Someone can call me crazy here. But I don't think blockading the Strait of Hormuz helps with your problem of the Strait of Hormuz being blockaded. They don't "cancel each other out". I don't think that is a trait of blockades.

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@lyycernment
Someone can call me crazy here. But I don't think blockading the Strait of Hormuz helps with your problem of the Strait of Hormuz being blockaded. They don't "cancel each other out". I don't think that is a trait of blockades.
A lot of people don't realize just how much space car infrastructure takes up. So I've decided to provide everyone a visual aid!
I've presented two maps at the exact same zoom level, as indicated by the big red arrow. They also each have a red area circled, of approximately the same area.
In the first image, I've circled one of eightish parking lots at a US mall. A normal amount of distance for even Americans who drive everywhere to walk through.
In the second image, I've circled:
a subway station
a park
like twenty apartment buildings
like twenty restaurants
three convenience stores (which, being Japanese, can also handle banking, copying/printing, and a variety of governmental paperwork)
one grocery store (another two right outside the circle)
seven medical clinics, two pharmacies
a fire station
a post office
two preschools and three cram schools
a Shintō shrine
a Buddhist temple
multiple parking lots
This wasn't even a particularly cherry-picked part of Tokyo! I just picked the area around my house.
wip
I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.
You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me or buying a print or sticker on ko-fi here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!
The Strange Inaccuracies of HBO's Rome
HBO's Rome had a very ambitious plot, portraying the final years of the Roman Republic from the start of Caesar's war against Pompey and running until Augustus' ascension as first emperor. It ended after 2 seasons, so it was inevitable that story would be a bit compressed. Characters are cut and combined. Entire wars are cut. Understandable. They only had so much screentime.
This post isn't about the areas they had to compress. This post is about the strange things they decided to add.
Honestly, if I was inclined to be evil for the hell of it, I could easily convince the reactionary brain trust on tumblr to accept literally any level of religious brutality and oppression, so long as I couched it in the right jargon.
Thinking of the response to the Rushdie stabbing a couple of years ago — so many cowards yipping that he’d brought it on himself, what did he expect, it was his own fault for committing blasphemy, getting stabbed half to death was the reasonable consequence of writing fiction — I was shocked by the cringing spinelessness of it all, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. You need core principles to have a spine.
Anyway, let me make it easy: blasphemy is not a real crime. Blasphemy is merely disobedience against some religious custom or belief; it just means you refuse to play by their rules, because they are not entitled to your obedience.
The right to blasphemous speech / expression is a fundamental freedom, and it took centuries to establish. If you do not have the right to blaspheme, you do not have freedom of religion. If you are constricted to avoid offending some religious doctrine or other; if you are not protected from retaliation for refusing to bend over for zealots’ demands; if you are compelled to appease religious authorities and offended believers against your own inclination and conscience, you are not free.
#everyone is a blasphemer to someone else#the right to flaunt doctrine & custom is NECESSARY#for peaceful multi-faith co-existence#some of you want a blasphemy carve-out for free speech#partly because you are very stupid#and partly because you fall back on authoritarianism#whenever actually articulating or defending your own viewpoint seems too hard#no believer in any faith has the unilateral right to be coddled & flattered in that faith#no believer has the right to impose a single doctrine or faith-based restriction on unbelievers#my right as an unbeliever to be completely unbothered & unrestricted by religious doctrine#is a fundamental aspect of religious freedom#nobody is entitled to my religious obedience. ever.#the offended faithful are just going to have to deal with it
i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.
so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.
hey this is apparently helping a lot of people! adding that on top of this you can also go to settings > personalization > colors and turn off transparency to also boost performance. this wasn't the Big Fix for me but might as well do that too if you're trying to optimize.
past a certain note threshold on tumblr posts you unlock a bloodborne-esque insight and the strange lives of this site's users become visible to you
(x)
we fucking found them?
Ok I know we joke about this but I just went to the settings and first clicked "adjust for best performance" and then re-checked only 1 box:
"Smooth edges of screen fonts"
My computer was running hot before I turned everything off; the office I'm in is very warm, I could feel the heat of my CPU through the keyboard. The fans were going, not as loud as they usually get, but they were still blasting.
Y'all.
I can barely feel the warmth through the keyboard now. It's been like 2 minutes. The fan is nearly silent.
Click the Windows key and start typing "System settings", and "View Advanced system settings" will pop up. Then click "Settings" under Performance:
Then you'll see this:
TURN IT ALL OFF.
I turned "Show window contents while dragging" and then turned that off again. It's up to you.
My computer is so quiet and reasonably-temperatured now and I barely notice a difference in utility, why is windows like this
maybe I can even play computer games again
The second best thing you can do for a Win10 computer is turn off whatever unnecessary services it's decided it needs to run in the background always. Some services it does need, but others are useless. Here's an article that goes into step by steps.
