mothsandfoxes @mothsandfoxes - Tumblr Blog

Preview of some Fox bullshit.

when ralsei comes out as trans all of the people who refuse to gender kris correctly will suddenly have a really easy time using they/them for someone

jimmy-fun-fact

at this point i'm so galsei-pilled that i saw a post refer to ralsei with he/him pronouns and i was genuinely confused, like "who are you referring to, you only mentioned ral- oh."

dogpuppy

glumshoe

I’m glad that Indiana finally has its first national park and that it’s the one mostly known for having sand dunes that eat children.

pishposh-haberdash

how, pray tell, does a dune eat A Child

glumshoe

Imagine that you’re a big pile of sand by the shore of Lake Michigan, between Gary and Michigan City. Your name is Mount Baldy, and you’re a popular tourist destination at what is now Indiana Dunes National Park.

For a huge pile of tiny rocks, you live a surprisingly nomadic lifestyle. More than a hundred years of tourism and foot traffic has destroyed much of the native grass that kept you stationary. You are now what they call a “wandering dune”, as wind off the lake slowly but steadily pushes your tremendous bulk a little further inland every year.

As you move, you gradually engulf everything in your path—trees, buildings, rocks, hills, your own parking lot—everything. You are an unstoppable force, like some kind of gigantic gelatinous cube, but you’re still very popular with visitors.

In 2013, you suddenly eat a child. It’s a surprising move on your part—dry quicksand isn’t supposed to be a real natural phenomenon. I mean, what is this, a 1960’s action movie?

One moment, a family from Illinois is cheerfully climbing your slopes. The next, the 6 year old boy suddenly vanishes without warning, leaving no trace. Would-be rescuers dig in the sand where he disappeared until their hands are bleeding. Geologists insist that he must have wandered off, because enormous piles sand physically cannot form hollows or pockets within themselves—but three hours later, he is found, unconscious but alive, buried almost twelve feet deep in the sand.

The current leading geological theory as to how this happened is that the organic material you engulf, like trees, slowly decompose beneath your slopes, leaving behind unstable voids held together only by the fragile remains of the decayed material. When these voids are walked over, they collapse, forming sudden sinkholes that can swallow visitors whole. The rules that typically govern stationary dunes, or wandering dunes in areas that are not forested, no longer apply to you. You are unpredictable and dangerous and have remained closed to visitors except on guided hikes ever since.

thisisabitofme

Did that really need to be in second person and fuck me up like that? No. But I’m not mad.

glumshoe

in retrospect I have no idea what possessed me to write this in second person

anyway devil’s stovepipes/decomp chimneys are cool as shit

markrosewater

Could you please start incorporating reminder text for non-evergreen keywords on cards with extended art?

This is a polarizing topic. Let’s see how you Question Marks fall.

Should extended art cards have reminder text for non-evergreen keywords?

Yes

I’ll take that knowledge to my grave

Voting ended onAug 10

#if the card doesnt say what it does then no it doesnt imo

anexperimentallife

labelleizzy

Everyone reblog this. Mandatory.

powerbottombrucespringsteen

taurcatfoxgirlpolearms

🎶 vulp-in-ary girls were unoutwittable! crafty shrewd, you cant beat a fops~! 🎶 🎶 fluffed-up tails so big theyll make your lover choke~! 🎶 🎶 mreah-eah-eah-ha! mrrah-aha eah- ahah! 🎶

taurcatfoxgirlpolearms

🎶 vulp-in-ary girls were unassailable! vicious sharp, the bloodlust dont stop~! 🎶 🎶 teeth at your throat, lets open you up~! 🎶 🎶 mreah-eah-eah-ha! mrrah-aha eah- ah-ow! 🎶

bagelbarr0n

Really funny one two punch on my dash this morning

eilooxara

Oat milk was discovered much more recently than you may have known. Like many now-familiar technologies, it was found by accident during the Apollo program when NASA learned what a zero-g environment does to goat milk.

