Amor vincit omnia

French black girl, here for the fandoms and the memes (she/her bi feminist)

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[hamletthedane]

Want to learn something new in 2023??

Cooking with flavor bootcamp (used what I learned in this a LOT this year)

Beekeeping 101

Learn Interior Design from the British Academy of Interior Design (free to audit course - just choose the free option when you register)

Video on learning to read music that actually helped me??

How to use and sew with a sewing machine

How to ride a bike (listen. some of us never learned, and that's okay.)

How to cornrow-braid hair (I have it on good authority that this video is a godsend for doing your baby niece's black hair)

Making mead at home (I actually did this last summer and it was SO good)

How to garden

Basics of snowboarding (proceed with caution)

How to draw for people who (think they) suck at art (I know this website looks like a 2003 monstrosity, but the tutorials are excellent)

Pixel art for beginners so you can make the next great indie game

Go (back) to school

Introduction to Astronomy (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Principals of Economics (high school course - free textbook w/ practice problems)

Introduction to philosophy (free college course)

Computer science basics (full-semester Harvard course free online)

Learn a language

Japanese for Dummies (link fix from 2022)

Ukrainian

Portuguese (Brazil)

American Sign Language (as somebody who works with Deaf people professionally, I also strongly advise you to read up on Deaf/HoH culture and history!)

Chinese (Simplified)

Quenya (LOTR fantasy elf language)

[dogpuppy]

[vitariesocks]

just received the best text message I’ve ever had. from my mom

[vitariesocks]

2 pics. no caption

[alice-is-annoyed-deactivated202]

[sweepingtree]

pre-fame hozier tweeting this casually in 2012 like it isn’t the best fucking joke i’ve ever heard in my life, decimating all my brain cells instantly

[wizardarchetypes]

in concert in columbus, ohio last august (2024) someone in the pit was holding up a sign that said “do you want a snack?” and between songs Hozier stopped and asked them if they had silica gel packets, bc he already knew the joke was coming, and they said yes and he said “let’s have it” and they threw a silica gel packet on stage and he said “the safety manager doesn’t want me to have these anymore” and he put it in his pocket “for later.”

[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.

[koiagain]

White ppl seriously be like Can you not call out my racism it makes me feel bad

[icedsodapop]

Look, I'm glad to see more Asian representation in media, but this hype over the Wasians (mixed white-Asians) is making this Asian borderline uncomfortable 😬

[icedsodapop]

Firstly, Blasians (mixed Black-Asians) don't get this much hype for being mixed and we all know why 🤡

Secondly, media and the public almost always put on a pedestal a very specific type of mixed Wasians, those of East Asian descent. I don't see as much hype for the Wasians of South Asian, Southeast Asian or West Asian descent. And of course, we all know why 🤡

Like I thought we had this discourse back in the early 2010s criticising how Asian representation in YA fiction tended to be Wasians?

[icedsodapop]

Bring this back cos no one talks up the Asian heritage of the Blasians like Anderson Paak, H.E.R and Saweetie or the Latinasians like Bruno Mars. No one raises this much hype for the mixed white-South Asian actors. No one includes Olivia Rodrigo (white-Filipino) in the "Republic of Wasia"

[icedsodapop]

The way none of these Wasians are darker than a paper bag 😬😬😬

(Left to right: Lola Tung, Alysa Liu, Megan Skiendiel, Laufey, Hudson Williams)

[icedsodapop]

Precisely. We need to kill this phenomenon of the Wasian nation memes dead. Wasians are literally being used as a trend, at the expense of dehumanising themselves and erasing/ignoring mixed race Asians who don't pass the paperbag test.

[icedsodapop]

God forbid non-white mixed Asians and monoracial Asians criticise the recent hype around Wasians and talk about proximity to whiteness, antiblackness and colorism, or butthurt Wasians will flood their comments sections accusing them of being divisive or complaining about how they are excluded by the Asian community. Babes, Blasians actully get excluded a lot from the Asian community becos of antiblackness, these feelings of not belonging and alienation aren't exclusive to Wasians 🙄

[icedsodapop]

The Wasian meet-ups are just boba liberal bs. Becos yall were so annoyingly loud with your damn meet-ups during AAPI month and acting like victims when yall get called out by other mixed Asians and monoracial Asians for centering your whiteness. Nolan Wells is literally mixed Asian with a Blasian mother who's grieving him, they're from your community as well, but yall are staying mad quiet about his murder and the harassment his mother is receiving 🤡

[icedsodapop]

Here is Nolan Wells' family's gofundme:

Donate to In Loving Memory of Nolan Xavier Wells, organized by Christine Wonsley

In Loving Memory of Nolan Xavier Wells Our hearts are broken beyond words… Christine Wonsley needs your support for In Loving Memory of

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[headspace-hotel]

They sting. I got ouched by one a couple days ago. The vest is for your protection.

[headspace-hotel]

@phillipfancypants

[gallusrostromegalus]

Upstairs Kevin Is Actually For Real The World's Most Perfect Betta Fish

So for those of you not familiar with my recent descent into fishkeeping, about 2 months ago a friend of mine who does Hazardous Waste cleanup (specifically cleaning up hazardous places like meth labs) called me up and asked:

"You have fish, right?"

"...Why?" I asked, having become aware that the Fish Distribution System is even more aggressive than the cat one.

