Clever title goes here.

Mandi. Born in the 1900's. 50 hyperfixations in a people suit. I'm an old-taku, sci-fi, horror nerd, whose been working conventions for 20+ years.

[beardedmrbean]

[datclassydame]

Can @raccoonmilf vouch for this? Super rad if true.

[raccoonmilf]

Yes it’s true

[telomeke]

[ID–

Tweet by "Give A Shit About Nature" @‌giveashitnature posted at 4:00PM 23 May 2026.

The tweet reads:

The USDA has kept raccoon rabies out of the central United States for over 30 years by air-dropping fish-flavored ravioli from helicopters. Each one is a small packet coated in fishmeal with an oral rabies vaccine inside. Raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and skunks find them by smell, bite through, and swallow. Many animals that consume the bait develop immunity, helping build a protective barrier across populations. The bait is generally considered safe for pets and tested in many non-target species. The USDA's Wildlife Services has been running this since 1995. Without the bait program, raccoon rabies very likely would have spread much further west. A federal program you've probably never heard of is protecting your pets and your kids by feeding wild animals ravioli from a helicopter.

The tweet is accompanied by two photographs. The photo on the left shows a lab-gloved hand holding out some examples of the fish-flavored ravioli – five pellets of the oral rabies vaccine, each a bit smaller than a human thumb. The photo on the right shows a raccoon, front paws holding something to its mouth, avidly munching on what is probably some delectable (at least to wildlife) rabies vaccine.

E‌nd ID.]

[odyver]

alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?

under 18, AI is a net positive

under 18, AI is a net negative

18-29, AI is a net positive

18-29, AI is a net negative

30-45, AI is a net positive

30-45, AI is a net negative

46-60, AI is a net positive

46-60, AI is a net negative

over 60, AI is a net postive

over 60, AI is a net negative

Remaining time: 5 days 16 hours

[odyver]

Question 2/3

How often do you visit or interact with museums/archives (whether in person or online)?

Frequently (multiple times per month)

Often (multiple times per year)

Occasionally (a couple times per year)

Rarely (once every couple of years)

Never :(

Remaining time: 5 days 16 hours

[odyver]

Question 3/3

If you saw a museum was using AI in exhibits, marketing, research, etc., would you be more or less inclined to visit that museum?

under 18, more inclined

under 18, less inclined

18-29, more inclined

18-29, less inclined

30-45, more inclined

30-45, less inclined

46-60, more inclined

46-60, less inclined

over 60, more inclined

over 60, less inclined

Remaining time: 5 days 16 hours

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

🫶

[longseasons]

[gwydionmisha]

Bonus: If I buy a book I get to keep it! The publisher can't turn up at my house at random and confiscate all the books I bought.

[raginrayguns]

These three versions of the same image taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity illustrate different choices that scientists can make in presenting the colors recorded by the camera. The left image is the raw, unprocessed color, as it is received directly from Mars (and as available on the MSL Raw Images Web site: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/). The center rendering was produced after calibration of the image to show an estimate of "natural" color, or approximately what the colors would look like if we were to view the scene ourselves on Mars. The right image shows the result of then applying a processing method called white-balancing, which shows an estimate of the colors of the terrain as if illuminated under Earth-like, rather than Martian, lighting.

(nasa.gov)

[fragariavescana]

Here's the swatch they have on the rover for calibration

[infimace-blog]

dead wife montage but it's a henchman reminiscing about da boss after he got put six feet under. picking flowers before hiding the bodies, wiping cocaine from your nose after a big night, that long drive down the beach to find the bookie who squealed. where did the days go

[eggblackoutpoetry]

“Egg [x4]”

[infimace-blog]

boss, wherever your spirit may be, you gotta help me, they're doing easter egg hunts in my precious yet illicit memories

[macrolit]

Quick tip: Don’t highlight every line of a block of sentences. Outline them instead.

