consume the darkness, return it to light

Dirk/30 This is just a random blog of things that I find interesting, as well as a few creative endeavors here and there.

[blumineck]

I’ve got a lot of Thoughts(tm) about The Odyssey at the moment, but damnit Blum I’m an archer, not a film critic, so here’s something in my lane!

[purplepints]

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

Oldest human footprint on the Moon, made July 20, 1969 on the Sea of Tranquility, Earth's moon.

[tumbalendar]

Happy moon landing!

[millenniumscreampuff]

[lady-halibuts-chambers]

[hillbillyoracle]

✨ Bullet Journal for Cheap

The Original Bullet Journal

A few years ago, I found out that it was not necessarily common knowledge that bullet journaling was not making your own planner in a notebook with lots of art supplies but rather a simple system designed by Ryder Carroll - a designer who grew the system over decades to assist him with his ADHD. All it requires is a notebook + pen. That's it.

[ Bullet Journal - How to Bullet Journal ]

Here's a quick 5 minute guide to the absolute basics which can be done in any kind of notebook with just a pen. This is the starting point. It's worth noting he's since updated the key some - use whichever version works for you.

[ Bullet Journal - Bullet Journal in 5 Minutes a Day (for busy people) ]

Here's what a day in the life of using a bullet journal looks like. Basically, it's helpful to check in with your bujo in the morning and evening but you don't necessarily have to thanks to how flexible the system is.

[ Bullet Journal - How I Run My Entire Life (using any notebook) ]

Here's a slightly broader view of the system and how to make sure it's serving you in particular. It's focuses on the weekly rhythms of the systems to show how reflecting can help you notice patterns and make helpful changes as you go.

[ Bullet Journal - Journaling this way increases my mental clarity ]

This video focuses on the monthly ritual. I often turn it on and follow along at the end of a month as I'm setting up my next one.

In general, if you're ever stuck with bullet journaling, I really recommend checking out what Ryder Carroll has put out first. He's very focused on keeping things simple and his channel is a decade plus gold mine of little ways to use the system to it's fullest - with nothing more than your notebook + a pen.

Check out:

Habit Tracker

Daily Dashboards

Collections and Threading

Other's Examples

Dot grid notebooks are great but if they're too expensive or not available it's totally possible to use a lined notebook. Here are some examples.

[ JashiiCorrin - Can you bullet journal in a lined notebook? ]

There's so many good tips for journaling in lined notebooks with cheaper paper. It's less minimalistic so don't feel like you have to include everything she does but it is proof that you have options if your tastes lean more artsy.

[ Claudia Spaurel - Simple and Minimalist Bullet Journal Set Up ]

Great example of what bullet journaling in a lined notebook looks like -especially with minimal supplies.

I'd personally recommend putting the monthly log on two pages when there's not enough lines for all days. It's intended as a memory keeping/jogging device so its important to have room to write in important events after the fact as well.

[ lootengstudio - bullet journal on a budget + on a lined notebook ]

Another lovely example of what you can do with minimal supplies. I think the demonstration of faux-caligraphy with a gel pen and some of the design elements she adds could be useful for people who like a little more artistic flair in their set ups.

I would caution folks the setting up lots of trackers is how people get burnt out on bullet journaling and there are simpler ways to track most things shown on the monthly log. See Ryder Carroll's habit tracker.

Easy Extras for Bullet Journals

Just because you're using a lined notebook doesn't mean you don't want it to look nice. Here are some strategies you can use with minimal supplies to decorate a given page.

[ JashiiCorrin - BULLET JOURNAL HEADERS ]

Lots of ideas of headers and fonts to use for your different spreads. Instead of fineliners and Tombows, I'd recommend a good gel pen and Crayola Super tips (I reach for these more often than my Tombows). Just make sure the gel pen goes on last where ever possible.

[ AmandaRachLee - 50 Bullet Journal Doodle Ideas! ]

A plethora of cute doodle ideas for any pages you might want to decorate. Her other videos, while not true to the bullet journal system, have lots of lovely ideas for themes and easy drawings to do.

