PEBKAC: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair
(the user is the issue here)
Lithobraking Maneuver
(our rocket stopped because it crashed into rocks)
I get that this is intended to be funny, but just so people are aware the Bunting map (on the left) is not intended to be cartographically useful. It is intended to show a theological conception of the world, where Jerusalem is the center, and to make a visual reference to the three leafed clover on the arms of Hanover, Bunting's home. It's art, not a serious map.
A serious cartographic map from the era looked more like this:
Don't get me started on late medieval/Renaissance nautical maps. DO FUCKING NOT. You're all lucky that my external HDD on which I had a collection of about 500 of those decided to die as a Christmas present and now I have to search for images online instead of uploading them directly, so this will be a quick and short post. Sorry if it's not very ordered.
So, @socialmaya (because if I don't tag people, no one will read this).
Yes, in the early to high middle ages, Christian European maps were very schematic. There were the so-called T-O maps, with the internal seas (Black and Mediterranean) in a T shape, dividing Europe, Africa and Asia, and surrounded by the O-shaped world ocean:
Then, a bit more detailed, Beatus maps, depicting the known world still as a more or less monolithic island in the world ocean:
Until eventually, in ca. 1000-1100 AD they became highly complex, if very inaccurate maps of the old world, like the Ebstorf map:
Those maps were simplified, since as per Christian canon the mortal world was sinful and not worth depicting in detail, from earlier maps like the 700 AD Ravenna cosmography:
which was itself based on maps from Antiquity such as the one by Anaximander:
The map by Muhammad Al-Idrisi, also known as Tabula Rogeriana (made for King Roger II of Sicily) did lay the foundation for later mapmaking and it itself is the result of Islamic cartography having evolved directly from Ancient Greek cartographers like Anaximander and Ptolemy because the Islamic golden age was a time when classical works were preserved, examined and built upon in the Muslim world, unlike in the Christian one.
And then came the 1200s and European sailors started demanding more accurate maps for navigating the seas for trade and war. At that point, mostly the Mediterranean and Black seas, to trade with the Levant and the Golden Horde. Thus came to be the portolan maps, made specifically for seafaring.
The earliest known map of this type is the so called Carte Pisane, or the map from Pisa:
As you can see, it encompasses the Mediterranean and Black seas, which would be true for most such maps for centuries to come. It is also covered in numerous, intersecting lines - the so-called "rhumblines" radiating from several central points on the map which were used for navigation before map projection was a thing.
Portolans drew on Arabic cartography and there was some back-and-forth exchange of cartographic knowledge around the Mediterranean. First, there was the Genoese cartographic school, product of which were the Carta Pisana and the earliest example of an illuminated portolan map, such as the Lucca chart, again from ca. 1300-1320:
Early Genoese cartographers this codified the portolan map as the principal map type of the age, which was to yield important navigational and political information (well not really, flags were often obsolete by hundreds of years, I've seen Byzantine eagles over Constantinople on maps made 100+ years after the city fell, etc.)
Those flags, btw, are why I became so fascinated with portolan maps in the first place and why they're still my passion.
Maps encompassing the whole then-known world, also known as *mappae mundi* (literally "maps of the world"), evolved independently from portolans, although often by the same cartographers: from the T-O and Beatus maps, through Arabic world maps, to accompany portolan maps and atlases. A shining example are the maps (ca. 1320) by Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte:
And then the ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE of Fra Maro, a Franciscan monk, from ca. 1450:
(image limit hit so link)
The practice then went to the kingdom of Aragon where (mostly Jewish) cartographers would spread from Genoa to Mallorca and Barcelona, founding the Catalan map school:
1375, Abraham Cresques (the so-called Catalan atlas):
Venetians, Portuguese, French and others soon followed, founding their own portolan making traditions.
