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gUyS please click the link you wonāt regret it
Its been so long since Build-a-Frog came across my dash. I needed them today :)
i don't do bad sauce passes
I'd rather be in outer space šø
we're not kids anymore.

ē„ę„ / Permanent Vacation

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art blog(derogatory)
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AnasAbdin

tannertan36
Aqua Utopiaļ½ęµ·ć®åŗć§čØę¶ćē“”ć
$LAYYYTER
Cosmic Funnies

Product Placement

#extradirty
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Kiana Khansmith

Janaina Medeiros
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NASA

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@mc-goober
Welcome to Build-a-Frog!
Click here to enter
gUyS please click the link you wonāt regret it
Its been so long since Build-a-Frog came across my dash. I needed them today :)
graduated and was blessed by ladybug freaks ššš
photographic evidence btw šš
the thing that always gets me about the US and jobs it considers 'essential' is those roles are always treated like/expected to be temporary, and you both get talked down to and it is made extremely difficult to live if you don't want them to be (temporary, that is).
i frequently miss previous food service jobs, not because i don't enjoy what i do now, but because i did genuinely enjoy those jobs too. the reason i left is because the expectation was that i either sell 40+ hours of my week to the job, regularly be physically injured with no support, either no or abysmal workers comp, inconsistent scheduling so it meant i had little to no life outside of work... and still, the actual labor of the job, i enjoyed. i enjoyed the people. i liked working with my hands and making people happy.
and you know, people often bring up customers as the reason to leave food service - this was part of my reason as well, but how much of that - like the unsustainability of working food service itself, bodily and monetarily - is manufactured? many of the people who were terrible to me working food service were often people working office jobs only marginally 'above' mine in pay and support, miserable with their own work, looking to exert some level of power they could over someone else.
this is a bit long winded, but i think its a perfect cultural example of how capitalism does not actually incentivize 'progress' or 'growth' as much as a constant state of desperation, discomfort and dehumanization - you arent actually encouraged to do what it is you excel at, but whatever you can just barely tolerate, all at the risk that at the current stage your body might give out and you will not have worked hard enough to have 'earned' the right to be care for when it does. and someone will be right behind you, desperate enough to immediately replace you.
luv how male animals gotta fucking dance around and cry and shit for female attention and sex. and then men irl complain about fat women and body hair like get on ur fucking knees and beg me actually
like these tarantulas dude?? the male has to tap out a rhythm she likes and if she doesnāt?? sheāll literally eat him.
Alpha males: "This is nature. You don't see animals acting like queers don't you?"
90% of nature documentaries: "Until now the female has been very impressed by the males drag performance of Orwell's Homage To Catalonia, soundtracked exclusively by Maria Carey songs. A demanding performance like that knows to impress. But... Oh No... One note in the final tune was one cent flat. It doesn't look good for the male now. She is ordering an orbital laser strike to burn his beautifully groomed plumage from space. It will take all year to regrow, effectively ending this one's mating season early. Better luck next time, little guy. Women are a tough audience."
HEREāS THE THING THOUGH
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello youād get connected to them, so I just launch right into my āHarvard University and NPR blah blah blahā thing and then thereās this long pause and I think the personās hung up even though I didnāt hear a click
And then I hear āyou shouldnāt be able to call this number.ā
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we arenāt selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
āNo, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.ā
I explain that itās randomly generated and Iām very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
āMaāam, this is a matter of national security.ā
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.Ā
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.Ā
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. āThis is a holdover from the cold war.ā They said. āIt isnāt going to come up, but hereās the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.ā
So my third night there, itās around 2am and thereās a ringing sound.Ā
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken byā¦
āUh⦠Is Shantavia there?ā
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporationās command center in the mid-west United States.
Thereās another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying āI think you have the wrong number, maāam.ā and Iām standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.Ā
Every time I try to find this story, I end up having to search google with a variety of terms that Iām sure have gotten me flagged by some watchlist, so Iām reblogging it again where I swear Iāve reblogged it before.
But none of these stories even come close to the best one of them all; a wrong number is how the NORAD Santa Tracker got started.
Seriously, this is legit.
In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.Ā Hereās the ad they posted.
Only problem is, they misprinted the number.Ā And the number they printed?Ā It went straight through to fucking NORAD.Ā This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.Ā NORAD was the front line.
And it wasnāt just any number at NORAD.Ā Oh no no no.
Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. āOnly a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,ā she says.
āThis was the ā50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,ā Rick says.
The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. āAnd then there was a small voice that just asked, āIs this Santa Claus?ā ā
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke ā but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
