my name is rev and i have interests that range from music to fiber arts to writing and Several Fandoms. also code but that doesn’t seem to lend itself so very well to social media. i'm in my 20s, in Europe, and here are some sideblogs for slightly more filtered content, since my main (this one) is where everything else goes
words and writings
guild wars 2 OCs and nonsense
warframe shenanigans and yelling
be advised that i have a neocities
common tags:
rev writes code (i write and think about computer code and programming sometimes)
rev.txt (non reblog shouting-into-the-void type posts)
rev fibers (fiber arts such as crochet and spinning and felting and general wool things)
[rev gardens](https://www.tumblr.com/revukanfendrenim/tagged/rev gardens) (i have a garden since recently and it's fun as long as the slugs don't feel like participating)
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses.
Free Courses from Stanford.
Free Courses from MIT.
Free courses from Yale.
Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx
Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses."
Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
First time doing a thing with rolags that's bigger than 1-2 of them! At 67g this is still small but way bigger than all but one project I have spun so far, and that one was a commercial braid, so this very much feels special
Distributed them into two gradients for the two plies. From experience I know i can cram about 25g of fiber on one spindle so i'll play it safe and split this entire load into four (two rolags/three rolags for both plies)
I'm doing a square metre of flax with help of a museum, and they send out instructions on what to do with it every so often. I'm almost at the harvesting point. One of the things I'll be doing after the retting (letting the bast break down) is rippling (removing the seeds by combing the stem).
In Dutch this step is called repelen. In Dutch, Rumpelstiltskin is called repelsteeltje (ripple stem). So now I'm wondering if the name of the central character in the flax centred story is related to flax production.
My paycheck isn't processed until Monday. My deadline for being able to split rent and keep my apartment is Sunday night.
I'm selling every character in my TH, which you can find here
I need to somehow make 500 dollars in 48 hours.
Every single one is available. Literally even Jack. Some of them are going to be pretty expensive.
Even if you don't want to buy a character or anything just share this and circulate it, anything helps, I dont know what I'm going to do I can literally see the paycheck about to clear. It's in my upcoming transactions but nobody fucking cares.
If it isn't in by the fifth it doesn't matter. I'm so tired . I'm going to fucking lose everything because of this if I can't come up with the funds.
If someone wants to pay and be reimbursed I can do that too once my check comes in. Just
Need 350 more now but I've got some down. Holy fucking shit. It's even worse because my bank has a members guarantee that they'll pay you early on a federal holiday, release your funds the day before if it falls on a Friday, but I guess this time they said fuck you about it.
Which makes me feel like I'm going fucking crazy. I'm almost halfway there. I can't even like pawn shit because of the bank holiday
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
It's that time of year again and I think we should all enjoy this, as well as familiarize yourself with your local fireworks laws, the non-emergency line or see if there's a fireworks reporting hotline. I would very much like to not be in the path of a wildfire.
You know, on my second read through I'm starting to think - and I mean this with all the love in my heart - that Murderbot might be a little bit of a dumbass
In its defense, it does mention at some point that SecUnits aren't given much in the way of education beyond what is needed to be a murderbot, and I doubt that education includes things like what an anagram is.
That is absolutely true, and that's a detail that I love! Because it isn't Murderbot's fault that the company gave it inadequate information, and its very clear that they did not prioritize their SecUnits education (or safety or personhood or a lot of things really) Despite that, Murderbot really is incredibly resourceful, creative, and intelligent, despite what it insists to the contrary. It went "Oh god a combatbot we're all going to die!" and then 3 seconds later it was dead due to Murderbot's expert analysis and planning, and we see it do that a lot!
But then we have these other instances, where it misses a few things, but the thing is, it's doing it on purpose. If we look, we find that in several instances - the anagram one, for instance - the initial realization with PSELR that it doesn't remember the right word and can only think of anagram happens way before it casually calls ART's name an anagram. There is a significant passage of time. And in the instance of the forensic sweep - which I didn't include in my post but it was already really long - there's a quote where it comes up a second time (after a significant delay) and Murderbot goes 'ah, so they do work that way!' indicating it, again, didn't bother looking real ones up. As we know, Murderbot has constant feed access that it cheerfully abuses at every waking moment. it oftentimes gathers analyzes, and utilizes, and even repackages vital information in seconds, when it would have taken a human hours (or longer) to do the exact same thing! Because Murderbot really is intelligent, and frankly, has a lot of processing power.
Even though there was a lot going on in both books, Murderbot did have more than enough time to download a dictionary (especially with it's processing power, and I honestly bet Perihelion has one on board, let's be real), but look at what it says! It says "whatever", and it means it. It knows it can be vague and incorrect (it feels safe enough to get something wrong) and Ratthi and Amena will still be able to understand it.
All of this to say, now that Murderbot isn't under the thumb of the company, it absolutely has access to all kinds of education modules that could cover all of this, including a basic dictionary that would be infinitely less complex to download and integrate into it's own systems for reference than a bunch of other things we've seen it do. We've seen it scan soap operas for the right response to emotional moments, a dictionary would be nothing. But it doesn't do that! It shoves aside the education modules and snatches every single soap opera it can get it's data-equivalent-of-hands-on. Education modules? Murderbot says. I don't have room for that, this new serial has 68 seasons and they're still making more.
I hope this doesn't come off as ranting at you (you're definitely not the only one rightfully pointing out that it's education modules were shit), I'm actually just buzzing with energy thinking about Murderbot, and you're right that it was deprived of a lot of opportunities. But I love the details that go into it not knowing everything, because it says a lot about Murderbot's personality, and its newfound freedom of choice, and it also demonstrates intelligence versus wisdom. Murderbot is very intelligent, but not always wise, and it has the freedom to exercise that lack of wisdom (that dumbassery, if you will) just like any other being with free will does! Just like I do! Would my life be a lot easier if I stopped and figured out who was holding my student loans? Probably! Am I, instead, reading the Silmarillion? Yes! Yes I am. I'm a dumbass, and so I look at Murderbot and I see a fellow dumbass, and it makes me really happy. Murderbot can choose what it wants to learn now, and what it wants to learn is every single plotline on Days of Our Lives