[pangur-and-grim]

I felt bad accepting financial aid for my medication, but also, I DID NEED THE FINANCIAL AID. so maybe that’s alright.

and now I can finally get my immunosuppressants and pay zero dollars for them, so that’s good!

[pangur-and-grim]

this is very good advice, boosting this so more people can see

[darshanaheena]

yeah it’s a big fuckin’ mystery alright

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[estro-boi]

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

[estro-boi]

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

[macleod]

How to Use Torrents (with Pictures) - wikiHow

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

[macrolit]

Marilyn Monroe’s apartment was full of books

[macrolit]

Happy 100th birthday to Marilyn Monroe.

[girlballs]

captain picker isgonna finger himself

[girlballs]

his wife is. 44 years old.

[despazito]

The fucking that old man website when someone actually fucks that old man

[the-unnecessary-commentary]

[alexandersfolly]

Tumblr is stuffed to the brim with 18-25 year olds who talk endlessly about being a hole for old men and have a heart attack the second a consenting adult is in a relationship with an old man

[reddherring777]

me: yeah, so one of your most famous works is actually just that commission of a woman that you kept. Honestly, it's less of the piece itself that lead to its fame and more the mystery surrounding it, so I was hoping you could clear that up the decayed corpse of Leonardo Da Vinci that I resurrected: Hai detto che hanno chiamato una tartaruga che combatte il crimine con il mio nome?

[metal-autistic-coven]

Hang on let me translate something real quick

[metal-autistic-coven]

Yeah this is funny

[reddherring777]

[mervynbunter]

You said something in “Smith” which I hope I grasped, and there was a feeling almost of recognition. An odd feeling of grief overcame me when I read it. I cannot explain my feelings any clearer. It was like hearing a piece of music from way back, except that it was nearer poetry by Graves’ definition. Thank you very much for writing it.

Terry Pratchett, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, 22 November 1967

Thank you very much for your letter. The first one that I have received with regard to Smith of Wootton Major. You evidently feel about the story very much as I do myself. I can hardly say more.

J. R. R. Tolkien, in reply to Pratchett’s letter, 24 November 1967

[thesetwoutes]

This is the first I've ever seen this and it makes me wonder if it's why Pratchett was always so conscientious about responding to letters from kids.

[vaspider]

If you were wondering: in November 1967, Terry Pratchett was 19 years old.

[rock-n-roll-fantasy]

And he did in fact say on at least one occasion that it was this that pushed him to always engage with his own fans in the same kind and conscientious manner.

[sashayed]

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

[boomstab-papa]

[your-cosmic-creature]

“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

[daily-lifeprotips]

If you have a senior to check on ask them to "borrow" something small so they think they're helping you.

My mom (72) recently downsized and moved close enough to me that checking on her in person regularly is not really out of my way, but when I was obvious about it she wouldn’t let me “stop-by” because she was, “fine”.

Well, one day I actually needed some aluminum foil so I called and asked if I could borrow enough to cover a baking tin because I didn’t want to run to the store. She said sure, but when I got to her house she needed furniture moved, a wasp nest removed, and her coffee pot fixed. After I got the foil I mentioned each thing cautiously and she let me take care of them for her. So next weekend I’ll need a cup of rice and check on her again.

[morwentrouble]

Even better, here’s an array of more reciprocal options for building relationship & supporting seniors’ dignity and independence:

- ask for something they can actually help you with. Elders have skills. Mending? Advice about knitting, gardening, home repair, nevermind professional training?

-ask about their experiences. “I was reading about xyz event the other day & I would love to know what that time was like for you. Can we chat about it over tea?” Goes double for family history for relatives.

-“Someone gave me this [or, I ended up with extra] & I don’t need/want it, but I bet you have a use for it. Can I bring it over? I would hate for it to go to waste.”

-work side-by-side. They get your physical help, you get their experience & expertise. “Could I come over & have you show me how you [used to] prune your gorgeous roses? I’m trying to get better with mine.”

[crowboy-bebop]

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

source: hellgate osprey cam

[curlicuecal]