Awkward Lurking

Here for the hot takes

[venndaai]

have you guys heard about the greenland shark. some crazy shit happening there.

[venndaai]

they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.

their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.

longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years

toxic flesh

has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.

lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion

largest genome of any shark

eats everything including moose and polar bears

ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you

[fluorescentbrains]

this post prompted me to refresh my memory on Greenland Shark Facts and this detail about how they feed goes so hard

just vacuuming up their unsuspecting prey. whole !

[muffinlance]

Good news good news good news! Recent research suggests the eye parasites do NOT blind them!

Eye-opening research: Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk sits in her office, eyes fixed on the computer monitor in front of her. "You see it move its eye," says the UC Ir

I <3 you a normal amount Greenland sharks

[soapdispensersalesman]

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

[zevveli]

StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.

[redpandarascal]

stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.

[musashi]

bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.

[lesbiassoon]

mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

[no-one-offical]

‎

[totally-cis-offical]

I used to love take me to a useless website

[missstrogen]

Tumblr Staff, after making a half hearted apology for mass banning trans women, has just today mass banned trans women a second time

I don't have exact numbers yet, but at least twenty users were terminated at the same exact time, recieving an "internally generated report" refusing to declare reason for the ban. I quote, "Upon review of your account we have determined that it does not align with our terms of service". No reason given, this was clearly a deliberate action by staff as they themselves claim

Tumblr staff is currently mass banning trans women again. Make them know this is unnaceptable

[quasi-normalcy]

So what I think is that there's this default belief in patriarchy that men are superior to women and therefore the "masculine" sphere is superior to the "feminine" sphere. And so, as feminists have fought to expand the number of allowable female activities, men (on the aggregate over generations) have retreated from those activities because they're now seen as "feminine", and so partaking in them is incommensurate with their belief in their own superiority. And, unfortunately, as this has progressed, this has resulted in a lot of men sectioning themselves off from, frankly, everything that actually makes being alive worthwhile. It's a misery spiral, and the only way out is to abandon male supremacy.

[quasi-normalcy]

#men gave up deep friendships and reading and poetry and colourful fashion#all things that used to be considered manly in the 19th century#they're currently giving up on studying law and medecine#it's so stupid and sad

(I mean, the colourful fashion was more of an eighteenth century thing, but yeah)

[quasi-normalcy]

#more women in higher education meaning fewer men is incredibly depressing to me. funny in a sad way#what happens when women will finally get into trades? will they just stop working

[sherryzade]

spectacular tags from @luesmainblog

[alarajrogers]

I call this "subtractive masculinity". If masculinity consists of What Is Not For Women, then every time some new domain is opened up to women, it's subtracted from masculinity, leaving men with less and less they can do and be. So now toxic masculinity, the form of masculinity that practices subtractive masculinity, is all about being as gross and unlikeable and unfuckable as possible because those are traits women don't generally want to have.

Which makes those women who argue for women's right to be repulsive little goblins a threat to these guys; if women got to be gross and unlikeable too, what would be left for these men to be?

[novella-november]

If you are on a Windows 11 computer, pause everything you are doing for one minute and:

Open computer settings

Click on Accessibility on the left-hand menu

Scroll down the Accessibility menu and click on the Keyboard Option

Under the "related settings" tab, click "Typing" which should have a description of "spellcheck, autocorrect, text suggestions."

Turn off the AI "correct misspelled words"

and most importantly: turn off Typing Insights.

[ID: a screenshot of the above mentioned Windows 11 settings, showing that Typing Insights is now turned off, with the following description from Microsoft: "Windows is using artificial intelligence to help you type To help you save time and type efficiently, Windows can learn to suggest words, autocorrect spelling mistakes, and interpret swiped typing. Take a look at the insights below to see up-to-the-minute stats on how Windows has learned to improve typing for you. These stats are stored only on this device and Microsoft does not collect the typing insights data." End ID]

"But Mx. November, it says right there Microsoft doesn't collect the typing insights data!"

