an action).
People do not want to read an email and even if they do read it, most people are skimming and not interested. Tell them what you want first, then provide context or other information (when you need a thing is often key). If the email is informational, you can even add "you don't need to do anything, this is just to keep you informed!" People will appreciate not having to figure out what you want from them.
If you can't articulate what you want the recipient to do with the message, you are not ready to email them. I read too many emails where I have no idea what the person wants from me.
Put the most important thing first and everyone will be impressed! AI cannot do this for you because it can't tell what's important! Only you know that, which is why you must write your own emails.
to everyone who wants help with emails: go through the notes of this post. there are ideas I've never thought of and plenty of scripts for all kinds of situations/jobs
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
"You know what's harder than Getting Better? Living Like That" is just the thesis for my whole shit going on right now honestly. You know what's harder than doing my physical therapy? Hurting All The Time. You know what's harder than addressing my gender dysphoria? Hurting All The Time
I'm Doing The Hard Thing and it's *easier* than how I was living before. If you make yourself feel better you will have more energy to spend on Getting Better. Nice inch nails - the upward spiral. Crawl out of your grave Thursday
And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly
so today a public health official guy came into my class to give a lecture on disaster awareness and he was talking about house fires and mentioned that the reason people most likely die during a house fire is because they refuse to leave their pet inside or they go back to get their pet. and right when he said this my friend immediately turned his head and looked at me and in that moment I had the most complete and genuine acceptance take over my body. I would 100% in front of my family and Jesus himself walk straight back into some raging inferno that was once my house to go get my fat cat. I nodded back
the best part of this post is reading all the tags from animal people who would also go back to save their pets. like no hesitation. walk backwards from heaven straight back into hell. someone even said they would go back for their fish. amazing
If you are a person who would walk into a blazing inferno for your animal, and your pet has free movement around the house, here’s a training exercise that could help save you both:
1) Set off your smoke alarm or play the sound on your phone (if your home has no smoke alarms, pease get some!)
2) stand BY THE FRONT DOOR to hand out treats
Do this a couple times and then keep it up NO EXCEPTIONS. Accidentally set the alarm off cooking? Treats by the door. Smoke alarm sound on TV? Treats by the door. Changing your smoke alarm batteries twice a year like you’re supposed to? Give them a test run and your pets get treats by the door.
Most dogs and cats will clue in VERY quickly that hearing that specific sound means go to the front door and wait for treats.
If there’s an emergency and even if you leave by another way, you will still know the most likely place your pet(s) is and can direct first responders to help.
You can also do this for any other kind of emergency alarm. My friend had both her cats trained to go to the front door for a tsunami siren.
(7/30/26) The Red Cross just declared the second US blood crisis in its history.
Summer sees both a drop off in donations and, at least for our trauma center, a spike in traumas. Trauma centers across the US are in danger of running out of blood for our trauma patients TODAY, which is very scary but, unlike much of the other scary national news coming across our screens these days, is something you can help fix immediately and directly.
We need ASAP donations of blood, for people to spread the word, and for manager types to help facilitate others' donations. All blood types are needed, but universal donor blood (type O) is especially dire.
would you look at that, fandom.com has started adding completely content-blocking popups to their page that totally prevent you from using the site unless you turn ad block off.
it sure would be a shame if people went to their URL bar and typed "anti" in front of "fandom.com" in order to go to the antifandom.com mirror of the page they were trying to reach, which shows all the same content but without any ads,
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
Sometimes I think about my old manager at work who, in order to prove that the organisation was safe for trans people, told me about a fellow trans employee—a woman who was passing! who wasn’t out to me or to anyone else!—and about how chill everyone in management had been about her needing to take time off TO GET VAGINOPLASTY. He was not her manager! He was not her friend! He did not work in HR! There was no way he could have come into this PRIVATE MEDICAL INFORMATION without being told by another manager who had gossiped. And even if there had been, why the fuck was it any of my business!
Likewise, a friend of mine was just told by a school principal about how a prospective school was safe for trans kids… because a trans girl whose parents don’t affirm her at home is able to be affirmed at school. This information about this child’s gender and home environment was relayed along with her FUCKING GRADE LEVEL. This incredibly vulnerable kid was wheeled out as a selling point by the school with way more than enough information to figure out who she was.
In order to make the argument that a place is safe for trans people, cis people are wayyyy too happy to give out private information about trans people. With allies like these, who needs enemies!!!
If you are the recipient of this kind of "and here is another trans person" information leak (ESPECIALLY when it outs a trans woman!!) it's imperative that you come down on it like the divine fist of God. We should shame these little weasels like trans lives depend on it (because they might). Might I suggest:
"I'm not sure I'm comfortable about having been told so much."
"I'm sorry, but that all sounded very private."
"And has she given approval for her medical history to be used as an example?"
"How do you know it's safe to tell me this?" (if the answer is 'because you are trans' then that is its own Massive Problem)
"Does (school) always share private information about trans students with prospective parents?"
"So, will you share my personal information like this?"
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
so christopher nolan drilled into an active historical site to rig a scene, dumped a bunch of plastic skeletons into the ocean with no plan to fish them out, and ruined an actual Viking ship on loan from sweden and refuses to pay for damages. all for that garbage movie.
Swedish nonprofit alleges cost to repair replica was $6,000 but Universal – which made $264m on film’s opening weekend – has not stumped up
Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close | www.italianinsider.it
looking for a news outlet to pick up the archeologist drama over this but you can google the practical effects used for the cyclops and find the pictures pretty easily
Hi im a librarian amd that's not now this works. If a library allows you to have a digital card and not live in the area, you are NOT taking away resources from other people, that's not how anything works. Please keep doing it!!! The more people that use our services, the more money we can get from funding sources!!! Please use us!!! We are not utilized enough, by people in or out of our community. Thanks.
If you were taking resources away from patrons in the local community then the virtual anywhere card wouldn't be offered. Or it would be discontinued once it became a problem. Trust me, libraries are very on top of trimming the budget whenever and wherever they can so resources get optimized. No library is creating any kind of resource and then going "wow we hope people don't use this!"
(Not a librarian but am library staff. If you want credentials.)
I think arguments like "everyone loves gnc girls until we transition" is correct in identifying (temporary) preference but wrong about the conclusion. These bigots HATE gnc women, it's just preferable to being a man. Easier to keep in line. Bigots love to suddenly "love" a lot of groups when they can use them to reel you back in.
Bigots will throw binary trans people at nonbinary trans people. They don't love binary trans people, they don't wish you were binary trans, they wish you were a step closer to "normal" until they move the goalposts again.
"everyone loves tomboys" they fuckin loaaathe tomboys, but if they can convince you you're not trans, you're really a gnc girl, then they've got you back to "girl" and then they can go after the GNC part next.
There isn't an actual hierarchy in gender minorityship where ones are championed and others are loathed. They just know that 1. if you think each other are enemies you'll help tear each other down 2. if you moved back closer to their goal they can move you again because it's not about your specific path of gender transgression, the transgression itself IS their problem
you can be a trans man, trans woman, nonbinary person, xeno stargender, multigender, gnc man or woman, or just a person who identifies with cisheteronormativity but is getting flagged anyway because hyperscruitiny encourages us to find why someone doesnt belong
A cishet girl cutting her hair short gets immediately investigated for being gay or trans, we don't gotta pretend there is some threshold where True Minorities exist and others are permanently safe from scrutiny
