Kat, a log of chaos @katalogofchaos - Tumblr Blog

Trail cam catching a deer fawn with the zoomies

U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.

likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015

Dan Hays - Colorado Snow Effect (2008) - Oil on canvas

anapplepie

when programs fucking autocorrect <3 to ❤️ and :) to 😃,,,, do you have any idea what you’ve just done?? what you just fucking destroyed ?

sufficientlylargen

A) It's irritating when systems turn lovely ascii art into crude little pictograms, and

😎 It's even more frustrating when you weren't actually trying to make an emoji.

thetalkingcow

Medieval Scooby

thedreadvampy

An Ich wōld goÞ awai with-al, wer't non for hērte meddelende youÞen!

sirfrogsworth

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.

jenroses

Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because... he liked wearing eyeliner. That's it. he had a girlfriend. He's still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.

And later learned that a number of people I'd known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.

vaspider

Kids started calling me a "lesbo" on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became "boy crazy" as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn't a dyke.

It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for "girls." Ha ha, it's funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.

That's my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.

Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn't.

wolfinthethorns

If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss "homosexually" (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn't an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).

Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.

Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as "a lesbian with a man's body" and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female "transvestites" didn't exist, so I guess I couldn't feel like that? Painfully.

So why didn't you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren't getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.

katalogofchaos

I started highschool in 1996. My sophomore year (second year) a classmate showed up one day wearing a wig and makeup, and told us her name was Michelle and she was a girl.

I went to a small school in a large district, and students had some say in which highschool they ended up in. (There was a ranked choice system, and you'd be placed at one of your top 3 choices). To choose my school, you were supposed to visit for a day to see what it was like. What it was like was there were a lot of weird kids, the sort who might get beat up at other schools. And so it attracted a lot of weird kids, the sort who might get beat up at other schools.

In my time there, I can recall several students who were openly not straight, but as a bunch of teens in the 90s we didn't have the best understanding of our possibilities, or language for talking about them. I don't think most of us knew what to make of Michelle, because we didn't know the word "transgender". I remember thinking of her as being in drag, because that's a thing I knew about. It was ok to dress in drag at my school, but I'm not sure Michelle didn't still get made fun of, even if she wasn't at risk of getting jumped in the bathroom. I didn't have a class with her, and I think she transferred out the next year.

My point is this, even at the school that was a safe space for queer kids, the culture of the 90s made it hard for a trans kid to come out and for their peers to be supportive, because we didn't have any good way to understand or talk about what it meant for someone to say "actually, I'm a girl"

So you can imagine at other schools no one would even risk exploring it, lest Heather and her friends decide to make your life a living hell.

meremalice

slumdundermifflinaire

AVENGE ME HAMLET FOR I WAS KILLED BY YOUR UNCLE, AND MY BROTHER

thedaisiestdaisy

A MOST FOWL AND UNNATURAL MURDER

thecollectibles

Environment sketches: Blue by Olga Romanova

despazito

i think about this often

plaguedocboi

Ok y’all brace yourselves cuz I just learned about a new animal

Yes, that is an animal. Yes, scientists refer to it as the purple sock worm. No, that’s not it’s real name, silly, it’s real name is Xenoturbella!

When these deep-sea socks were first discovered, no one knew what the fuck they were looking at (and, really, can you blame them?). They have no eyes, brains, or digestive tracts. They are literally just a bag of wet slop. DNA analysis initially seemed to indicate that they were related to mollusks, until the scientists realized that DNA sample was from the clams they had recently eaten (yes, they can eat with no organs. We don’t know how.)

Scientists then analyzed the data again and tentatively placed them in the group that includes acorn worms, saying that their ancestors probably had eyes, brains, and organs, but simplified as a response to their deep sea ecosystems.

Later DNA testing has since shown that they are their own thing! Xenoturbella, along with another simple and problematic to place creature called acoelomorphs, belong to their own phylum called Xenacelomorpha! This places them as the sister group to all bilateral animals. So, they just never evolved brains, eyes, or organs. They are a glimpse at a very primitive form of animal that never bothered to change, because apparently what they do works. Rock on, purple sock worm.

gallusrostromegalus

Real "Luigi Wins By Doing Nothing" animal here.

assortedinsanities

Couple of corrections: they are bilateral animals. However they are in their own phylum together with just one other group of animals. They also do have some organs, one that gives the animal a sense of balance and another one called Stempell's organ that likely senses the contraction of a muscle.

And in case you wonder how they consume things and breathe without a digestive system or lung, they do it via a central cavity.

liliiiith

‘ur quiet’ i am gatekeeping my personality from u

fatehbaz

Good question:

In the United States, many jails and prisons can and will charge you money for every single night that you spend imprisoned, for the entire duration of your incarceration, as if you were being billed for staying at a hotel. Even if you are incarcerated for years. Adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. What happens when you’re released?

In response to this:

—

So.

You’re getting charged, like, ten dollars every time you even submit a request form to possibly be seen by a doctor or dentist.

You’re getting charged maybe five dollars for ten minutes on the phone.

Any time a friend or family tries to send you like five dollars so that you can buy some toothpaste or lotion, or maybe a snack from the commissary since you’re diabetic and the “meals” have left you malnourished, maybe half of that money gets taken as a “service fee” by the corporate contractor that the prison uses to manage your pre-paid debit card. So you’re already losing money every day just by being there.

