Butt Kicking for Goodness

I make no promises for content?

[wizardarchetypes]

funniest convo ever with a guy who said 2 me "nobody uses journalism degrees" and i said "my mom has a bachelors in journalism" and he smiled like knowingly and said "yeah, but what does she do?" and i said "she runs a newspaper and publishes romance novels on the side." and he literally said "oh" and nothing else. like he ended the whole conversation there.

[wizardarchetypes]

i've just been informed he has a trombone degree. like the study of playing trombone. which is all well and good, i genuinely think we should all have the opportunity to chase our academic bliss but i do think the trombone studies guy should hesitate to judge the economic value of other people's degrees no

[wizardarchetypes]

i love the tags on this post because there’s other music/instrument majors implying niche field-specific drama like “of course it was a trombone player 😒” and then there’s trombone majors like “this was NOT me for the record”

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[letatlin]

one american thing that confuses me are college application letters. why do you need to write yourself a tragic backstory to go to university, don't you have standardized exams? who's reading through all these bad high schooler essays?

[letatlin]

as opposed to someone's essay they wrote when they were 16, which is a permanent immutable window to their soul,

[evelyn-likes-robots]

It's a humiliation ritual, like everything else.

[theonewhopoops]

Exactly. "Convince me you deserve this more than the guy next to you."

[the-haiku-bot]

Exactly. “Convince

me you deserve this more than

the guy next to you.”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[awkwardtuatara]

the thing about trying to blorbopost about Eärendil is that you just sound like a Tolkien character. "save me Eärendil. Eärendil. Eärendil save me" would fit right in. Á rehta ni, elenion ancalima. Berio nin, Gil-Estel. Gil-Estel. Seron Aearon, annin,

[andthepeople]

always funny to remember darth vader is anakin skywalker. the adrenaline junkie chucklefuck who used to dive head first out of speeders and built a pod racer in his yard when he was like six is now upper-middle management for the evil empire. half of his appearances in the original trilogy are Meetings. vader spends like 80% of his time dealing with bureaucratic bullshit. status updates. team meetings. holo-Zooms. budget rundowns. anakin betrayed the jedi and caused the fall of the republic and his punishment is being CC'd on every email forever. and you know what. he would hate that. the punishment fits the criminal

[tmorriscode]

I HC that Sidious put him in upper management specifically to make that hate flow. He looked at Jedi Anakin and thought to himself: what does this guy like? Jumping out of moving vehicles at 30,000 feet? Well, we won’t be doing *gestures at all of Anakin* that. Put this guy in an office.

[tlirsgender]

They don't tell you this but besides the Beloved Mutual there's also the Longterm Follower who you don't follow back but they're always in your notes and you're kind of watching them. Checking on the longterm follower's bio every so often like turning over a log. She's trans now good for her

[tlirsgender]

Longterm followers I am putting fresh leaves and hrt in your enclosure

[a-book-of-creatures]

I knew I was getting close to Textile City. I could see their monument, a colossal weaving device, looming in the distance.

[necromancelena]

Die temu ad die

[necromancelena]

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

[chef-boy-ar-girl]

It accidentally is latin

[saanah]

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

[santapau]

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

[qqueenofhades]

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

[nudistcat]

@theshitpostcalligrapher

[sekkitsune]

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

[qqueenofhades]

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.

[sekkitsune]

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

[qqueenofhades]

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

[laurenthemself]

how dare you say we error on the scribes

[jtimu]

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu

[pronouncingitwang]

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

[yokowan]

at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.

[le-jardin-inculte]

at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly

[shithowdy]

at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.

[whitachi]

at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.

[araceil]

At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.

[determinate-negation]

actually super basic archival preservation for your personal belongings

label and date everything

dont use adhesives on important stuff they degrade really quickly and can damage things

some paper is much more acidic than others and will degrade and damage things touching it. newspaper and construction paper are the worst and will mess up other papers theyre next to

printed photographs have chemicals that can react really badly to temperatures and dampness and you should keep them separate from other materials

soft and thin plastics also degrade really quickly (unless theyre archival grade) and are the worst to deal with

keep a copy of digital files in at least one separate location (flash drive or hard drive)

personally i think everyone should do this because its worth having a record of your life

[determinate-negation]

a few more things

some inks will fade over time or bleed onto whatever theyre on. archival ink is a thing but there are also just some inks that are more stable

rubber bands break within a few years, paper clips and staples will rust and damage the paper if theyre not made of the right material

exposing photos or any material with colors to light for a while will obviously degrade them over time and theres not much you can to do restore them at that point

you lowkey should print out digital correspondence or materials if you want to keep them long term and be able to find them regardless of what happens to that email domain, website etc. its not uncommon to have printed out email threads in archival collections

these seem to have been more common in the 70s-90s but those photo albums with thin plastic and slight adhesive pages are terrible and will damage your photos and make them stuck forever

this is what acidic paper does to anything its touching after a few decades so watch out

[kropotkindersurprise]

home-burned CD's/DVD's degrade in like 10 to 20 years. flash drives/SSD's need to be powered up now and again to be able to retain their data without getting corrupted (they generally only guarantee data for 1 year without power, although data might stay uncorrupted for a lot longer). Hard drives are more reliable over a longer time of storage.

