artist Tsutomu Nihei.
Jules of Nature
No title available
Xuebing Du
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
sheepfilms
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Kiana Khansmith

@theartofmadeline
cherry valley forever
wallacepolsom

pixel skylines
Cosmic Funnies

if i look back, i am lost
Game of Thrones Daily
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
ojovivo

★
No title available
Fai_Ryy

seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from Azerbaijan
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Bolivia
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@rust-coast
artist Tsutomu Nihei.
Dealing with dickovers
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for
a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.
https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.
These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control
But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.
If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."
What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:
https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf
This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.
But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.
Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax
Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:
https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
Hell yeah moon holiday
Ooh coming up we should celebrate
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
MOON DAY MOON DAY MOON DAY
moon day is 20th July!!!
Scheduling this a day earlier to remind you all and myself about the Moon Day tomorow!
The garbage was from outside the barriers that surrounded Madison Square Garden for Swift’s wedding. Read more at straitstimes.com. Read mor
they probably pay $32 for garbage from taylor swift every year-- each time she releases an album!
This guy's illusions are great
KIM KEEVER American b. 1955
Kim Keever studied Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA and was briefly a thermal engineer working primarily on NASA projects. Keever changed career in the late 1970s to become a full time artist. Yet he has always drawn on his original vocation by retaining a scientific and investigative process in his work, while at the same time displaying an astute awareness of historical landscape art.
Keever’s landscapes, that are at first glance redolent of the Hudson River School and the German Romantic painters, are actually detailed miniature scenes that he builds himself, places in a 200-gallon tank, submerges in water, and then photographs (as shown right). The landscape and the abstract images all have paint dispersing through the water adding a certain character to the constructed landscape in the tank and a high degree of randomness to the abstract images. More recently, Keever has been incorporating balloons to his strictly abstract photographs.
Kim Keever lives and works in New York City and his work is in numerous collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virgina; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, New York; Patterson Museum, Patterson, New Jersey; George Washington University Gallery, Washington DC; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri and Elgin Community College, Elgin, Illinois.
Upcoming exhibitions of Kim Keever’s work in the US include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, 2018, and Figge Museum in Davenport, Iowa. 2019. Keever’s work will be shown internationally at the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation, Berlin, 2018; Kallmann-Museum Ismaning, Museum Haus Ludwig Saarlouis, Stadtgalerie Kiel, 2019; and Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung in Berlin, 2020.
oh,
oh this is absolutely beautiful
I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.
200k notes is insane who the hell are u people
realizing that the online sphere and especially tumblr is NOT a good sample for ‘what everyone thinks’ is so, so, so good for your mental health and moral OCD. i swear to god. realizing that you don’t have to live your actual life like you’re being hunted for sport because the average tumblr user will hunt you for sport for wording something slightly weird or engaging in the wrong stuff or whatever is so incredible. like no you’re actually not fucked up and evil for not donating or for watching that one indie cartoon or questioning a post that everybody is agreeing with. that’s just tumblrs georg making you feel that way
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)
HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")
In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.
A good boss (liege lord) is:
Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.
Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.
Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.
Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.
Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).
Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"
Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.
Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.
Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.
Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.
Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.
Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.
The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.
TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"
(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)
spongebob looking out the window meme but it's me being jealous of everyone w those cunty chinese cigarettes
look at these beauties [x] [x]
Why waste the rain?
I'm obsessed with gardening systems that utilize rainwater without the use of barrels or cisterns. My ultimate fav is using bioswales to catch and filter stormwater on the street.
Fun addition: Dams that utilize trees to catch dirt/ stop erosion, and prevent disaster that can come from broken dams.
Also:
SUSTAINABLE URBAN DRAINAGE! SUDS!
We need more of them, in the right places!
Also, using these to reduce stormwater loads in storm events, particularly in places with combined stormwater and sewage systems, could/would be helpful at reducing river discharges of raw sewage. (If climate change is factored in at system level cos more rain in less time needs to be accouted for at rhe large scale designs...)