āAnd Dad realized that it wasnāt a joke,ā her sister says. āSo he talked to him, ho-ho-hoād and asked if he had been a good boy and, āMay I talk to your mother?ā And the mother got on and said, āYou havenāt seen the paper yet? Thereās a phone number to call Santa. Itās in the Sears ad.ā Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.ā
āIt got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, āThe old manās really flipped his lid this time. Weāre answering Santa calls,ā ā Terri says.
And then, it got better.
āThe airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,ā Pam says.
āAnd Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,ā Rick says.
āDad said, āWhat is that?ā They say, āColonel, weāre sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?ā Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, āThis is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.ā Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, āWhereās Santa now?ā ā Terri says.
For real.
āAnd later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, āThank you, Colonel,ā for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,ā she says. āYou know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing heās known for.ā
āYeah,ā Rick [his son] says, āitās probably the thing he was proudest of, too.ā
So yeah.Ā I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.
Source:Ā http://www.npr.org/2014/12/19/371647099/norads-santa-tracker-began-with-a-typo-and-a-good-sport
No okay THAT is adorable and Iām queueing this for next December.
I tell this story to anyone whoāll listen irl, itās amazing
Itās crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles
The ground in these places is too compact for water to soak in during wet season which leads to flooding but digging these holes gives the water a place to stop and soak in. And theyāre pushing back the desert with this. By just digging holes.
The new plants also help even more water soak into the ground which reduces flooding even more.
These places also give people places to grow food and graze animals like people are turning completely dry compact desert into a refuge for wildlife and plants and solving regional food insecurity just by digging holes.
The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.
He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.
Immensely cool dude. He's been a personal hero since I learned about him.
Ooooh, Mr. Sawadoga innovated the traditional zai method by adding manure and other biological matter to the holes! This put nutrients in the soil as well as helping even more with water retention and attracted termites whose tunnels helped loosen the compacted earth, all of which supported plant-growth like no zai before! Which increased water-retention even further! Oh excellent, excellent work!
It is a crime that the link preview doesn't show Mr. Sawadoga's face, so here's his photo from Wikipedia.
This is the face of a man adding beauty to the world and making the future better.
imagine you're a child, you learn your queer and your parents are extremely bigoted. you have some friends on Roblox who are very kind, they're in their early 20s and they sympathize as they went through the same things as a kid. they offer to use your correct name and pronouns, maybe some even offer to buy you a binder or help you find hrt or support groups local to you
roblox rolls out their age group system, and you can no longer talk to any adults on the platform. you can only talk to people in person, i.e. your parents, who are horrid. now you're back at square one, being helplessly abused. to make it worse, you're homeschooled, as I was. you can't reach out to anyone at school for support either.
or maybe you're not homeschooled, and you ask your pronouns to be used at school. it goes well for a while, and you feel some relief.
then your state passes a bill that requires forced outing. your teachers report to your parents that you've been trying out a different name and pronouns.
they pull you from school, send you to boarding school or conversion therapy, and force you to attend private schools in the future that match their values.
you are entirely under their control. you could've made connections with other adults, ones willing to help you out. to treat you like a human, give you access to life saving care. and it's stripped away, you're alone, and everything feels hopeless.
this is the reality for many children. this is almost exactly what I went through as a child. it is not a mere hypothetical, it happens regularly. please stop falling for this moral grandstanding, it's about control- it's always been about control.
āwe need to stop the stigma towards drug users and addictsā and āwe need to challenge the idea that being sober makes you boringā and āwe need to stop acting like binge drinking to the extent youāre doing medical damage is fun and normal for young peopleā are all ideas that can and should coexist.
just so weāre clear, the threshold for ābinge drinking to the extent youāre doing medical damageā is waaaay lower than you think.
I work in an obstetrician and gynaecologistās office. we have to tell patients on a regular basis that they are binge drinking weekly when they think they are simply consuming a normal amount of alcohol on the weekends.
having more than 3 drinks in a single sitting if you have an estrogen based endocrine system is a binge that is medically significant.
having more than 5 in a sitting is a medically significant binge for someone with a testosterone based endocrine system.
every time you do this, it significantly impacts your risk of getting breast cancer, and damages your liver. it takes time to recover from that liver damage. if youāre having a 3-5 or more drink binge on a weekly basis, you are an alcoholic, medically speaking, and your liver is not recovering.
again: the bar for what binge drinking is, medically, is so much lower than what you think it is.
alcohol is a really toxic substance and not something you should fuck around with.
again: if you have an estrogenized hormone system (common for most women), then 3 drinks is a binge. if you have a testosteronized hormone system (common for most men), then 5 drinks is a binge.
anything above that number, consumed as frequently as weekly or more, and youāre medically a binge drinking alcoholic.
also, if youāre drinking any quantity of alcohol 6 days a week or more, thatās another threshold at which, medically speaking, you meet the definition of alcoholism. your liver needs more days without alcohol in your system than just one a week to recover and be healthy.