10AppsManager lets you uninstall bloatware. Winaero Tweaker lets you disable crap like Cortana/Copilot, ads, telemetry, internet search results when you search from the taskbar, and all kinds of other stuff, plus it gives you lots of other little options that are just nice to have (like, it can restore the old MS Paint program in place of Paint 3D). Both are totally free.
Oh, and check your startup programs in the Task Manager tab to make sure your computer isn't automatically starting eight million programs every time it boots. But I think people mostly know about that. (Unless this is me going "they only know one or two feldspars... and quartz of course.")
The first best thing you can do for a Windows computer is install Linux Mint. But some of us do need a few pesky Windows-specific programs. Bleh. Still, if you're up for a project, you can have both (and it's awesome). Here's an article about setting up a dual boot Windows/Mint system.
SCPs I think about semi-regularly:
Antimemetics division story about The Spider That Kills You When You Think About It and how they keep re-starting the division because the spider gets them.
Humanity is two disjoint social groups that live directly alongside each other. You might walk by somebody in the second group every day, but nobody you know (or anybody they know and so on) knows that person.
Evil IKEA (of course).
Breakfast isn't real, when you think you're eating breakfast you actually get teleported to The Breakfast Zone which is dark and goopy and then you come back with no memory of The Breakfast Zone
In the span of article 2000 to article 3000, the foundation went from benevolent protectors of humanity to feeding prisoners to a sea snake to get memory drugs
Tower that keeps going up which needs to be explored, but the Tower is Evil and contains Evil Furries (very much not furries but they're in suits or something)
Number that is equal to Bear. Using it Invokes A Bear.
The shadow monster they've been feeding live chickens for a decade is actually quite nice, they teach it cooking and how to play piano
Some of these are not well-known but I don't know which anymore.
With the weekend I had the time to look for these:
Unforgettable, That's What You Are. This one holds up to my remembered expectations really well, thanks qntm.
Trying to search this only gave me results for groups of interest.
Evil Ikea.
The Breakfast Zone. This is somehow even weirder than I remember.
SCP-2000 and SCP-3000. SCP-3000 is a much better entry than I remember.
I should have expected any search with "SCP" and "furries" would not produce anything I wanted to see.
Bear Number.
This is heartwarming in a stupid kind of way.
I found #2 thanks to Reddit. It's SCP-4857.
Does anyone have any guesses on the evil tower not-furries?
If it helps, I largely remember it because it had a monologue about how people associate going up as good, so thought the top of the tower was a mystery to uncover.
It's not SCP-962 plus some associated tale, is it?
This somehow matches all of my descriptions and isn't it, that's unnerving
If when you say the internet you mean the devil's tweets, the javascript scourge, the bloated monster, that defiles the user, dethrones reason, destroys the discourse, creates misery and brainrot, yea, literally takes the space from the screens of the layman that knows no better; if you mean the slop that topples the Posting man and woman from the pinnacle of wise, gracious living into the bottomless pit of conspiracy theory, and infographics, and scams and humaaans, and googlezonbookrosoft, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say the internet you mean the gem of information, the World Wide Web, the content that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a Post in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean greentexts; if you mean the stimulating discord argument that puts the spring in the old gentleman's hands as he types at his desk; if you mean the technology which enables a man to expand his friend list, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that internet, the consumption of which pours into our computers untold millions of forums and wikis and websites and mp3s, which are used to provide tender care for our freakish little hearts, our faggots, our autists, our rejects, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build archives and software and communities, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
I let myself rest and now I'm daydreaming about academia and academic research and writing again
Guys I'm getting some very mixed messaging here
academia perfec t size to put human in to learn! inside very good and learn human get smart put human in academia. put human in academia. no problems ever in academia because no stress and support for human mind in big human head. academia yes a place for human put human in academia can trust college for giveing good brain to human. friend college.
i had a dream that time travel was invented and too many people choose to travel back in time to save the titanic from sinking (the question of whether unsinking of the titanic deserved so much attention in the face of human history was the subject of both heavy academic and online discourse), which caused a rift in the space-time-continuum that led to the titanic showing up indiscriminately all over the world’s oceans and sea in various states of sinking.
this caused a lot of issues both in terms of fixing said space-time-continuum and in terms of nautical navigation, and after a long and heavy battle in the international maritime organization it was decided that the bureaucratic burden of dealing with this was to be upon Ireland, much to their dismay. the Irish Government then released an app for all sailors and seafarers so they could report titanic sightings during their journeys, even though they heavily dissuaded you from reporting them given the paperwork it caused.
anyway i woke up with a clear image of the app in my head and needed to recreate it for all of you:
So this is a thing that me and @penelopetheverytrans collaborated on, I did the doodles for the sprites and she put the video together. I hope y’all like it, makes me laugh :)
Lovingly crafted with pen & ink, by one person over 4.5 years. In The Collage Atlas your presence, your gaze, your movements all matter.
