This is my blog y'all

Hello, all! Mars | they/she | aroace. This blog is essentially a whole bunch of random stuff that I find on the internet or stuff that I hear/do in my real life. You can always ask me questions about whatever I post about! I will do my best to answer. (Credit for my header goes to justlgbtthings)

[nohoperadio]

just saw a pigeon doing the puffed up courtship dance thing to another pigeon, and as he was strutting around he suddenly stopped for a split second to do a very brief preen-peck at his own side, then returned to the strutting around. and i surprised myself by instantly losing respect for the male pigeon in that moment, like come on man i appreciate you had an itch or whatever but how is she supposed to feel special when you're getting distracted by bullshit like that? which on reflection i don't endorse, i mean those are pretty harsh dating norms i'm imposing on these pigeons, from a total outsider perspective, for no reason. probably not all girl pigeons are as uptight about that sort of thing as i would apparently be if i was a girl pigeon, maybe she even found it endearing who knows, i don't know her. it's none of my business really. sorry pigeons.

[scribeherself]

people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.

[scribeherself]

Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼

[thevastnessof]

it’s actually quite easy to take over a small local government group if you really want to, bc if you volunteer consistently people will just put you in charge of whatever. I’m now one of like three people at a nature preserve making official decisions about trails, putting in a prairie, and designing a series of illustrations for a storybook trail etc., and it’s just because last summer I started coming over once a week to help the naturalist out for a couple hours. Mine now. you too can steal an organization and shape it to your will 🫵

[phleb0tomist]

be proud of ‘small’ achievements that are big for you as a disabled person. share them with trusted people, share them online, write them in your journal or your notes app. forge a space for yourself. don’t shrug your successes off just bc they don’t look like much to abled people.

[proteusolm]

The Ojibwe nailed it. Wawa is exactly the right name for a goose.

[happilyloudwonderland]

Speaking of Ojibwe! There’s a new point and click game to help teach the language! It’s called Reclaim! Azhe-giiwewining, and is currently on sale on Steam!

[hobbular]

Friend of mine was submitting a job application and discovered that they REQUIRED a photo:

We’re trying to decide which of these is a better option:

or

[nowlander]

[aetherograph]

And DO NOT! VOLUNTEER!! INFORMATION!!!

[dyscomancer]

[ouroborosorder]

honestly I hate “can you pet the dog?!?” not for any of the common reasons but because it was initially interesting as a proposition of “can you interact with the world in a way that is not within the primary mechanical loop” and that very quickly fell away to being “well now any indie developer making a game has to have a pet the dog button or they’re going to get letters”

[ouroborosorder]

One of my dream projects has an NPC with a dog, and if you try to pet it, the owner tells you not to do that. If you try again, it bites you and you take damage. I want to do this entirely because I genuinely believe that this would make me feel way more grounded in the world than any “click button to see cute animation” would ever do, and also it would be really funny to have a game where people lose their runs because they tried to pet a dog they were told not to pet

[catgirldragon]

[sistertaxon]

[keatxu]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[omikronsoul]

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.

[justletmeremember]

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.

[jollysunflora]

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality

[haaarpb]

i deliver pizzas & sometimes funny things happen

[the-sacred-now]

I feel like a lot of people engaging in torture are not treating their victims as if they could have blood borne pathogens 🤔

[the-sacred-now]

Is what my wife said apropo of nothing as we were silently drifting off to sleep

[the-sacred-now]

Uh oh

Is what she said when I immediately reached for my phone and opened Tumblr instead of responding

[the-sacred-now]

@everything-you-feel-is-real I know by tumblr tradition that I'm to say "impossible, my posts never blow up like that," or "please don't do this to me."

But I feel in my bones that you are right. If this is to be my wife's moment of glory, I am willing to suffer notification overload, that the world may know she is funny. #MyFunnyWife

[notatzimisce]

I will never shy away from the word goon. goon is the only way to describe a particular type of henchman, lackey, or thug. look at these guys. they're goons.

[randomencounters]

Encounter: skategoons

[mangled-by-disuse]

genuinely curious pls respond

people always say that internet spaces are americanised because the users are majority americans.

and i do always wonder how much of that is "there are actually a majority of usamericans" and how much is "usamerican cultural markers are a default for many online spaces, and non usamericans are often indistinguishable from usamericans unless you're actively looking".

so here's an incredibly unscientific poll reblog for reach or whatever

where do you live?

in the usa

anywhere that is not the usa

Remaining time: 1 day 8 hours

no nuance. if you live in a usa territory/colony like puerto rico or guam or american samoa, go with your heart.