transmechanicus

necromancelena

i wish usb ports were several magnitudes larger and made a hefty "kerchunk" sound when you plugged stuff in

relia-robot

heirtocragflame

Princess who says “let me consult with my advisors” before staring off into space for a full 30 seconds until she snaps back with a different posture and tone of voice

esthermika

gives a new meaning to the royal we

inbabylontheywept

My dad will listen to me talk about the same ten things that have interested me since I was 8 years old, and I am 27 now but he still thinks they're fascinating. He has like, a best-hits-of-Babylon rants, and when we're in a topic adjacent to them, he'll occasionally just invoke them. We'll be talking about the 1960's, and he'll be like, so, whatever did happen to those original Apollo rocket engines, and he knows what happened to them because I've told him about it like thirty times, and he knows that I know that he knows, but he also knows that I love talking about it and that this is a carte blanche to spend the next ten minutes spinning a yarn about the lost machining arts and the death of knowledge and the constant red-queen-hypothesis style sprint that technology is locked into just to try and preserve itself.

So I'll do the rant again, and he'll listen to it like it's his first time hearing it, and he'll ask the best questions because he's been hearing this rant for 19 years, you can bet your ass he knows the best questions, and it's... beautiful. The words are almost adjacent to the dance.

I can remember reading a book once, where there was a perfect translator. Too perfect, because it translated for meaning alone, independent of the words. A man might ask his wife, "Hey, do you remember that hotdog we shared in 1972?" and the translator would spit out "We have been many different people, but we have always loved each other. Isn't that beautiful?" And I've imagined it for those rant-dances, and tried to imagine what the words would be. I think his parts would just come out to something like "Your handful of intense interests are something that I love about you, and I want you to know that they are not merely tolerated." And my parts would come out to something like "I am sharing who I am with you because I trust you. And I've always been able to trust you. You are, and were, and remain, an amazing dad."

inbabylontheywept

I'm reblogging this because this story ties into it and I want you all to read this story very much. It's from @drenamigmo and it is unbelievably good and I get a little watery every time I think about it. Also, just follow Dren in general, they're good people.

softness-and-shattering

What is red queen hypothesis?

inbabylontheywept

A very streamlined explanation of the red queen hypothesis is this idea in evolution biology that some animals get locked together in evolutionary traps where one animal is evolving an offensive trait as a counter to another animal, who is evolving a defensive trait at the same speed, and that both will evolve in more exaggerated forms until the traits are entirely unsustainable and both die. It comes from the red queen's race in Through the Looking Glass, where she says something about how she needs to run as fast as she possibly can just to stay in place.

If you want examples, some I've heard punted around are things like sabertooth tigers vs. megafauna and some weird ass newts in Yellowstone. The sabertooth theory is that they got locked in a race to eat megafauna that protected themselves with really thick skin, so their fangs get longer to counter the skin, then the skin got thicker to counter the fangs, repeat, and eventually, the skin became so thick that the megafauna couldn't cool themselves properly. Then humans figured out that they could just skip the giant fangs thing and just chase the megafauna until they had heat strokes. Badaboom, now the megafauna and saberteeth are both extinct. The newt example is that there are some newts in Yellowstone that have absurdly high level of tetrodotoxin in their skin. Like, hundreds of times the lethal dose for a human. But! They're preyed upon by birds that have evolved limited immunity to tetrodotoxin. So the newts are stuck always trying to become more toxic, and the birds are stuck always trying to become more immune, and they sit at this uneasy level where the birds can't gorge themselves entirely on newts because then they'll die, but they can eat enough newts that it keeps the newt population down, and neither really has enough evolutionary wiggle room to adapt to their environment in any new ways besides becoming more poisonous and more poison immune. So it's almost like they're not really evolving to adapt to their environment, they're mostly just evolving to adapt to each other, and that means that one day the environment will kill them.

Very useful for describing situations where things are using all of their available energy trying to just maintain balance with a problem that will immediately kill them if they ever relax, and eventually kill them if they don't.

softness-and-shattering

So regarding technology, is that the same as the capitalist goal of growth regardless of it makes sense or is sustainable or necessary or helpful, every quarter has to bring in more money than the last even though resources are finite and the shareholders are doing just fine?