What happens if you can’t pay?

In some places, after serving just a couple of years for drugs charges, almost 20 years after being released, the state can still hunt you down for over $80,000 that you “owe” as if it were a per-night room-and-board accommodations charge, like this recent highly-publicized case in Connecticut:

Excerpt:

Two decades after her release from prison, [TB] feels she is still being punished. When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed $83,762 to cover the cost of her 2 ½ year imprisonment for drug crimes. […] “I’m about to be homeless,” said [TB], 58, who in March [2022] became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state law that charges prisoners $249 a day for the cost of their incarceration. […] All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars […]. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. Efforts have been underway in some places to scale back or eliminate such policies. Two states — Illinois and New Hampshire — have repealed their laws since 2019. […] Pay-to-stay laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s, said Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California who is leading a study of the practice. […] Connecticut used to collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison […].

Text by: Pat Eaton-Robb. “At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt.” AP News / The Associated Press. 27 August 2022.

—

Look at this:

To help her son, Cindy started depositing between $50 to $100 a week into Matthew’s account, money he could use to buy food from the prison commissary, such as packaged ramen noodles, cookies, or peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches. Cindy said sending that money wasn’t necessarily an expense she could afford. “No one can,” she said. So far in the past month, she estimates she sent Matthew close to $300. But in reality, he only received half of that amount. The balance goes straight to the prison to pay off the $1,000 in “rent” that the prison charged Matthew for his prior incarceration. […] A PA Post examination of six county budgets (Crawford, Dauphin, Lebanon, Lehigh, Venango and Indiana) showed that those counties’ prisons have collected more than $15 million from inmates — almost half is for daily room and board fees that are meant to cover at least a portion of the costs with housing and food. Prisoners who don’t work are still expected to pay. If they don’t, their bills are sent to collections agencies, which can report the debts to credit bureaus. […] Between 2014 and 2017, the Indiana County Prison — which has an average inmate population of 87 people — collected nearly $3 million from its prisoners. In the past five years, Lebanon’s jail collected just over $2 million in housing and processing fees.

Text by: Joseph Darius Jaafari. “Paying rent to your jailers: Inmates are billed millions of dollars for their stays in Pa. prisons.” WHYY (PBS). 10 December 2019. Originally published at PA Post.

—

Pay-to-stay, the practice of charging people to pay for their own jail or prison confinement, is being enforced unfairly by using criminal, civil and administrative law, according to a new Rutgers University-New Brunswick led study. The study […] finds that charging pay-to-stay fees is triggered by criminal justice contact but possible due to the co-opting of civil and administrative institutions, like social service agencies and state treasuries that oversee benefits, which are outside the realm of criminal justice. “A person can be charged $20 to $80 a day for their incarceration,” said author Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of Rutgers’ criminal justice program. “That per diem rate can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees when a person gets out of prison. To recoup fees, states use civil means such as lawsuits and wage garnishment against currently and formerly incarcerated people, and regularly use administrative means such as seizing employment pensions, tax refunds and public benefits to satisfy the debt.” […] Civil penalties are enacted on family members if the defendant cannot pay and in states such as Florida, Nevada and Idaho can occur even after the original defendant is deceased. […]

Text by: Megan Schumann. “States Unfairly Burdening Incarcerated People With “Pay-to-Stay” Fees.” Rutgers press release. 20 November 2020.

—

So, to pay for your own imprisonment, states can:

– hunt you down for decades (track you down 20 years later, charge you tens of thousands of dollars, and take your house away)

– put a lien on your vehicle, house

– garnish your paycheck/wages

– seize your tax refund

– send collections agencies after you

– take your public assistance benefits

– sue you in civil court

– take money from your family even after you’re dead

fidelcostco

I’m so scared, what the fuck does this do to you

memesnotwelcome

scooplery

i am so in love with this little animal that i had to draw him…

#truncation is not a content strategy #(karen mcgrane said that)#information architecture

mindblowingscience

Math is called the “universal language,” but a unique dialect is being reborn

In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.

Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to.

basileater

this is so cool

seventy5th

Absolutely love it

marlynnofmany

This is so cool. I’ve never seen a number system other than the standard 123′s and the Roman Numerals, and I love how logical this is! It works so well! I can only imagine how much easier it would be for kids to learn math when the answers are right there in front of you like that.

I hadn’t thought much about how a system that’s not base-10 would work, when it comes to comparing the big numbers, and it threw me that instead of the “10s, 100s, and 1000s” you get “20s, 400s, and 8000s.” So foreign. So cool.

I can tell that this will pop into my head every time I mention in a sci-fi that a fictional culture has a different number system. Now I want to research what else is out there that I’ve never heard about.

$msexcelfractal blog's avatar$

msexcelfractal

⬦▢⬦

more shinies for you to enjoy. please zoom in!

This spreadsheet has a programmable rule. for each iteration, each cell takes the sum mod 3 of a region around itself. I define the shape of the region using the rule cells, shown in red:

The three sprites in the top row represent the first iterate of the rule: a single voxel grows into a 3x3x3 cube of voxels with the 8 corners and 1 center removed. From the second iterate onward the rule recurses on itself. In the case of self-intersection voxels combine additively mod 3 - a yellow cell represents a 1-voxel and a blue cell is a 2-voxel.