Unknown Knowns

24, she/her. Message me if you want! Math, programming, rock climbing, being outside.

[the-blueprint]

@Wisdom

[mugwomps]

Don't mess with perfection

[argumate]

one day someone is going to ask this fucker to model the integers and they'll do it

[serinemolecule]

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.

In case anyone thinks by "a park" I'm talking about the green area not circled, I'm not, I'm talking at this area at the southeast end of the circle:

Here's another angle on the area I circled, with a lot of the things I mentioned in view.

The shrine, just because I have a soft spot for Tokyo neighborhood shrines:

Anyway, I suppose I'll end on what the mall parking lot looks like.

Remember, this is one of eightish parking lots at this mall.

[bananonbinary]

one of the hardest things to learn as a depressed former Gifted Kid™ is that half-assed is better than nothing. take the 50%, 40%, even 20% job. scrubbing your face is better than not taking a shower at all. picking up your clothes is better than never cleaning. nibbling on some bread is better than starving.

DO THINGS HALFWAY. NOW YOU’RE 100% BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE BEFORE.

[redheadhatchet]

One of my college professors used to say “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.”  I didn’t understand that for years because I didn’t do anything poorly, I couldn’t do anything poorly, I had to Do Everything Perfectly.

But brushing your teeth for 30 seconds is better than not brushing them at all when that 2 minutes seems exhausting.  Doing ten minutes of yoga is better than 10 minutes of sitting when 30 minutes of cardio sounds impossible.  Changing my clothes is good when a whole shower is impossible.  Standing on the porch for a few minutes is worth it after being in the house for three straight days because I don’t have the energy to go anywhere.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly… because doing it poorly is better than not doing it.

[resetium]

someone please hit me over the head with this post every day for like the next week thanks. a mention, a reblog with text, a message, something.

[blackwoolncrown]

You must understand that perfectionism isn’t striving for excellence, it’s a crippling fear of being flawed and therefore worth abandonment or punishment. It’s a kind of psychological avoidance. You’re avoiding fear and failure , not embracing the thing you want to do bc if it was about the thing you want to do you’d be fine with partial victory.

[purplesaline]

Melon collies

[sahonithereadwolf]

I can no longer feel the infinite sadness

[song-of-the-spheres]

I will never be over the romance arc of Shards of Honor tbh. testament to the characterization and the book's way of saying a lot with few words/small actions that it actually works, because the timeline is bananas. Cordelia takes like a week to go from believing this man is a war criminal to helping him resolve a mutiny and contemplating saying she loves him. Aral doesn't make it 24 hours from when they meet before he's planning how to propose to her. by all rights this should trip my "this is ludicrous" sensors but instead I'm not only going "yeah that makes sense for these people to be like this given the circumstances and who they are as characters" but actively rooting for it.

and then they don't see each other for months! and are still clearly thinking about each other! I think that's what makes it work, honestly (and the fact that they aren't wide-eyed 20-year-olds jumping in headfirst). How they relate to each other is also fairly...grounded, in a way that's very charming and makes you believe the sudden connection. "you at least permit each other to learn from your mistakes" "you don't--deal in small change, do you?" "but at least I can offer you the best that I have" "when he's cut, I bleed"

truly the enemies to lovers speedrun of all time, 1000/10, I promise I am Very Normal about this (lying).

[totally-kasane-teto]

@ zhngb80293220

[suweeka]

Silhouette alts on patreon

[nekomimidusteon]

being the level up tutorial lady has some perks, like now whenever a new player comes along she tells them the only way to grind their level is to grind against her. funny as fuck to never correct them. watching the heroine who will save the world whimper as she shoots another load against her thighs because she "just needs to get a bit stronger" never gets old.

she doesn't even know she's a secret boss and they unlock penetration options after beating her. she can't wait to see the look on her face after she realizes she could have been fucking her senseless each level instead of pathetically rubbing against her.

[a-random-fruity-sky]

So where might one begin the journey of leveling up?

[ntrider]

hanging out with the other warriors and they're always reading my poems and saying stuff at each other like "a princess or maybe even a queen talked to me like this I would fight for her cause for the rest of my life no matter what" but how come are none of them willing to serve me? I'm the one who wrote the stuff! just because I'm one of them? I could wear a cute dress and a crown too

[eriserinyes]

Knightly rose putting on a crown same vibe as wearing your big sisters dress for the first time and looking in the mirror, so cuuuuute

[ntrider]

[magicfriend1000000000000000]

yeah girls usually whine and moan in their friends' ears. you know, while they desperately hump their legs?

[nekomimidusteon]

please stop insulting the princess as you bite and grope her you're starting to teach her funny ideas of what constitutes flirting.,.,...

[infectiouspiss]

you're mommy's good little printer aren't you? you'll print whatever mommy tells you to because otherwise mommy gets sad and leaves you for one of those free use library printer sluts

[infectiouspiss]

mommy needs you to print this document now and if you don't mommy is going to turn you off at the wall

[infectiouspiss]

listen to mommy okay? if you don't be a good little printer and fucking print my document and i know you want to okay mommy can see it in your print queue if you don't. print. my fucking document. mommy's going to get the hammer

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[skunkbear]

Big math news! It’s been thirty years since mathematicians last found a convex pentagon that could “tile the plane.” The latest discovery (by Jennifer McLoud-Mann, Casey Mann, and David Von Derau) was published earlier this month. Full story.

