45 Boxes of Books

3 staircases and 1 bookcase. Someting does not add up here.

[were--ralph]

HE NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED

Theyre going to send a team after Mamdani this is highkey insane

[kentodreaming]

unraveling at the seams thinking about how graces reaction to remembering that he was drugged and forced onto the mission was to come to the conclusion that he was a coward. like on some level sure he was angry at stratt but he was far angrier with himself. he built up this story in his head that somewhere somehow along the way he developed the courage and bravery to choose to sacrifice himself for earths sake. he clung to this story when he didnt have anything else. and it wasnt real. not only was he a vicious coward but he threatened to sabotage a mission to save the entire world because his desire to live was so overpowering. there was nothing that couldve convinced him otherwise. not his kids, not the rest of humanity, nothing. and he tears himself APARTTTTT for this. if you want rocky to get this secret out of grace youre gonna need twelve hours, some elbow grease, and industrial grade lube thats how deep the shame lies. i think grace is incredibly angry about how it all went down and i also think that if you told him he didnt deserve it he'd probably bite your head off

[argumate]

it's easy to get the feeling that LLM coding agents making software development "free" now because a skilled engineer can do what used to take them two weeks in one intense day and that is a 10x speed up which is amazing but it's not free and they're working even harder than they did before, with zero downtime, and will burn out that much faster.

[sacrebleuth]

I saw a psychologist talk about how automating the 'easy tasks' means everyone's jobs will just get harder. Because the human has to do the hard stuff all the time now.

Her example was in call centers, where an agent might take 1 difficult call in 10, which is stressful, but the person has the 9 easy calls to offset that stress and recalibrate their nervous system. But when 'AI agents' take those 9 easy calls, you, the human, are left with 100% difficult calls. What used to be a small, unpleasant portion of your day now becomes your entire day, all day, every day.

And to make things worse, your boss fired all the other humans, so rather than spreading out the bad amongst a team of people who could commiserate and provide support, it's just you, absorbing the stress, alone, forever.

And that's miserable.

[argumate]

yeah that's a weird inversion of what happens in some other fields, most famously when autopilots steadily took away more pilot work in the easy situations, only to dump human pilots into impossible situations when they cut out at the worst possible time.

[calebwittebane]

i looked and she was sleeping like this. on purpose, she chose this. and when she heard me laughing she crawled out from under the duvet all sleepy and gave such an angry offended look

[calebwittebane]

thank you for appreciating my beloved kitty amity. i am glad she and her angy canky face are famous. to celebrate here is my drawing of her in that moment

but also dont worry shes generally unbothered and funny and loves to frolic. this was a notable rare instance of angy and canky

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[leftcosine]

I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know

[humanfist]

I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit

[sobcat]

wild horses living on the cliffs of the welsh gower

[marzipanandminutiae]

It's time for: cool antiques with Marzi! Ring edition!

This 1850s stunner was a very kind gift from my mother when my family was visiting at the beginning of the month, and I just got it back from being resized today. I mostly want to show it off because of the way the stone is set, although I love the whole thing (pardon my inelegant hand there)

Do you see how there's a band of silver around the central stone? That's a formerly common technique for setting diamonds to make them look bigger, called an "illusion setting." Since the stones are rare, or were before the advent of lab-grown diamonds, and therefore used to be expensive for reasons besides "DeBeers wants even more money," jewelers employed clever methods to make them look larger at a distance via the setting

While this can clearly be seen pretty far back, it had something of a golden age in the mid 20th century. Which makes sense – during or after a depression, a world war, etc., people were probably looking to save money wherever they could. But they still wanted pretty things, because they were human beings and human beings like a dormant

... also by this point DeBeers had started the whole "engagement ring has to be a diamond" racket

1950s

1940s

1940s

it's a clever trick to get the most bang for your buck with a small stone

also, when my ring was made, they used a closed setting with a layer of metal foil at the back, to increase sparkle (a technique dating back to Minoan times at least). later in the 19th century, open-backed settings became more popular, on the principle that they let more light in to refract off the stone. but you can still buy foil-backed craft gems today!

I find this all very cool and I hope you do, too

[honorculture]

[strictlyfavorites]

Wood chopping competition in Austrailia

[epiphainie]

slow burn where they're already having sex. such a beautiful combination i cannot put it into words

[iamafanofcartoons]

This is exactly why so many Marvel movies feel completely interchangeable. They hire brilliant world-class actors and then force them to fit into a standardized, corporate assembly line

That’s pretty wild to tell the Asian martial artist his opinion on martial arts doesn’t matter

[everydayimslothin]

Far be it of me to comment on the politics of another nation, but the Binface thing is so fucking funny. I just saw an attempted smear article against Binface in the Telegraph. It was basically just like THIS JOKE IS NOT FUNNY IT IS STUPID ALSO A DIFFERENT GOOFY POLITICIAN WHO DID A SIMILAR BIT KILLED THEMSELVES (stay classy Telegraph) AND ALSO DID YOU KNOW BINFACE IS LIBERAL!?!?!?!?!?