Plus using constructed wetlands to retain these discharges and treat them before rivers too!
I trust your knowledge evil wizard
I cast fireball 25 feet over my solar panel as many times a day as my spell slots permit. I used to use prestidigitation, but it takes a lot of turns to power my EV that way.
okay but what about a FEMALE podcast protagonist who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars. could you be normal about her or would the misogyny prevail
#pls someone recommend me podcasts like this
GLADLY
The one I tagged is The Silt Verses, starring Sister Carpenter who is one of my favorite protagonists in anything EVER. The Silt Verses is fantasy-horror tragedy set in a world where gods are very present, very active, and very hungry. Human sacrifice is what powers this world and all of society is structured around this fact. In this world of gods and laws and sacrifices and late-stage capitalism, Carpenter is a worshipper of an illegal river god, who she has done so many terrible things in the name of, and who she is losing her faith in. Carpenter is a stubborn survivor, grouchy and standoffish and carrying the weight of so much doubt and pride and regret and she CANNOT catch a break—she’s not the whimpering type but everything else fits her to a T and I love her.
Another one that absolutely fits the bill is The Pasithea Powder, a sci-fi space opera about the aftermath of a devastating space war. Captain Sophie Green is now a war hero, and Dr. Jane Gonzalez is now a war criminal, and they used to be best friends, and they are… not anymore. The story starts with Sophie on a “friendship tour” after her planet lost the war and has to make nice (she is very bad at making nice) and Jane in prison (for the Unethical Science she was doing, the horror when it was revealed which led to her planet losing the war). They are also both wrecked and haunted by the death in the war of Sophie’s boyfriend and Jane’s best friend, who is haunting the narrative more than just about anyone ever. Jane and Sophie are both A MESS and unfortunately they are the only ones who seem to notice or care that Jane’s unethical science is still being used and there is another war brewing on the horizon. Politics, aliens, slowburn F/F with the most disaster bisexuals you have ever seen. REALLY good.
Talking about women who whimper and fuck up and go to prison and try so so so hard and are hurt and sad and angry and everything: NICA STAMATIS HOW COULD I FORGET MY GIRL NICA from Greater Boston. Greater Boston doesn’t really have a protagonist—it is joyously and deliberately a great big ensemble cast—but the Stamatis siblings Leon, Nica, and Dimitri are where it all started. It’s a magical realism/slipstream story, a mosaic of people interacting in this strange and alternate Boston, centering around the political campaign for the Red Line subway to secede and become its own underground train city. I love every character, even the awful ones, but if you want a woman who whimpers throughout the whole thing and is always on the brink of death (more metaphorical than literal, but still) and thinks she's a monster for the things she's done and saves so many people and hurts so many people and fucks up and tries again and has so so so many scars (again metaphorical, but oh boy her metaphorical scars) That’s Nica.
Drifting slightly farther from the prompt but women who are complete and total emotional disasters who have decided to bottle that all up until they someday die in space and then it won’t be their problem anymore, I also sing the praises of Nova NoStar from InCo. Nova is an information courier, an InCo, an interstellar messenger/spy-for-hire selling secrets between planets, who lives alone on her spaceship with only her therapy android for company and she is NOT doing her therapy homework Even Slightly. She’s fine. She’s Fine. (She’s not fine.) But when she rescues a boy from getting spaced—a boy who claims to be the prince of a planet that shouldn’t exist—Nova realizes she’s stumbled on the secret of a lifetime. And maybe she might start to make some real friends along the way. She also gets a nasty bloody abdominal gunshot wound along the way and has to let herself get taken care of by her not-yet-exactly-a-friend-but-getting there. if you’re looking for that. Which on this post you probably are.
OP: When I put on Hanfu, I suddenly realized that I'm a modern person.
(A growing trend among Hanfu enthusiasts is skipping elaborate traditional updos and pairing Hanfu with everyday modern hairstyles for daily wear. Many still opt for classic Hanfu hairstyles on special occasions such as visiting museums.)
I hate when king arthur has all these fussy little steps in the instructions and you're like "no way do these fussy little steps matter" but you try it and they do. they matter so much.
I thought you meant Camelot quests and I was like "that's fair, 'never pick a four leaf clover on the last Wednesday of the month' IS a fussy little step that shouldn't matter" but then I was like "wait isn't that also a flour company"
nooo I am not a beleaguered knight of the round table I am making elaborate focaccia 😭
sufficiently advanced baking is indistinguishable from a Camelot quest
"becomes" 🤨🙄
portal 2 is an american gothic horror story about an incredibly traumatized and exploited girl who was forced into a perpetual hell of servitude by the forces of capital and infinite growth. portal 2 is about how science owes its greatest achievements to women who never received any credit or control over the industries that they created. portal 2 is about how tech companies dehumanize and exploit feminized labor. portal 2 is about physically exploring a woman's repressed memories and realizing she was right to kill all those people with deadly neurotoxin. portal 2 is about fighting the piece of you they created to keep you weak and easy to control, ripping it out, and sending it to the fucking moon. portal 2 is about helping your traumatized girlfriend come to grips with her violent past. portal 2 is about how tech CEOs are so fucking stupid they would probably die from snorting moon rocks. portal 2 is about rape and exploitation and capitalism and vivisection and everything that would make you go 'ewwie' if it wasnt happening to a gigantic robot