[ceekari]

reblogging for cool as shit gifs

[prokopetz]

Magical girl duo who are fucking on the regular but it still manages to be unrequited because one of them is in love and the other is super into the Power of Friendship™ and thinks they're just bonding.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

[red-mercer]

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

[sreegs]

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

Yahoo’s grand plan for Tumblr was to turn it into a “next-generation PDF”

They didn't really get it.

[noctumsolis]

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

[sreegs]

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

[virdigrishammer]

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.

[ralfmaximus]

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.

[cyle]

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.)

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.

[rainbowgod666]

TEN

FUCKING

YEARS

[landofwindandskyscrapers]

Ohhhhh, this makes a lot more sense.

And I do wish the posting standard thing was implemented by law anywhere, to make social media portable and solve the lock-in

[ot3]

i wish people were more capable of articulating critiques about exploitative conveniences like doordash without implying that the exploitation and the convenience are both equally objectionable.

[immigrant]

i kinda think it is because u cant rlly have one without the other

[ot3]

well see now i don't think that's true. its entirely possible to adequately compensate people to do stuff like "pick up and deliver food or other objects to someone's house," or any other kind of situation where you're paying someone else to do a task for you. it's the desire for third party entities to extract as much money as possible out of these interactions that causes the exploitation. like, having a neightborhood mailmain isn't exploitative just because there's a world where people could pick up their own mail at the post office because the mailman gets stuff like health insurance and paid leave and overtime.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#like.#most convenience boils down to value-added right?#frozen diced onion is more expensive per unit than a whole onion bc someone spent time adding convenience to it#the need for convenience is totally value neutral!!!#it's not providing convenience as a service that exploits labourers#it's having the value of their labour extracted to the business owner#this is true of the instacart worker and true of the worker who works in the packing plant chopping the onions#nobody who is remotely serious is suggesting that we abolish labour bc it's simply not feasible and never will be#there is always work that needs doing#making things more convenient and accessible for anyone who needs that is extremely valuable work in fact!#and the people doing that labour and producing that value are entitled to the whole proceeds of it!#what i'm trying to say is that yeah we need to move these conversations beyond really weird guilt rituals around consumer behaviour

The interesting thing here is that it's not necessarily true that adding convenience adds cost. Pre-diced frozen onions might be more expensive in some places because there's an extra step... but they're also cheaper in some places, because it's easier to transport and store frozen food (and you can store it for much longer) than fresh food, and nobody's out there selling frozen whole onions. Pre-diced food also allows the use of unattractive vegetables, or damaged parts can be removed and the undamaged parts diced and sold, which you can't do with whole onions. The small amount of extra labour is one part of the equation re: what affects the total costs and benefits of pre-chopping, bagging and freezing onions.

There's a gut reaction to the idea that if something is more convenient for the end user, then it must be more difficult, expensive, or worse in some way to make, but that's not entirely true. It is true in many cases and false in many cases. Dishwashers use less water than sink washing, but you'll still see people hating on them because they take less labour and more labour is somehow righteous. Tumble dryers are a bad idea in many areas because they use so much electricity and damage clothing, and a good idea in others where electricity is abundant and the local weather and space availability isn't conducive to air drying. Those blender things that Americans have in their sinks look like an absurd sign of laziness and negligence to the rest of us, but if you look at how their waste disposal systems are set up, breaking down basic organics and flushing them in wastewater is actually a very convenient way of dealing with food waste in areas where composting is inconvenient and reduces the need for road transport to take away green waste in rubbish bins. Installing little electric blenders in all the sinks is a reasonable investment that reduces the need to transport and deal with waste in other ways.

There are taps in my house that I can turn on for all the clean, safe water I want, whenever I want. I can get it hot, cold, or mix it to any temperature in between. That's fucking absurd. Having clean water available on tap inside almost every home is a bonkers convenience. Having systems to take away the wastewater is even more convenient. This system is unbelievably complicated and expensive and integrating it into every home and most businesses has a huge impact on the design, cost and maintenance of every town that has it and every home within those towns. Yet, obviously, it's worth it from a practical standpoint -- the massive health benefits, ability to make sure that the majority of people have access to clean water (some people fall through the cracks in any system) and reduction in the traffic we'd otherwise experience if everyone had to obtain and dispose of their own water hugely outweigh the costs of implementation.

[kitstacean]

FROZEN RASPBERRIES.

Even the fancy organic brand is $10/500g (so like $20/kg)

How much are fresh raspberries? Oh, only.... $8 per 100g.... so like $80/kg?!?!

Frozen raspberries are more convenient - they don't spoil as quickly. Crucially they're also not super easy to damage, so you can use an individual quick freeze conveyor and the conveyor can then dump em into gigantic bags with very little human intervention. Fresh raspberries have to individually hand packed because they are SO delicate.

Industrial scale production, particularly food production in the modern age does not necessarily look like a dark satanic mill (in fact in an ideal world very little of industrial scale production looks like dark satanic mills! We're not there yet but perhaps one day we'll get there?). At yeah sure you can say that for now it's all powered by fossil fuels but there's gonna be a tipping point where it's genuinely much more economic to slap some solar panels on the roof and install some batteries and THEN you really can't say that this well designed system is exploitative just because it's convenient.