I'm reminded of a time in high school during student body elections, when some of my friends began posting signs around the school to encourage students to write in a vote for the pokemon blastoise. And no one really took it seriously until the school did a psa over the morning intercom not to vote for blastoise and to take the election seriously.

After that everyone in the school, now realizing they had the ability to actually mildly disrupt the proceedings of those in power, agressively and obsessively began campaigning for blastoise. 'A vote for blastoise is a vote for blastoise. Vote Blastoise.' Became the most common thing to hear in the hallway. Some people even made tshirts with a tshirt press. Eventually a human was elected but only because the school didnt count the blastoise votes. Real voter fraud happening here. I bet the boring human class president only got like 3 votes in total but I'll never know how much my hero Blastoise was cheated.

Anyway a vote for Binface is a vote for Binface. Vote binface.

[thatdisasterauthor]

Everyone please enjoy this delightful ground rainbow.

[selena-soto]

[emliyarmstrong]

ANNA TORV as Olivia Dunham ↳ FRINGE ⊹ 1.04, The Arrival

BONUS:

[average-smoothie-enjoyer]

My favorite “humans are space orcs” idea is that trope where aliens kidnap some humans for their zoo, except it ends up like Jurassic Park. And the poor Alien Humanologists who were invited to the park are like:

“You mean you locked up a pack of curious, highly competitive persistence predators with NO enrichment in the enclosure? You FOOLS! If you had bothered to throw a basketball or half a box of Legos in there, KE-X9 would still be alive!

“Well of course they climbed the retaining wall! Did you think to study their evolutionary lineage AT ALL?”

[what-even-is-thiss]

The humans would find a way to use the basketball and legos to escape. I mean one time a guy somehow escaped from a prison in Mexico without breaking any laws so his escape would be legal so honestly given enough time the Jurassic park situation is inevitable.

[elidyce]

Jurassic Park would be awesome, but now that I think about it I also kind of love love the idea of humans as the alien zoo equivalent of those octopuses that climb out of their tanks and wander around taste-testing other exhibits or throwing sub-par shrimp at handlers. 

Like they’re totally unable to figure out what’s happening because the cameras keep going out, but every night things get moved, or stolen, exhibits are disappearing, WHAT IS GOING ON, they’ve moved facilities twice and it’s still happening, are they haunted, are the ancestors angry, WHAT IS HAPPENING!?

And then a weary humanologist is all ‘… your humans are getting out’. 

“That is impossible.” 

“They’re getting out.” 

“That enclosure is COMPLETELY SECURE.” 

“And yet somehow they’re getting out.” 

“THE HUMANS ARE NOT GETTING OUT.” 

“Oh yeah? I bet you twenty glarks they’re getting out. Stay after closing time with me and I’ll show you.” 

*next day*

“… the humans were getting out.” 

“… why did they keep going back in, then?!”

(In a deeply embarrassed mumble) “They said they weren’t going to escape until they finished their behavioural experiments. Uh. On us.”

[weaselle]

two things come to mind:

1 - at our own zoos the MOST notorious jail breakers are the orangutans, who exploit all manner of methods, including literal lock picking. One orangutan, Ken Allen escaped several times WHILE THE ZOO WAS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC without getting caught by watching Zoo employees, even when they tried to disguise themselves as tourists to catch him at it. While he was being “secretly” surveilled, he managed to escape AND show the other orangutans how to escape. They finally found out he was doing some thought-to-be-impossible rock climbing to escape. To fix it, they brought in a team of human rock-climbers to locate all possible methods of climbing out. So. Humans would absolutely be the worst to try to keep contained. Like, “escape rooms” are currently seen as a fun date idea. I’m sayin.

2 - animals that escape most often return to their own enclosure (after all that’s where their beds and dinners are, and if the zoo is any good it is the place best suited to their species-specific needs for miles and miles) after they have had sufficient excitement. Ken Allen the orangutan would escape and wander around the zoo looking at the animals like he’d bought a ticket. So if the keepers were nice, and formed a bond, and the set up was comfy, once the human knew they could get out if they really wanted, they’d probably go back, depending on how uncomfortable/dangerous the alien environment was.

I mean if they were raised in captivity. Wild-caught humans, all bets are off; depending on age of capture a return home could be a full blown obsession, the sabotage of engineering from mechanisms up to entire facilities is a strong possibility, and they may go on a murder spree with improvised or stolen weapons if desperate.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

Humans consider an Escape Room to be a Fun Courtship Ritual

[roseapprentice]

The wild humans thing does depend a LOT on how good the zoo is, IMO. If you, as the alien zookeeper:

“Rescued” humans who weren’t thriving in the wild. (Aka dire medical debt.)

Made sure to take an entire social troop instead of lone individuals. (Your closest friends/family members are there.)

Offered VERY good care and enrichment.

Then I think you’d have at least a PARTIAL chance of your wild humans proving to themselves that they can escape and immediately going, “Okay but the zoo is obviously better.”

[microsff]

The parking attendant paused by the double-length bay. Intended for mobile homes and cars with trailers, it was currently occupied by a sleeping dragon.

No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.

The parking attendant moved on.

[lionessfeather]

I was going to just queue it for later but then it stuck in my brain, and I decided to make it everyone's problem