sweet memes are made of this @princesslizard - Tumblr Blog

I'm writing again to bring attention to the GFM campaign of @nourfamily1989, a mother of five in Gaza.

Since the last update, the situation for Nour and her family has gotten a lot worse. The area they've been seeking refuge in has been subject to intense bombing, and they've had to flee again in the middle of the night, with no idea where to go or what awaits them.

The despair Nour is describing is heartbreaking:

We see death every day, every minute, and every second??? We can no longer endure all this suffering, and my children are no longer children. Rather, they have become adults. After all this suffering, they have not taken any of their rights. Rather, they have lost their lowest rights. They have to bear what no grown-up person could bear. How long will all this torment and destruction that we live in?? Every day we move from place to place and we do not know where to go and where to go. There is no safe place for us. Every place is targeted and there is no safety. Please help my children from this bitter torment. Please save us from this destruction. There is no home. There is no future for my children. All their dreams are shattered.

Nour has repeatedly said on her blog that she hates having to ask for help, but that, for the sake of her children, she no longer has a choice.

Let's make sure her pleas now don't go unanswered.

You can make a big difference to the family even with a small donation. If you can't donate, then please help by sharing.

Donation link (GFM)

For vetting info, see this post by @/killy.

Over the course of a week, we've been able to raise a little over $5,000. Let's aim to reach the next $5,000 milestone as soon as possible, so that if the Rafah crossing reopens in the near future, the family will have the funds necessary to evacuate.

Currently: $14,240 / $20,000

Total GFM goal: $90,000

#palestine #please help nour 🙏

pcholkachai

all shades of pink

#art #pmmm

wosp-reactivated

One day a tooth will hop out of your mouth and start singing, kill it. Be prepared.

catcrumb

processintegrated

wiisagi-maiingan

"Things that make your front door look tacky" "lawn decorations that lower your property value" "why you should never paint your rooms bright colors" "unique styles make your home impossible to sell" "plants that make a garden unattractive to buyers" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!! STOP BASING YOUR HOME DECOR DECISIONS ON WHO WILL LIVE THERE NEXT AND JUST DO WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL HAPPY AND SECURE IN YOUR SPACE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

lifeafterpsychiatry

Give me less "being kind requires zero effort" and more "being kind is worth the effort it takes."

tobiosty

General useful stuff!

Guides

How to make Crumbl Cookies!

How to bookbind!

How to pirate movies/shows

How to make frog plushies

How to make a Go-bag for emergencies

How to repair clothing

How to make different a03 kudos!

How to download videos/pictures/gifs from a website

How to make various chocolate desserts!

Tips and Tricks!

A03 formatting

Back stretches!

Depression tips

Adult cheat sheet

How to regulate and understand your emotions better

Disabling Windows 11 web search in search bar

Resources

Horror game recs!

Dca fic recs!

Hand references

Free Adobe photoshop

Artist resources

Free spotify

Pirating sites

Artist resources pt 2

Helpful random sites

Homemaking, gardening, sustainability

Free libraries!

Making stuff and doing things (free book pdf)

Healthcare (medicine discount websites, guide on how to pay hospital bills)

Alternative stuff to mega corporations

Also while it’s on my mind, I wanted to write down stuff from a really interesting panel I went to at the con, run by a guy who does anime market research and marketing strategy, about the data behind anime viewership and revenue. I think it’s especially interesting coming on the heels of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and the discussions I've seen around it (mostly around not being happy with the winners).

I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:

At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.

And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.

Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.

About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.

Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"

Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)

Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.

The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.

Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol

Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.

The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.

Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)

Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.

Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.

Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.

He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol

Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.

Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular

The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.

Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."

At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.

There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.

Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.

He concluded that the quality of storytelling in animanga is completely unrelated to whether it is popular, and that, at the current time, the popularity of a series essentially just comes down to 1. is it a shonen, 2. sheer luck. rip

#interesting

pansy2025

goo goo dolls if they were in dune: and i don’t want the worm to see me

mezzodical

goracememy

yourlocalsubmissivegirlfailure

i did this for like 5 minutes . Consecutively. I’m easily entertained

directactionforhope

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

vasyan-pupkinyan

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

directactionforhope

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

directactionforhope

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

reasonsforhope

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live

#save for later

orteil42

we're overdue for a reactive wave of anti-cozy games. animal crossing but office workers. restaurant management but applebee's. farming sim but all spreadsheets. never see an ear of corn the whole game

trans-girl-nausicaa

a young witch trying to solve a gristly murder in the Italian alps during the Years of Lead

seymour-butz-stuff

Time to feed unprofessional managers what they’ve been dishing out for far too long.

beaniebaneenie

Couple things here, for when you do this to people:

1. if you get the “answer my call” text, NEVER ANSWER THE CALL.

They are calling you because they want to have the conversation verbally, and be able to lie later about what they said or didn’t say. Force them to continue via text or email- force them to continue the conversation in writing or not at all.

2. “Lack of 2 weeks notice is unprofessional!” or the other version, “Not providing notice is illegal!”

No it isn’t. Neither is true.

And in the US, all states except Montana are “at will” employment (though you may hear an employer refer to it as “right to work” to make it sound better, it’s the same thing). Sure, at-will employment means they can fire you without cause, BUT! It also means that you are not legally required to give a reason for quitting, or to give notice of any kind.

Is it polite to give notice when you can? Sure. Do bosses expect it? Absolutely. But that does not make you legally required to provide it.

3. The only thing I would change in the worker’s interaction here was their response when initially asked to come in.

Employee: “Hey Mark. Sorry I’m unable to cover the shift tonight because I’m studying for my exam tomorrow.”

Don’t give a reason for your lack of availability. It may be tempting to. You may feel rude if you don’t.

DON’T DO IT.

You do not owe your boss any information about what you do off the clock, and any reason you give will only ever be used against you.

Boss: “Hey I need you to cover Jasper’s shift tonight.”

Employee: “Sorry, I’m not available.”

And leave it at that.

Do not elaborate.

Do not offer additional information.

When you boss asks you to elaborate, because they will, be polite but firm. “With respect, that’s personal. I’m sorry, but I’m unavailable to cover this shift/work late/come in early/etc.”

Be a broken record- you’re unavailable. That’s the only information they need to know, and it’s the only information they have a LEGAL RIGHT to know.

Please stop giving your bosses information they don’t need to know and don’t get to have, because they’re only going to try and use it to fuck you over later.

reasonandempathy

My job is HR. The above is completely accurate.

#resource

tboy-cock

the weird thing about being a leftist is the government calling you a radical extremist and your family believing that youre a radical extremist and the whole times your main political beliefs are shit like "we live in a world where we could very easily end world hunger, homelessness, most disease, poverty, ect. and the people in power are choosing not to, and thats evil and should change" and that bigotry is bad

voidsetup1

and out of the darkness - you you you you you

#animation #phm

hyumjim

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