(i transferred all my old school projects and photos and data and pirated stuff from binders full of burned dvd's to hard drives a few years back and only like half of the files were still recoverable after ~15 years).

[transcyberism]

there are four human activities and they are crafting, stories, math, and fucking around. whatever you're doing is at least one of those four.

[mrvelocipede]

I've been working on adding some knitting stitch instructions to my website. I think that hits all four.

[copperbadge]

I was going to say, cross-stitch is very much all four at once....

[animentality]

[arrowandaxe]

[bee-in-your-binnet]

Coyotes trying their damndest to get domesticated

[gallusrostromegalus]

Thoughts, in approximate order:

You know, given how C. lupus, C. lupus familiaris, and C. latrans can all create perfectly viable hybrids, and that the proto-dogs that domestic dogs descended from much more resembled coyotes than wolves, it's not really a surprise that some yotes are experimenting with domestication.

Goddamn that lady must be fucking shredded to be able to chase down a coyote through a swamp.

"Don't let wild animals into your house, you are not going to make Dogs 2.0, you're going to get injured and the animal killed." is probably obvious enough advice that I don't need to put it in the tags as a reminder.

...I know more than four people on this site that have poisoned themselves trying out 'foraging guides' they found online, two people IRL who tried to keep raccoons at pets, and have a family member who got hospitalized for Cat Scratch Fever after grabbing a feral cat bare-handed. This is apparently, not obvious enough.

Do Not Attempt To Domesticate Coyotes

[collected-sports-bra]

Genuine question:

Could coyotes be domesticated, sometime down the line? I know there are animals like bears that could never be, but coyotes seem close enough to dogs for it to work in many many many many generations.

Or is there something about coyotes that would make that impossible.

[gallusrostromegalus]

The Hare Indian Dog is a now-extinct canine that is strongly suspected to have been a domesticated coyote or coyote-dog hybrid that was bred by the Sahtu people of far northern Canada. The breed went into decline with the displacement and genocide of the Sahtu and other indigenous people of the area, and they could not keep as many of their dogs in the reservations, so the breed eventually comingled back into Newfoundland and Canadian Inuit Dogs. We don't have any preserved specimens to do any genetic testing on, so far as I know.

Could Coyotes be domesticated again? Yes and No.

Yes: They're REALLY closely related and already frequently interbreed with domestic dogs and are in a similar ecological position to the proto-dogs: comfortable living in and around human settlements, especially garbage dumps. Biologically, it's a VERY short hop (possibly as few as 2 or 3 mutations) to domestication for them.

No: The actual practicality of domesticating coyotes is negligible. Humans domesticated dogs in the first place because partially because we needed help with hunting, but probably mostly because we had fuck-all else to do for fun back then. In the modern age of readily available livestock and needing to monetize EVERYTHING or suffer for it, there isn't really much need or interest in domesticating coyotes. It'd take a large canine farming facility, similar to the fox farms of the early 1900's, multiple generations of careful genetic testing and manipulation, and would be goddamn impossible to zone or get insurance for.

The re-domestication of Cheetahs has a slightly better shot because there is a genuine need for LOTS of them as an ecological keystone species and there's decent odds of finding some rich idiots to back that project so they can have The Coolest Pet Cat.

If for some reason there became a widespread need for hunting dogs again, like say, the total collapse of society ala Cinematic Zombie Apocalypse, people would probably stick to domestic dogs, but there would be a lot of cross-breeding with coyotes FAST, especially in the USA Southwest. It's something I'd love to see a post-apocalyptic fiction author explore. That and what happens when various zoo animals eventually break out/are broken out of their enclosures and start populating new habitats. Elephants would be worth their weight in gold in a society with no more functioning bulldozers.

[horsefriend]

[putnamspuppeteer]

For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times. Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.

[brookietf]

[catgirlforeskin]

Happy pride month to her and her exclusively

[seraphiminn]

she made a comic about the experience on twitter

[catboybiologist]

happy pride

[ikindamaybewanthertositonmyface]

An Update from back in October I'm surprised wasn't added to this post. lol

[theweirdwideweb]

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[vigilantsycamore]

eeby deeby... i haven't heard that name in years...

[digitaldiscipline]

[fullmetalwindbreaker]

[lakevida]

[thequeeninyellowlace]

[juney-blues]

how to become retroactively 10 years on estrogen

[juney-blues]

yeah whatever the second best time to plant a tree is now there is always time it's never too late etc etc. but also like half of my problems ultimately trace back to "there was never a chance in hell of me getting on estrogen early enough to avoid the damage testosterone did to me" and I'm allowed to be upset or atleast miffed about it

[juney-blues]

oh you figured it out too late? Well that's a moot point really because your family would've been unaccepting at the time and your country's medical system's method of trans healthcare is "waste as much time as possible in the hopes they detransition or die" so like yeah no matter what it was kinda inevitable you'd have broad shoulders narrow hips and have to spend a bunch of money on laser

[juney-blues]

and like yeah whatever cis women have those too, I'm #fucking valid or whatever. shut uppp I don't caaaaaaare. I don't need to be welcomed to womanhood. I don't need reassurance that clocky girls are valid. I don't even care about passing that much I just want to look in the mirror without being upset. can I have that. can I fucking mourn. can I be a little pissed off and sad that I have to deal with this? can you fucking handle that without shutting me down and telling me I'm wrong to feel dysphoria about anything in the first place?