"I found a fish in the back of an abandoned trap house. Alive." She clarified.

I could feel my fate settling upon my soul.

"...Send me a pic so I can ID the species and I'll see what I can do."

She sent me a picture of a small purplish squiggle in six inches of fetid green muck. But when I arrived to collect the sludge creature he turned out to look like this:

He's difficult to photograph in focus, but he's a deep wine-dark creature with an iridescent blue sheen. The red patches on his fins mirror where the fins of a Plakat/wild Betta splendens would be, and the rest of his fins are a ghostly shimmering white. This fish was in six inches of toxic green shit.

Naturally, he needed the finest tank I could put together that afternoon.

I think I did alright.

He's so fucking cute. He always swims up to watch when anyone approaches. I've got him trained to do a little dance when I feed him. He likes watching me doing anything in front of his tank.

That's all actually pretty typical of Bettas- they're very intelligent and curious creatures and like learning, which is more than I can say for some of my relatives.

Where Upstairs Kevin (so named because his tank is in my upstairs bathroom) really shines is that a lot of Bettas are... Not sociable. They often eat shrimp, attack other fish in their tank (or get stressed out of they can't commit enough violence to maintain their personal space) or constantly harass and nip the snails in their tanks. Most Bettas are genuinely happier being alone.

Kevin fucking loves his snail (Bluebert) and will shimmy as fast as he can over whenever Bluebert falls off something (it's fine, this is a normal way for mystery snails to get from one place to another).

When I had my Nego D'Aguas in the holding tank, I had to put three of the smallest ones in with him because they were being harassed in the small tank, and he was a perfect gentleman with them. He was trying very hard to shoal with them, but they're very zippy. He was visibly upset (lethargic, dulled colors) when I moved them back to the big tank.

Today was the real acid test: I'm going to move him from his 5 gallon to the 10 gallon so I can use the 5 as a hospital/spare plants tank, and I needed to know if I could have shrimp in with him. Even Betta that are cool with other fish can still see a shrimp and decide they're at the buffet. Unfortunately, there's no real way to know without putting shrimp in with the Betta.

So earlier today, I got half a dozen super-discounted Rilli shrimp (LFS has a massive overstock of them for some reason) and added them to his 5 gallon. There are a bunch of hiding places for shrimp in there and if he was aggressive with them I'd move him to the 10 gallon immediately (I don't want to do that just yet because I need to move the furniture around in there a bit).

Friends.

The shrimp are fully swimming in the open and Kevin is just following them around, curious, but only curious. No gill-flaring, no posturing, no lunges or snapping. Some of them are red, a color that normally triggers aggression in Bettas, and he's just. Hanging out, watching them eat biofilm off the moss. One of them accidentally landed on his head and stayed there for 3 seconds and he only went "???" Until it took off again.

My beautiful and perfect and son who is so kind and gentle with his tiny friends.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Pictures that are paintings, to me:

They're both so curious about each other.

(Kitty Fishtank Time is closely supervised and the room is closed off when we're not there. The tank also has a heavy glass lid that covers the whole tank and has anti-kitty safety clips)

[funstyle]

[recommending something i sincerely love] ok so the thing about it is it kinda sucks

[amygdalae]

kind of hate my stupid caustic pussy for dissolving my underwear over time but it's kind of cool, like, scientifically

[destinationtoast]

dying at this sequence from @pinkydragon01 :

[halfbloodfanboy]

[victusinveritas]

[naamahdarling]

WTF this is masterful, 10/10.

[marjorierose]

Other people have said this in notes, but the Bulwer-Lytton contest involves writing the most absurd opener you can think of and submitting it to the contest. It's not a judgment like the Razzies or the bad sex in books award or something; it's a game. Diana Murtaugh of Baltimore is to be congratulated for this win.

[calllynx]

Op turned off reblogs but I MUST

[dayeadomingo]

We were so enthralled by this leaf on our walk back from dinner last night

[heavyweightheart]

we really can’t overstate how damaging it has been to indoctrinate the public with the idea that if they let themselves eat as much as they want, they’ll eat too much. human bodies, when permitted over the long term to eat as much as they want, actually get really, really good at calibrating their hunger and satiety, and will over time eat exactly the right amount for themselves. the common conception of a balanced eater as a minimal or restrained eater is absolutely wrong. balanced eaters eat quite a lot (compared to diet cultural ideas about right intake amounts), and they do so consistently and permanently. healthy, balanced eating isn’t some tightrope walk, it’s a gigantic net of total permission to eat.

[stylo-90]

tags via @theendofmybody

[bookhobbit]

why is “olde vampires in high school” the big thing and not “olde vampires in college”

everyone in college is eccentric. everyone

you wanna wear full on Victorian suit? the girl in pajamas who clearly hasn’t slept in three days supports you

everyone is too preoccupied to care as long as you’re polite and follow class etiquette

multiple high school diplomas? eh. same stuff. multiple BAs? Enjoy learning chemistry AND art history! All in detail!

wandering around campus at 3am? that’s just the lifestyle tm

no matter how old or young you look it’s not really that weird, there’s sixteen year olds and sixty year olds doing BAs somewhere

big schools are very anonymous so nobody’s gonna bother to hassle you

[dragon-in-a-fez]

consider: vampire PhD students and postdocs, because in addition to all of the above:

been at the same campus for 57 years? seems legit