Like there always has to be a new phone every couple years, planned obsolencence, that kind of thing? Im reminded of a fashion show, I dont remember the designers name, where the clothes were badly made and ripping and tearing off the models on the runway as a commentary on how fast new clothes are expected to be designed and produced with not nearly enough time taken to ensure quality.

inbabylontheywept

I don't know that my concerns with how much technology struggles to propogate itself have to do with capitalism as with the pace of technology itself, with is incredibly fast. By the time a generation masters how to use a tool in electrical engineering, it is generally almost obsolete. So there's this tradeoff that exists, naturally, between how cutting edge something is and how well the field knows how to use it. Additionally, there are sometimes older technologies that work better in niche fields that can wind up stranded later because they become extremely expensive without widespread use. There are niche applications where vacuum tubes aren't just used, but are truly necessary, but since there's not enough consumers to justify mass production in those fields they're almost always being created custom.

To make an analogy of it, imagine that you live in the bronze age. And you know what? Some stuff is actually just better when it's made out of bronze. Like, a bronze knife isn't great because it'll be soft, quick to dull and easy to bend, but bronze works really well in nautical environments. I think we still commonly make boat props out of bronze. So if you're a boat guy, maybe you used to just go to your local smith and ask for a prop and he'd hand you one. But then iron becomes a thing and now your local smith is an iron only guy, and the one the next town over is an iron only guy, and it turns out that the only guy within a week's journey of you that knows how to make bronze is some old as dirt crabby bastard from the old bronze days. And you can get on his wait list, but you're very acutely aware that he's not gonna live forever, and there's not exactly a bunch of young students clamoring to learn this guy's craft, so you're not sure exactly what's gonna happen when he dies. Maybe someone else will pick up his niche, but there's a world of difference between a knowledge handoff and reinventing the field. Experts almost never write down all that they know. They often don't even know that they know it themselves. They just do things in a very particular, almost superstitious way.

And even if, if, that old guy does a real handoff, gets an apprentice and everything, the apprentice is never going to have the same kind of environment the old timer did for learning. They're not going to get the kind of general practice that existed in a world where everything was made of bronze. They won't be made into an expert, they'll be born one. And it will make them worse.

In electronics, we've basically moved through the bronze age, to the iron age, to the steel age, to the diamond age, all in the last 60 years. It's like living through three consecutive Tower of Babel's. There is no system for doing handoffs. There is a terrible struggle for each generation to understand even the one previous, least of all the ones before that. We have to keep running because behind us, the past is going up in flames, and we are afraid of what will happen when all that fire catches up to us.

(Anyway, please read The Universal Translator. It's a very good short story.)

mothsandfoxes

a particular specific way this happens is that fabs with smaller node sizes are the only ones ever built. if you need a bigger node size for some reason (voltage withstand, thermal robustness, current handling, BOM cost, or what have you) you have to get the parts from a preexisting fab and if the wrong pieces of equipment break those chips are gone from availability forever. AND! companies will pretend their smaller node offerings are identical replacements WHEN THEY ABSOLUTELY ARE NOT. and sure tiny node sizes are great for high performance compute but for things like power electronics, automotive, space grade hardware, audio, low noise analog, or anything even mildly niche this will make production of devices un-tenable.

I'm still salty about a certain manufacturer discontinuing their JFET input op-amps, those were basically the lowest noise devices with a high impedance input on the market.

also ddr3 or 4 are more than sufficient for plenty of embedded applications but nooooo everything's gotta be ddr5 (which is less robust for signal integrity than ddr4 and more expensive plus you'll have to change CPU's/SOC's ) and they're already working on ddr6, like legacy products exist you fuckos and people want to support them without having to revamp an entire product line

also a popular manufacturer just shitcanned their whole GAN power devices lineup so I guess fuck you if you were using them

things are great out here in electronics land

#Youtube