In 1989, China was at a crossroads. The Cultural Revolution had destroyed China’s economy and culture, and only recently ended with Mao’s death. There was real uncertainty over what would come next. Deng Xiaoping, who replaced him, slowly rebuilt China, transitioning its economy to capitalism (pronounced “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”).
While Socialism with Chinese Characteristics was definitely an improvement over the mass murder and the dismantling of social institutions during the Cultural Revolution, it also brought with it more corruption and nepotism. All the old problems came back, and workers and students couldn’t help but notice that the West seemed to have fewer of these problems and also had this interesting social technology called democracy which was maybe related.
So started the 1989 Democracy Movement, a series of protests that sprang up across all of China, asking the government for democracy. The biggest and longest-lasting protest was in Tiananmen Square, which if you don’t know where that is, you can think of it like protesting in front of the White House.
And at Tiananmen, they built the Goddess of Democracy out of papier-mâché and a metal frame.
The students who created it said:
At this grim moment, what we need most is to remain calm and united in a single purpose. We need a powerful cementing force to strengthen our resolve: That is the Goddess of Democracy. Democracy…You are the symbol of every student in the Square, of the hearts of millions of people. …Today, here in the People’s Square, the people’s Goddess stands tall and announces to the whole world: A consciousness of democracy has awakened among the Chinese people! The new era has begun! …The statue of the Goddess of Democracy is made of plaster, and of course cannot stand here forever. But as the symbol of the people’s hearts, she is divine and inviolate. Let those who would sully her beware: the people will not permit this! …On the day when real democracy and freedom come to China, we must erect another Goddess of Democracy here in the Square, monumental, towering, and permanent. We have strong faith that that day will come at last. We have still another hope: Chinese people, arise! Erect the statue of the Goddess of Democracy in your millions of hearts! Long live the people! Long live freedom! Long live democracy!“
Less than a week later, the protests and the sculpture were destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army.
These words speak to me a lot, and I hope they are never forgotten. Especially this line:
On the day when real democracy and freedom come to China, we must erect another Goddess of Democracy here in the Square, monumental, towering, and permanent.
I have faith that one day, this really will happen. It’s such a powerful symbol. Until then, I think the best thing we can do is help keep this hope alive and known.
There’s a replica in San Francisco Chinatown:
And another in Washington, DC, twoish blocks north of the Capitol.
And a few others around the world.
If you live near one of these, please visit, and take your friends with you. And tell them the story of the students and workers who dreamed of a democratic China.
The People’s Liberation Army rolled into the Tiananmen Square on this day 32 years ago: June 4th, 1989. In China, it’s called the 6-4 Incident. Today is a good day to tell this story.
(While I have you here: Some people on the internet get annoyed when Chinese people don’t realize you’re talking about the 6-4 Incident when you mention Tiananmen. This is kind of like getting annoyed that if you mention Kent State to someone in Ohio, they don’t immediately think of the 1970 shootings. Please don’t be that kind of person.)
Cannot reblog original post but: taboo "feminism"?
Less laconically it looks like you and your interlocutors are talking about different things. They understand "feminism" as the movement that is pushing for/has made strides towards at least formally and legally treating women the same as men (which seems straightforwardly laudable and needn't be zero sum) whereas when you talk about feminism yours is...a new concept for me, which I'd like to understand better.
okay, to do that, I need to "taboo" a different word, and before I do THAT, I need to remind you of something important: useful information is information that lets us make accurate predictions.
"Alright, time to see what this animated poetry movie is like-
Oh jesus christ"
To elaborate outside of initial tags:
So this is from 30,000 Miles From Chang’an, which is a 2 hours 47 minutes(!!?) long Chinese animated film that is basically an actually legitimate historical epic and historical biopic (think Gladiator & Amadeus) made into animation, and also passionate tribute to classical art and culture, similar to something like Miss Hokusai or Millennium Actress.
I heard it was decent before, but was not expecting it to be This Ambitious. The Criminally Underrated Champ of 2023 Animation
what's point of generically asking whether the ends justify the means? it depends on the ends and the means. like for every mean there's an end that justifies it and for every end there's a mean which it doesn't justify. this should be obvious. pointless ass question...
In the 18th and 19th century, many modern european philosophers decided that there should be a single principle from which all morality was derived, so they each thought really hard and made something up. This was a grave error that has only recently begun to be addressed, as it turns out none of these ideas work very well for much of anything other than trying to justify some reallly immoral shit that everyone agrees sucks real bad, like organ harvesting or firebombing children.
John Stuart Mill could step through a time portal today and, without receiving any briefing, immediately be relied upon to make better ethical choices in concrete situations than the average Tumblr user.