Diogo Homem (Portugal), 1563:
Muslim (Arab and later Ottoman) cartographers also would make portolans sometimes:
1461, Ibrahim Al-Mursi from Tunis (sorry, lost my good copy):
Then, in the 1480s, a copy of the Cosmpgraphia, an atlas by the Ancient Greco-Roman cartographer Claudius Ptolemaus was discovered, leading to the rediscovery of polar projection:
(13th century Byzantine Greek copy)
Thus cartographers like Sebastian Münster (early 1500s) and Gerhard Mercator (late 1500s) were able to build on those foundations.
Sebastian Münster, Cosmpgraphia, 1550:
Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1572:
So yeah, the "BLERGH STOOPID YUROPIAN MAPP" is bullshit. That one is a very symbolic map no one at the time believed was true. There are other allegorical maps, such as Münster's "Europe as Queen":
Honestly I love this recent stylistic 3D movie trend where they have clearly started with 2D designs and developed them recognizable instead of forcing them into Disney/Dreamworks market-owning design rules
During a summer heat wave in Alaska growing up (yes it’s a thing), my dad had several sprinklers and a tractor sprinkler going in the yard. From the woods behind the house suddenly came two young babies and a very large mother.
They came directly towards the tractor sprinkler and sat right down.
My dad verrrrry slowly pulled the hose of the other sprinklers, and repositioned them in the backyard so they would spray grass under the shade of several trees.
Lo and behold, the mother moose got up, walked over to the water now pooling beside these trees, and plomped down. The two babies followed after and just fell over in the cool water.
So, animated cursors are a little trickier because there isn't a reliable .cur to .ani (animated cursor) converter. You'll need to download an old program to get what you want.
But it IS possible! And just as customizable.
Part 1
Let's say I want my mouse to be Furret. First I need a gif with a transparent background.
(If you want to make your own gif instead, you need a series of .png files, then to upload them on this website here and customize what kind of timing you want.)
This gif is definitely WAY too big to become a proper mouse. So we need to shrink it down. Upload or paste the link in here, then figure out what size you want.
When you're ready to test it, go ahead and click "Resize Image!"
You'll want to pay attention to that file size there. At MAX, you never want to go over 60KiB.
So we have our tiny Furret. What now?
You see all those icons underneath the preview?
You want to click this one.
Then hit "Split into frames!" here. Don't worry about the "Split options" box, it won't really impact the end result for what we're going for here.
Ta-da! You now have every frame of your gif ready. Click "Download frames as ZIP, then once you have the Zip file, extract the files into a normal folder.
Part 2
Part 2 of this, turning those frames into a .ani file, is slightly less straightforward if you're going in blind.
You'll need to download and install AniTuner. It's free and safe, but it also looks and acts straight out of Windows 2007, so be warned.
Note: This page does not have misleading links that I can see. It was tested WITH ad blockers on FireFox, and WITHOUT ad blockers on Chrome and Edge. However, I always recommend viewing any site you aren't personally familiar with WITH ad blockers, just in case.
Once you have AniTuner installed, go ahead and open it up.
You'll get a window open that looks like this:
Go ahead and click "Create a new animated cursor."
Now we get to the cursor creation stage. You can pick out a name for it and give it your author signature if you want to, but for now, we're just going to be working on the gif part of it. Click on "Edit Cursor Frames" on the left hand size.
Hit "Import image(s)," go to that folder with the gif frames, and press Ctrl + A to select them all. Don't worry about whatever file names they have, they're in the right order.
Ignore everything here. You don't need to mess with it unless you're further editing the image. Just make sure your background color is something you can stand seeing a few pixels of and that "Set the color as transparent" is checked, and you're good to go.
Unless your image was 32 x 32, you'll get this box. I'm going to hit "Resize Image to fit the new size," that way it doesn't cut off any bits of the cursor, but this is up to you. Check "Don't ask me again," then hit "OK."
Now's the slightly obnoxious part. It wants to ask you to adjust things for every frame.
You can hold down the enter button to blow through them, or you can button mash the "OK" button, doesn't matter. Just know that however many frames you put in, that's the number it's going to ask you to do this. So if you're compressing the entire Morbius movie, you've been warned.
