Am I a ghost, then?

Jasper | he/they/ze | im an adult | just a nerdy dude who likes puns and hyperfixates on cartoons n anime a lot | I yell in my tags | background is by @jamiekinosian header is from @happymoomin

[bioluminescent-fungus]

no amount of butter or salt removes the nutrients from vegetables

[bioluminescent-fungus]

a vegetable in the stomach is worth two on the plate

[firesidoni]

(tags via @malicious-compliance-esq )

[misidentifying-animals-in-posts]

it's so funny to me that you can share a location to Uber/Lyft from iNaturalist. oh there was a frog here? take me. IMMEDIATELY

[olorinscombatboots]

túrin and gurthang probably

[scarlct-vvitch]

grace, who has been alone for five minutes: oh my god. an alien! im not alone anymore! i hope he wants to be friends :)

rocky, coming up on 50 years of solitude, imprinting on grace in ways baby ducklings can only dream of: if you leave me to sleep where i can't watch your heart beat i am blowing up this tunnel with us both in it

[noelements-setempty]

I almost picked Pierre de Fermat as my favourite mathematician, but he was beaten by a narrow margin.

[complex-variable]

In my opinion, the relative merits of Newton and Leibniz are truly infinitesimal.

[noelements-setempty]

Fibonacci is as good as the previous two combined.

[complex-variable]

Yes, alright, so what - shoot me - I think Galois is the greatest of all time!

[hardlocke]

Personally, I think Euclid is unparalleled.

[dexer-von-dexer]

The complete set of Cantor's work, of course, cannot be discounted.

[desolationlesbian]

my cat is completely obsessed with watching the bathroom sink drain and I have started calling this "her shows." as in when I'm in the bathroom and she meows and runs up I'll be like "oh you want to watch your shows?" and run the faucet for an extra few seconds so it fills a little. she will then sit there at the edge of the sink for ages totally entraptured by the drain. blorbo from her sink

[desolationlesbian]

her shows

[renirat5]

Orbital Sunrise

Inspired by a drawing of Alexei Leonov

[ndnbutch]

personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like “the way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so I’m doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the same” are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe I’ve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist

[ndnbutch]

hey can y’all maybe ask yourselves why when people of color say things like “this movement I generally agree with has a racism problem” your gut instinct is to downplay and dismiss and say it’s only a few bad apples and that we’re co-opting the larger conversation by talking about it? can y’all examine this instinct in yourselves for a second?

[pangur-and-grim]

I told my little nephew that I'd wave at his airplane when it flew over my house today, and he very calmly and politely explained that it wouldn't be possible to see me due to the limitations of human vision. I said he just had to squint real hard, and he took a deep breath and went into the toddler version of "see, what you're not understanding–"

[pangur-and-grim]

[roseworth]

i don’t want to be angry anymore i’m never going to hate again unless someone says something really stupid or if i see something i don’t like at all or maybe just whenever i feel like it

[energyprison]

ive been going out late at night alone to wander about until i find somewhere to spend money needlessly. which i think is a classic sign of a positive mental state

[energyprison]

[crossing a dark streetwhile the red hand is up] im like a bomblebee of the night...

[opanchu]

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Me, passing a car covered in horny thirst-trap anime girl stickers: while I personally find this to be cringe, given the national push for censorship, I must concede that this is technically Praxis.

[shieldfoss]

#driving my Toyota Praxis

[tlaquetzqui]

The Japanese name for cars with those stickers is itasha. Which literally means “pain chariot” but is more idiomatically translated “cringemobile”.

[lizardsfromspace]

If you dig into unfounded plagiarism claims, you find quickly that not many are grifts. The vast majority are people who do genuinely feel they were stolen from, and who feel genuine hurt from it...they're just wrong, from the perspective of a neutral observer.

The writer of the 1973 short story "12:01 PM" was not lying when he said Groundhog Day ripped it off, or when he went to lawyers for six months to figure out if he had a case; he spent the rest of his life convinced Groundhog Day stole from him. But the lawyers were right: he would lose, because basically the only similarity between the two stories is the existence of a time loop. "12:01 PM" is a sci-fi story where a man repeats an hour of his life due to a glitch of science; Groundhog Day is a fantasy romcom where a man repeats a day of his life until he becomes a better person with no stated cause for the loop. It would only be plagiarism in a world where you could copyright plots & own the concept of a "time loop"...and in that case there were definitely time loop stories before 1973, so "12:01 PM" would be plagiarism too. And in this world, looking at a story about a time loop & going "I should make my own, totally unique story about a time loop" is not plagiarism, either, it's inspiration (there's no evidence the creators of Groundhog Day ever saw or read "12:01 PM", but it'd be fine if they had). But it wasn't a grift; after all, he didn't sue in the end, it was someone close to his work being unable to look at it objectively. Who can blame him?

