Kiara's Place

Kia'a Rules for Tumblr 1. Do Unto Others 2. Unfollow Early & Often 3. I don't have a theme. Deal with it. 4. I don't do Tumblr Drama (tm) /// I support marginalized identities & bodily autonomy for all. Yes, even THOSE people. My pronouns are Nunya/Bizniz. Don't like it, Don't Interact.

[zxid]

collection

[fishlung8877]

[bunniboiz]

"it's ok to show (x) in fiction as long as the bad guy gets punished!" the bad guy doesn't have to get punished. in fact the bad guy can win altogether. the bad guy can entirely get away with it. hope this helps

[bunniboiz]

and this part might make some people's head explode but: characters can be written to forgive things you personally wouldn't ever forgive. not everything is written as what you'd perceive to be the right choice. not everything is a self-insert & protagonists don't have to be relatable.

[kiaras]

Unpopular opinion but bad guys SHOULD win in fiction sometimes so we can learn how to act when they do in real life

[chillyfeetsteak]

from this article, which is well worth the read, if only for the fun of seeing zuck get dunked on

[purplejabberwock]

My bestie's tags

[soymoss]

Japanese Giant salamander painting sold to benefit the Shiga Giant Salamander Preservation Society hosted by the Cincinnati Zoo!

[kremlin]

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

[andmaybegayer]

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

[ms-demeanor]

I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.

[hmantegazzi]

My personal alternative to Firefox's PDF reader is SumatraPDF, which is Windows-only but very robust and capable with related formats, like EPUB. Though, to be honest, I've been using Firefox almost exclusively for months, without issue.

Sumatra PDF — Free, Fast PDF Reader for Windows

Download Sumatra PDF — a free, fast, lightweight PDF reader for Windows. Supports PDF, EPUB, MOBI, CBZ, DjVu, XPS, and CHM.

[kiaras]

I second Sumatra.

Does anyone have an alternative that does the layers thing though? I print a lot of patterns that need layers turned off.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

According to the charges filed in April, the Uintah County clerk-auditor flagged as many as 165 of the 305 signatures the man turned in as potentially fraudulent.

[x]

[fuck-customers]

[magnetictapedatastorage]

I Watched a 55-Year-Old Law Break the AI Hiring Industry — And It Was Overdue

The Eightfold AI lawsuit exposed what happens when companies treat employment decisions like ad targeting — and why the fix requires enginee

a bit more context

[bitchesgetriches]

Oh hey, it's yet more reasons why AI is ruining the job market. We wrote a bit about this in our most recent piece:

[marithlizard]

(via bsky)

In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:

Taylor Farms Earthbound Farms Little Salad Bar (Aldi) Marketside (Walmart) Kroger House Brand Target private label greens Costco salads and greens etc Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.

This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.

We need a fully funded and staffed FDA, and regulations with teeth - and that's exactly what we don't have under Trump. To make things worse, the CDC is no longer tracking these outbreaks. We're on our own.

[torchickentacos]

Quick correction and a couple sources to go along with it: the CDC is tracking the outbreak. More information can be found here (link pop-up isn't working for the CDC link): https://www.cdc.gov/cyclosporiasis/outbreaks/07-26/investigation.html

And here:

Investigation of 5-State Outbreak of Cyclospora Illnesses

Do not eat recalled iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico. FDA’s investigation is ongoing.

[marithlizard]

Thanks for the link! My commentary was partly based on information from the Letters from an American newsletter, which is usually reliable:

The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S. Last August, Aria Bendix of NBC News reported that on July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would no longer track infections caused by cyclospora and five other common causes of foodborne illnesses.

The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and ten state health departments covering about 54 million people have run a program called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, since 1995. Until last July 1 it monitored eight pathogens. Now it monitors only salmonella and toxin-producing E. coli. -----

The CDC link you shared does say they're investigating, but doesn't give a lot of details. I looked around a bit more and found this Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter, which clears things up: Public health cuts have played a role here, but not the one getting the headlines. A lot of blame is landing on last year’s cuts to FoodNet, a CDC surveillance program. But FoodNet was never designed for real-time outbreak detection or response. Instead, it tracks longer-term background trends for research. The more accurate culprits are the lack of centralized coordination by the federal government, our siloed health systems, and insufficient capacity at state and local health departments. The work is laborious, and public health is chronically underresourced. Local public health departments are doing this while tracking everything else, like measles. If the American public wants a public health system, then the U.S. needs to pay for it.

---- Really I think we're both right. Government infrastructure in all areas has been damaged by the actions of the current administration, and that is affecting all of us. But there's still a lot of knowledgeable, organized people out there doing their best to keep us safe. I agree that it doesn't make sense to write off everything the CDC says as worthless, or completely distrust government at all levels.

It's a fine line to walk between informed cynicism and doomerism. And mostly we all just throw up our hands and get on with living our lives, because we have to.

[thebibliosphere]

(Source)

Guys, he’s at it again…

[knitmeapony]

it's the last three seconds that make me shake my fist at this one.

[fashion-runways]

IRIS VAN HERPEN Couture Fall/Winter 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com

[loveridden1999]

i don't support all women's rights & wrongs some of you are terfs

[loveridden1999]

exactly

[riverwindphotography]

Harlequin ducks are quite interesting to observe.

(c) gifs by riverwindphotography, May 2026

[othert]

@elodieunderglass

[elodieunderglass]

They have a whole culture we can’t access!

[ashlgcostumes]

I pull up my slide show. The first slide says “I do not want to financially support the Church of the Latter Day Saints in any way”. There are murmurs of agreement and approval from the room

Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone

“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’

I’m sweating. The following slides explain tithing rules. The vibe of the room has shifted. I start to doubt I’m getting out of here alive

[fuckblast]

[ploobytumbls]

I would like to share the story of a very understandable but unfortunate mistake i made at work recently

So I'm weeding our ancient and terrible collection of children's books for the first time in possibly ever, and I'm making a decision about a book about migrant workers by Sandra Weiner, called Small Hands, Big Hands. And I'm not 100% sure and I go to just see if there's anything out there about this book's being notable in any way so I do an open web search for

"small hands big hands weiner"

And then I look at my results for a moment

and then at last I somberly add to the end of my search, "BOOK"

[chaostheorietblr]

I have one like that:

In mathematics, you often consider the two-dimensional plane - you know, the idealised flat two-dimensional object that extends infinitely - which can be real or complex (doesn't matter what that means)

On this, you can perform a mathematical operation called a "blow-up" (resulting in a more complicated geometry)

I needed to look up a formula related to this, so I confidently typed into the search bar:

"Blow up real plane"

The results were not what I wanted and I am not sure if I'm on a terror watchlist now.

[three--rings]

This reminds me of my corsetmaker days when i found myself searching for "extra thick boning."

[amygdalae]

still fucks me up what a bad rap coyotes get in peoples eyes. like ive talked to people who  see em as like. gross pests who should be culled. theyre literally just as cool as wolves just a lil smaller and less confident. i love them with all my heart to balance out all the coyote haters out there, coyotes rule theyre doing great

[amygdalae]

imagine having hatred in your heart for this beast

[amygdalae]

this post was so fucking funny I literally was just like “I like coyotes I think they’re cool” and so many people fucking hated it. Shut up I’m trying. To enjoy animal

[bookwyrminspiration]

there's a common belief that artists know how to make art. this is untrue. i've yet to meet a single artist who has any idea what they're doing

[guerrillatech]