If your file explorer pops up, you hit "Enter" one too many times and it thinks you pressed "Import Image(s)" again. Just X out of the file explorer and ignore it.
Now your window should look like this:
Right click that blank "Frame 1" and hit "Delete Frame(s)," otherwise you'll have a single flicker of nothing in your cursor.
Next you want to click "Set Length" down in the bottom right.
This is how many 1/100ths of a second each frame is going to last before it switches to the next. 10 makes a really slow Furret:
While 2 makes a fast one:
If you want to know the timing your original gif was set to, go to the folder your frames are saved to. All the frames will be named something like frame_00_delay-0.03s.
That last bit is the timing. "0.03s" means "3 jiffies," "0.12s" means "12 jiffies," etc.
Once you've decided how fast you want it, go ahead back to "Cursor Properties."
Ignore the Cursor Preview in the bottom left, it runs slower than your mouse will.
Now you want to choose your "hotspot." This is the part of the image that your computer expects you to use as the point you click with. You can set that manually with numbers, OR you can click somewhere on the image next to it to set it with crosshairs. So if I want it to be Furret's nose that clicks on things, I would click there.
You can test your timings, hotspots, etc with the "Test Cursor" button. Click it once to turn on your new cursor, then again to turn it off. If you somehow lose your mouse, just press "s" to get your old one back.
Pick your title and click "Save Animated Cursor..." on the left hand toolbar, then save it and close the program.
Congrats! You've just made a .ani file.
From there, treat it just like I did the Skyrim cursor in the first tutorial—go to "Control Panel," then "Mouse," "Pointers," click the cursor you want to replace, "Browse..." then find your file.
And there you have it! One animated cursor of whatever you want.
So in simple terms, the reason it reverts is because whenever your computer boots up, it tries to pull the cursor you made from its cursor directory. Failing to find one, it's like "well, guess I've gotta use something else" and grabs its default again.
To fix this, you just need to put your .cur or .ani into the file that has all the other cursors in it.
Open your file explorer and go to "This PC."
Pick out your local disk drive—it'll be the one with the memory bar displayed—and go into it.
Navigate down to the "Windows" file
Find "Cursors"
And there you go! This is where you want to save your files to make them permanent.
If you plan on making a lot of cursors, I recommend pinning it to Quick Access with this button:
This'll make it pin itself to the sidebar, so you can just drag things over to it instead of having to hunt it down each time.
i was so good at this water sort mobile game and i’m stuck on level like 348 and i’m convinced this one is impossible. i was stuck on it for weeks like a year ago and then quit and came back to it recently with a new hunger and vengeance and it’s kicking my ass i swear
When a “funny” dude likes you and anytime he sees you anywhere he will be like “yoooo wassup it’s Jelissa!” (Or whatever) like “omg Miranda is here whaaaat” for literally no reason why do they do that
They are more likely to do this the more meek and shy they perceive you too. They are less likely to do this if they think you’re loud and confident. Idk what it is it’s not even necessarily bad or annoying it’s just like why.
There was a stoner I liked very much when I was playing age of Conan some ten or more years ago. He would roll up into the vent, yell my name and rip a fat one on mic before vanishing again. Always made me feel special. It was like a dog that would greet you by barking as loud as possible and wagging his tail so hard it leaves a dent in the wall when your car rolls up. Everyone was luke warm to cold on him but he was my fucking buddy and I loved him because he made me feel wanted which I sure as shit wasn’t getting at home!!
Eventually I made the decision to start emulating behaviors that made me feel happy and started doing that in other places. To this day my whole discord chants the nickname of whomever joins the call, like a pack of seagulls who just locked eyes on a delicious spare French fry. There’s nothing quite as amazing as walking into a room and hearing a chorus of loved ones drawing out your name like they were going to sweep you off your feet if they could, slash like a pack of feral dogs ready to bowl you the fuck over.