I mean, yeah, it says that..... for *now.*

It also only specifies that Microsoft themselves don't collect it, and they wouldn't have made this something that I was automatically, secretly opted in for without my knowledge if they didn't have something to be gained by me not knowing it exists!

I only found this because a cat walked on the keyboard and turned on Filter Keys and while trying to figure out why my keyboard was just making chirping noises instead of typing, I happened to click on "typing insights" by accident.

Generative AI, and especially AI that is used to "personalize" and track your activity across the web and on your computer are never going to be in your best interest, it is always going to serve these companies in whatever way will line their pockets the most, and all it takes is updating their terms of service once, and then all of that data they promised they weren't collecting suddenly all belongs to them.

[surrealtiktoks]

[twinklecupcake]

Magical girl who had wanted to be one so badly but never had that magical mascot/mentor encounter so she summoned a demon to contract with instead.

It's not a dark story or anything, the magical girl is just as cute and cheery and friendly as factory standard and never loses that faith and optimism, she's just Pact-bound to a frightening demon from the underworld instead of a cute teddy bear mouse.

[twinklecupcake]

“What if he’s manipulating her to evil-“ No.

“What if she needs to eat souls to survive-“ No.

“What if she becomes horrified with what she’s becoming-“ No.

[writingamongther0ses]

Demon being viewed as weird for making a pact with a cute, cheery schoolgirl.

At every demon party where they show off their pacted there's evil, terrible, and frighteningly beautiful and then there's this teenager in a cute magical girl dress.

[pb-dot]

"I don't get you Goragog." "Listen, it's nice. Just nice! Can't things be nice? Is it a sin for things to be nice?" "No and that's part of the problem..." "You're just jealous Samantha created a "bffs forever" blingee with me. When was the last time one of your warlocks did something like that for you?" "*on the verge of tears* it's been DECADES!"

[twinklecupcake]

Meanwhile on the other side of the room...

"So what do you get in exchange? I get eternal youth and beauty."

"Yeah, and I get all my enemies smited."

"And my guy gave me immeasurable wealth. What'chu got, kid?"

"This super cute compact! Isn't it pretty? The heart-shaped jewels are so sparkly, and the mirror is always spotless!"

"...."

"And since we're pactbound, we're basically roomies now, so I also get a cool best friend and sleepovers on weekends!"

"...."

"Oh, and I also got my magical powers, of course."

[aroaceauri]

Er'trian, Harbinger of Eternal Night, Defender of the Shrieking Chasm, and Lord of Eight Furies stared at eir favorite rival in confusion.

"But it's a pact," ey said. "A deal. An exchange is built in! You can't just Bestow Magical Powers for nothing in return. So what are you getting out of this, Goragog???"

Goragog's dark eyes wept their endless ichor. A halo of eldritch nightmares flickered around his head. With deliberate slowness he turned to meet Er'trian's accursed gaze.

"The power of friendship."

[digitalchristian]

[discodeerdiary]

I still think that a key function of the way we think of the concepts "adult" and "child" is to separate the human population into "people who deserve autonomy but no protection" and "people who deserve protection but no autonomy" and in the process dehumanize both groups of people. We ignore the fact that all people need both autonomy and protection, and that our society could easily be set up to provide everyone a healthy mix of both.

[discodeerdiary]

And to be honest much of what we label as "protection" for children and "autonomy" for adults is merely the appearance of such. We act as if dictating what children are allowed to say, think, or feel is a form of care, and as if cutting away all social safety nets for adults is a form of empowerment.

[void-milf]

fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

[void-milf]

the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity.  make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged.  and strike. attack.

[37womenwieldingknives]

YES i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word. above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that

[afraidofamericans]

This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data

[queeranarchism]

Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.

[anarchopuppy]

Ooh I know this one!