I donāt say any of this to shame anyoneāto me, alcoholism or substance use disorders arenāt a sign of weakness or moral failing. and most of us genuinely donāt know this stuff.
ratherāI point this out because itās important to reduce harm, and find ways to live healthier, happier lives. there is a life outside of constant binge drinking. itās not always easy to find it. but itās out there. you deserve a life where your emotional needs are met by something other than alcohol, and a life in which your liver is healthy, and the ways you cope and celebrate and find joy donāt put you at increased risk of cancer.
alsoāeven if alcohol is the only way you can self-medicate, or if you choose to go on with your alcohol usage anyway regardless of other optionsāyou still deserve to know what itās doing to your body.
information is key. you donāt have to stop drinking, but the utter lack of education on alcohol + the normalization of binge drinking in current society leads to many people drinking without any idea of what itās doing to their bodies.
addicts deserve accurate medical information regardless of what they decide to do with it. for some people, losing liver function is worth the benefits they get from binge drinking, but they canāt make that choice if they donāt know what the consequences are to begin with.
addicts deserve accurate medical information regardless of what they decide to do with it.
Can someone tell me the definition of one drink in this context?
Because a vodka shot is not the same as (idk, some low alcohol percentage alcohol.)
So, what does 3 (or 5) drinks mean.
0.6 ounces of alcohol is a standard drink. Examples include 12 ounces of 5% alcohol beer, or 1.5 ounces of 40% alcohol liquor.
Super disappointing to finally see artwork accurately representing my body and realize itās being reposted on subreddits like āawful taste but great executionā and ādiwhyā :( Like this is so cool
(Note- none of the people reposting it to make fun are posting a source and I havenāt been able to find one after an hour of searching, so I canāt say for certain what the artistās intentions are/if itās intended to be about intersex genitals or embryonic genital development or both)
The artist is Sonia Rose aka Rose Grown. It is captioned "Biology is not binary".
152K Followers, 676 Following, 550 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Sonia Rose (@rosegrown)
@interquad
Rich people showers
Originally posted by weegems
reblogging for that gif
iām sorry i couldnāt help myselfĀ
This really helped to make me less angry.
*flies past*
And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?
Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu
Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF
They didn't really get it.
What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?
i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was
you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.
Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.
But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.
But first, some context.
See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.
Adobe changed all that with PDF.
Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.
Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.
Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.
Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.
Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.
If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.
(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)
So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.
The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.
"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"
Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".
@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.
the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)
Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.
TEN
FUCKING
YEARS
history fucked me up
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hutās invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, likeĀ āin this century, all this shit was happening concurrentlyā and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
You mean like this?
The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun
I grew up with this book, which is frickinā enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.
Or if you want something you can put on your wall, thereās this:
World History Timeline
I had this book! My grandpa gave it to me and it was really freakin useful!!
I loved this book! Same for The Timetables of Science: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Science.
Same for The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology. Great references!
okay but hereās an even cooler (free!) visualization that goes a step further and tracks ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500
āØļøwith a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosureāØļø
You can spend hours upon hours exploring this
Iām obsessed with this video
Three Bears and Ten Thousand Rats, by Sir Michael Rocks
Original poster deactivated 25āth of June 2023
the fact that these reactionary people always show literal advertising campaigns as "proof" of how people were happier in the past; like...I get that media literacy is, to put it mildly, not a conservative strong suit, but damn
the ai chatbot ads have moved on from fictional characters and are now straight up saying You Should Replace Your Friends With This App Because It Replies Fast
what the fuck .
to anyone who might need to hear this, I would rather wait for weeks/months/years to hear from you or even literally be ghosted forever that do whatever that is and that's the Correct Response in this scenario. you do not owe anyone fast replies you do not owe anyone replies Ever.
additionally. it sucks to not hear back from someone you wanted to talk to. it can be annoying to have to wait for a reply. but talking to people isn't a commodity, it's not content, it's not a product, and sometimes it doesn't happen or it happens differently from the way you wanted it to. and that's ok. you can try again with the same person, and if they straight up tell you they don't want to talk or you decide you don't vibe with it actually, you can try again with someone else. and the good thing is you get literally as many tries as you want because oh my god there are so many people on the internet.