[ life with hope - everything I collected for my junk journal this week ✨ 24 ideas of things you can include!! ]

This video has some great ideas of the types of things you can collect for junk/ephemera journaling. Love the fruit/veggie sticker page. All you need is some glue, glue tape, or tape to get started. You can collect things for free and paste them into your dailies or fill pages starting in the back for some added memory keeping.

[ Created and Made Studio - Stretch Your Supplies with this Amazing Play-Doh Stamping Technique! ]

Play-doh stamps are so versatile. You don't need a bunch of colors of ink, really just one will do. It's great for backgrounds on a title page or a background for pasting in ephemera. Good for memory keeping too. You can sometimes find ink pads in dollar stores.

My Thoughts

I started with a gel pen and a cheap graph paper notebook I got on sale at an office supply store 12 years ago (~$8). Use what you can find and afford to start, stretch it as far as you can and have fun doing it. Focus on the system.

I personally favor memo/A6 notebooks because I'm more likely to take them with me and have them on me when I need them. The more you use it, the more you'll get out of it.

I've gotten a lot out of printing off printables for ring planners and pasting them in when I need something I don't feel like setting it up (a proper calendar for instance). Check out Peanuts Planner Co to start.

Don't be precious with it. Perfectionism isn't a virtue, but courage is. Also it's literally just paper. Turn the page if you don't like something you made. That's life.

Remember the whole point of the bullet journal is that it's flexible. You don't have to use it every day. You can't fail at it - even if you drop off for a month or more. Sometimes it's what you need and sometimes it's not, use it as it serves you.

Happy Bujoing!

[pomarrillo]

looked at so many photos of people hugging cows for this one

ardbert my goat

[ethernalium]

Resident Evil 4 (2023)

[hagiomoto]

Is there anything he haven't wear yet

[balaclava-trismegistus]

a condom

[taxidermycatgirl]

you’re just jealous my blood is all over the floor and yours is stuck inside your body

[subwaybug]

❎ "my current mental state can cause me to be anxious, irrational, and overly reactive at times"

✅ "some sort of evil shadow self lurks within me that can only be defeated via battle of the mind combat"

[tearlessrain]

funniest possible site to get this on

[shitpostingkats]

Zack Fair is one of the video game guys ever made. He's a sweetheart. He believes government propaganda. He commits multiple war crimes and says "Oh yeah!" afterwards. He joins newsletter fanclubs for people he knows in real life. His coworkers call him puppy dog to his face. He's the beating heart trapped under the floorboards of the narrative. One time he pretended to let a nine year old beat him up. He's a country hick and proud of it. He loved one unimportant loner man so hard that the entire story of final fantasy vii exists. He's a government experiment. He's in a book club.

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[genderkoolaid]

Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.

[cherrispryte]

Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.

[mikkeneko]

Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.

[seagiri]

the girls love apollo

[sexygrammaticalerrors]

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Marriage fucking sucks and I can fully acknowledge that as an aro person but it also scares the hell out of me when I see people starting a family and involving kids with their non-married partners. I don't think people fully realize that unless your partner adopts your child, their only legal place in that child's life is fully determined by you and if something happens to you, then your partner's legal rights to that child are gone.

If you want to practically ensure that your partner would get custody of your children in the event of your death, the only ways to do that are 1) your partner adopting your child or 2) you guys getting married. That's it. Your will does not matter except as a suggestion to the court and if you don't create legal plans for your child in case you die, then they could very well end up with the family members you hate or being put in the foster system.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

For a very, very, very long time, queer couples could be living together for years and even decades and raise children together, only for one of them to die and for their queerphobic family members to swoop in, get fully custody of the children, and cut the other parent out completely. This was the NORM and it still is in places without gay marriage. It's one of many reasons why legalization was such a massive relief to people trying to raise families together, because they finally had legal protection for their children.

[lasfloresrotasblogdepoesia]

Unknown Artist, "Porte Veine", 1913.

[millennium-sketchbook]

He’s warning you

Based on this