Someone’s impersonating the CEO and trying to get me to send him a thousand dollars’ worth of gift cards and I gotta say this is the most exciting thing to happen to me in months
He stopped responding after I requested that he fill out a funding request form with the proper client ID codes attached. Idk what he expected trying to scam a corporate office swimming in red tape
What's that poem about the cockroach and the moth where the cockroach is like "I wish I've ever wanted anything the way that moth wanted to burn itself up in that lantern" because we had to read that in high school and it still fucks me up to this day
I was in line at Aldi and this girl with two toddlers in front of me had her card declined and she looked so fucking sad and said “let me call my husband real quick” and it was only 18 dollars, so I just paid for it, and she was very sweet and then as she walked off, the lady behind me said `”You know that was probably a scam, right?” and like, even if it was, like what a sad fucking scam, right? 18 dollars at the Aldi. If you’re “scamming” me for some Tyson chicken and apple juice and cauliflower, then just take my fucking money.
This happened to me, too. A woman had used WIC for the majority of her stuff (which I say from personal experience is such a long and embarrassing process) and to buy the remainder of her groceries, which included diapers and wipes, she used a card, and it got declined. I bought the other $30 of her groceries because hey, I’ve been there, and now I’m not. She was extremely emotional and began to cry and even hugged me. My mom called me on the drive home and could tell I had been crying myself, asked what was wrong, and when I told her what happened, she berated me for being “duped.” I couldn’t believe she could be so disappointed in one of her children for doing something- nice? Is that the hill you want to die on? Getting mad about people needing groceries?
I once paid for a woman’s bill at the vet…it wasn’t a big one, but she was trying to pay for some medication for her dog, and her card was declined. And her lip started trembling, and she says “I don’t get paid until Tuesday, would he be ok until then?”
So I just told them to add the $20 something onto my bill, and I thought she was going to break down crying right there.
And I don’t care if it was a scam or not. Just do nice things for people sometimes.
So this has happened to me but from the other side. Several years ago when my oldest was around three or so, I had my debit card decline at Walmart. It wasn’t a scam or a mistake, I was genuinely broke. Out of money. I checked my bank and discovered I had something like 7 dollars left to my name and a hungry kid and nothing to eat at home. So I sat there trying to come up with the best way to stretch that tiny amount of money to feed my kid. Not even to feed me. I can live on popcorn or something if I have to but my kid was three and he had to eat. So there I am trying really hard not to cry while I slowly take things out of my basket to get it down to under 7 bucks, when a lady tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up and she smiled at me and started putting the things back in my cart. I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t have the money for them but she stopped me right away and said “Don’t worry about it. It’s gonna be fine.” Then she handed the cashier her credit card and said “Ring up all of it.” My kid got to eat because of her. I got to eat because of her. I had laundry soap and deodorant because of her. She could’ve just ignored me silently struggling in that line. She could’ve decided I was a scam and gone home feeling good about avoiding being duped. But instead she chose to help me and she saved us. So maybe the person struggling in front of you is trying to put one over on you or maybe they are just sad and broke and trying to figure out what to do. You get to decide which you want to believe and what you want to do. But I’ll tell y’all, no one has ever been more beautiful to me than that lady in that line who saved me and my baby. Be like her. Be beautiful.
One time, my dad and I were living the grocery store and there was a guy outside asking for money to buy some stuff to take home for his kids. It was around Christmas time. My dad asked him if he could give him groceries instead of money, and the guy immediately said yes, so my dad gave him one of everything we bought (meat, rice, some chocolates, milk, oil). At that time, my dad hadn’t gotten his paycheck because the company he worked for was going through a tough time, but he didn’t care, he saw an opportunity to help someone and he did.
Another time, my dad gave 50 bucks to a guy who said he needed to buy medicine for his kids. I told my dad he was probably going to spend the money on alcohol or something, but my dad said that “whether he was lying or not says something about HIS character, but hearing someone in need and choosing not to help when I have the means to says something about mine”.
vaporwave
kaledo-art
izzy806
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
origamiaround