[mangled-by-disuse]

additional poll, what the hell:

is english your first/native language?

yes, english is the main language i grew up speaking

yes, but i also grew up speaking another language(s)/i'm bilingual

no, i learned english as a second or additional language

Remaining time: 1 day 8 hours

[mangled-by-disuse]

tags from @headpanemaniac:

#i am saying this every single time i see such polls but i am compelled to say it again#you are inevitably getting skewed results by even asking the question in english#i learned english as a second language but i feel comfortable enough in it to live in English-speaking internet as normal#there's many people i know who don't. and who will not interact with english posts as much because it takes effort#and your mind gets burnt out after focusing so much on foreign language content#not ideal for something you do in your free time#i know there's not much you can do about it#i just wanted this to be remembered

I don't have much to add to this (besides that I am one of the sad anglosphere people who is only fluent in one language - I used to be competently conversational in German but that's the highest I've ever got in any of the languages I've tried to learn, and I'm definitely not conversational in it now!), but you're absolutely right and it should be borne in mind.

also to remind people that i was being dead serious about "incredibly unscientific poll", there are massive methodological issues with every part of this poll that would make it completely unusable as a serious data source, and if i see anyone citing it as fact i will spray you in the face with a water bottle.

[mangled-by-disuse]

tags from @bigopenspaces:

#the language poll doesn't even have an option for non-English speakers#i think both Europeans and Americans have a great deal of privilege#so that their culture and especially the English language has been forced on the rest of the world#all to say that we must acknowledge Western-centrism when discussing American-centrism#polls

I didn't add a poll for non-English speakers because the polls themselves are in English, so it seemed fair to assume that most if not all people who interact with it would have at least some English.

like, you're not wrong, but putting "I don't speak English" in the second poll would have given an artificially low number of results in that category while implying it was accurate. looking at the current results it's easier to simply assume that people who don't speak English are fully unrepresented, and to mentally recategorise the results as "tumblr users who speak english"

(i have got to start adding methodological notes to polls like this from the beginning)

[bigopenspaces]

Translation programs exist. I use them sporadically when I interact with languages I'm not fluent in. They have the ability to translate entire pages or specific text.

[mangled-by-disuse]

I know, I've used them both personally and professionally. It's not that I think non-English-speakers are incapable of interacting with the post, just that I think that the additional barrier means it's less likely to circulate in non-English-speaking parts of Tumblr, so an "I don't speak English" option would probably come out looking depressingly low.

like I don't necessarily think this was the best methodological approach, and nobody should take these data as representative in the first place (bc this is a scratch poll not a well-designed survey), and you're absolutely right that Anglocentrism needs discussing just as much as America-centrism, but I also want to be clear that this wasn't "I didn't consider that non-English-speakers might exist on Tumblr" - whether or not to include "I don't speak English" was actually the part of this poll I spent the longest considering.

fwiw I think the lack of inclusion of non-English-speaking Tumblr probably goes some way to explaining the ~10% gap between the reported web traffic stats (45% USA) and this and similar polls (50-60% USA, usually), so I would suggest that around 8-9% of non-USA Tumblr is primarily non-English-speaking.

[icarusredwings]

If I see one more person say Queer Platonic Relationships is "Just best friends with extra steps" or define the UNDEFINEABLE LABEL by saying QPRs are not allowed to kiss or have sex Im going to start committing crimes.

The whole point is that its NOT DEFINEABLE and OUTLIERS of normal "just friendship" or romantic relationships.

[comikbook]

lets make bad art together

[comikbook]

[comikbook]

i just realized that i forgot to put the word “make” in the image and i think thats fitting lets bad art together

[woodwool]

worst part of being an adult is how often youre forced to nag. you Have to be annoying or youre never getting anything done. which is unfortunate considering how common it is to teach kids to never nag and be annoying ever

[vintagerobin]

I'm going to be honest I think the notion that there is a clear-cut list delineating what is and isn't a romantic or platonic behavior that is universal to every culture, time and unique life experience is a complete load of shit.

[chaotic-carnifex]

No shit, half of y'all lose your damn minds when family peck each other on the lips 🙄