[lizardsfromspace]

Viral plagiarism cases are so often discredited with even cursory research, one glance at legal documents citing ownership of broad genre tropes or shared inspiration or making up absurd comparisons (like The Holdovers one citing a meeting with two old friends as equivalent to the protagonist *seeing a billboard*), but the narrative of a wronged author going up against the man is so powerful and easy to latch onto, even if in practice each case is usually a writer - in some cases the *more* resourced one! - attacking another writer. It undercuts our critical thinking by establishing good and evil from the get, and has people rooting for someone who thinks that they own common storytelling conventions or the lives of historical figures and that someone else needs to be driven out of public life over it

Simply put the majority of viral plagiarism cases are unfounded. Plagiarism does obviously happen, but the type of writer-suing-somebody case you see in the media usually falls apart since...it's just that pattern over and over. But usually, their anger is sincere. It's just wrong.

[hidefdoritos]

BTW today I met a person who's at least 50, uses they/it pronouns, and named themself Wyvern. It looks like if Santa was a biker and it plays D&D at the local library. Just a reminder that you can do whatever you want, forever.

[velvetcloak]

[vaspider]

I think it's really important to point out one of the major flaws in that highway analogy:

Eminent domain requires payment.

The government cannot come in and merely seize your land under eminent domain and pay you nothing. There is a process & they have to pay you market value for your land and the buildings on it. A couple of my former clients went through this about 15 years ago when the 202 Bypass went through in Montgomery & Bucks County in Pennsylvania. Their houses and land were taken via eminent domain so that the highway could be built, but, I need to say this again: they were paid.

They were paid and there was a process in which they were informed ahead of time. They didn't just drive home one day and find out their home had been snatched, too bad, so sad, no money for you, you should have put your house in a bank vault.

Just taking someone's shit like that without compensation has a name, and it's not eminent domain or anything like it:

It's fucking theft.

(I'm not interested in hearing the same tired shit about how copyright is inherently bad and only protects corporations, because as someone who deals with protecting my livelihood from scammers and scrapers via copyright every goddamned day, this isn't a fun mental exercise/philosophical debate for me, and you're absolutely wrong. Fucking save it for someone ignorant enough and with time to waste on that.)

[vmures]

The highway argument is also disingenuous in that ignores the very real harms caused by the systems that decide which neighborhoods to target and who precisely is going to be displaced. From numerous historically black neighborhoods being demolished to farmers being displaced and left with no livelihood. There has been a great deal of harm done in the name of public good. https://historyfortomorrow.org/story/eminent-domain-and-the-displacement-of-black-communities/ https://thenarrativematters.com/eminent-domains-devastating-impact-on-communities-of-color/

https://www.condemnation-law.com/blog/general-eminent-domain/farm-land-and-eminent-domain/ https://www.vermontpublic.org/programs/2019-10-29/interstates-burning-farms-eminent-domain-remembering-romaine-tenney

There have long been worries about the abuse of eminent domain, and the AI scraping model is far closer to the abusive aspects of eminent domain than any supposed public good aspect. https://ij.org/issues/private-property/eminent-domain/eminent-domain-history/ https://www.purdybailey.com/blog/2020/january/5-famous-cases-of-eminent-domain-abuse/

Anytime someone brings up an argument that states something is for the greater good, always ask yourself "for whose greater good?" Who benefits most, who gets harmed the most, what are the actual harms when you think through the logistics and future implications of the harms and not just the immediate harm, is there remuneration for the harm being caused, is it sufficient?

These are all things that must be asked before proceeding with any so called public works plan. Anyone who tells you otherwise is scamming you.

[vaspider]

Oh, completely agreed. I only didn't go that far bc, like, you don't even need to before the argument entirely falls apart. But yeah, if people don't know about how eminent domain has been used to destroy Black neighborhoods in particular, they should read up and ask the questions.

[stainedglassboots-blog]

Let’s say you wanted to glue fabric to wood, but what do you use? What about glass to paper? This to That lets you choose two things you want to glue and lists what types of glue is best. (Because people have a need to glue things to other things!)

[dramaticthreads]

This is an incredibly awesome site.  Go check it out!

[aicosu]

Whhhhaaaaaattt!???

[techfails]

EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS

This is one of the first websites I was told about in props. It also has information about the toxicity, adhere time, price, and other stuff about the glues.

[geekhyena]

Useful for cosplayers and DIY!

[murasakidoku]

I feel personally attacked.

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

[replacement for first link, which wasn’t working] 

I went through the whole thing just to see what it said for each combination.