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me

@afraidofamericans

[mayflower-gal]

Boy it SURE would be a SHAME if this were SPREAD AROUND for everyone TO SEE

[oysters-aint-for-me]

[jellogram]

Southern California Republicans are possibly the stupidest people alive. They'll get mad at liberals for hating America and scream "If you don't like it, then leave!" and then bitch for ten bazillion years about how much California is a communist hellscape. Imagine moving to a border region that is famous for its Mexican culture, and that used to actually be Mexico until pretty recently, and then getting mad that there's a lot of Mexicans there. You are paying outrageous taxes and housing fees to live in a place that you openly despise, where you think half the population are evil rapist immigrants. There's no hope for you, you have to either kill yourself or move to Idaho

[bliss-bliss-bliss-bliss]

Here in California, our Republicans are like housecats: they see themselves as these capable, self-sufficient apex predators who could survive an apocalypse by killing their own food and eviscerating anyone who displeases them... but in reality, they're completely dependent for every aspect of their survival on a complex and interconnected system of cooperation that they aren't aware of, don't understand, and contribute nothing to

[fulminata2]

When you pick up a sword for the first time you will be slow and awkward. This is frustrating, but refuse the temptation to try and become a “faster” fencer. Chasing after speed is like trying to catch smoke. If you try and pursue speed, all you will accomplish is haste. Haste is the enemy of 1st class fencing.

Speed is a lie the untrained mind tells itself when it sees an action it cannot follow. The truth is a combination of timing, control, and fluidity. Fluid motion, even done slowly, will always arrive before a hasty strike. Control will allow you to move without wasteful motion that will slow you down. Timing will eliminate the need to move fast almost entirely. There is no need to get somewhere fast so long as you get there at the right time.  

[auckie]

Tip for mymutuals who engage in bladed armed combat

[plasmalogical]

signal boost

[friends-fam-fiends-hellothere]

This is true for plenty of other things too!! When you’re learning anything that involves moving your body, don’t forget that quality of movement is more important than speed!

[reading-by-the-pale-moonlight]

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast

[antiobjecttaskforce]

THEYRE LYING JUMP AT YOUR OPPONENT JUMPSCARE JUMPSCARE BACK FOOT FORWARD AND LEAP AT THEM!!

send them to HELL!!!

[hymnism]

making a collection

[putridghost]

Wait I have more

[acemingo]

[jabberding0]

Ancient technology

[un-monstre]

Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.

[un-monstre]

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

[jimmythejiver]

Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:

[jethroq]

dialectics

[deadseacorpse]

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Fellas, is it counter revolutionary to eat.

[biglawbear]

This is a reminder that any insane extreme position can be couched in progressive sounding language to try and persuade you of its validity, even positions that are totally contrary

[imyourbadjew]

[cuprohastes]

Only Sith deal in absolutes.

Any random who claims that their pet theory is the only truth is an authoritarian and is functionally identical to a fascist in personality and with regards to how much of a nightmare they’d be to have to live with.

[shadowgremlin]

My wife’s idea of decompressing after the busy holiday was to rearrange every piece of furniture in our home is this an ADHD thing or just a her thing

I’m not complaining the way she’s done it is much better than it was it’s just like how is this your idea of a relaxing weekend

[kaity--did]

Listen I don't get to decide when the drunk elf that is my executive actually does the functioning but when he does we have a SMALL WINDOW OF TIME before he finds the schnapps again and we're done

[honeysbunchesofoats]

[kaity--did]

yes this exactly

[luminouspica]

So to me, there are spoons (general energy cost) and carnival tickets (specific energy cost).

Spoons can be used pretty much anywhere.

Carnival tickets are only good for the carnival, and it’s only in town for a limited amount of time.

So like, if I get “kitchen cleaning” carnival tickets, I can’t use that to clean my bedroom, that’s not where the carnival is.

[lingonberry24]

phrase added to permanent vocabulary

[7crowsinadress]

If you’re a USAmerican and rightfully horrified by what the government is doing right now, I just want to rq share 5calls. They have a really simple tool for finding your reps and contacting them, as well as a variety of scripts for anyone not confident speaking off book. Emails can be filtered out, phone calls, voicemails, and physical letters are much harder to ignore. Calling your reps isn’t the end all be all of anti-war action, but it’s a place to start while you process what the fuck just happened.

5 Calls

Spend 5 minutes. Make 5 calls. Make your voice heard.