Land of curious interests

Hello friends! PNW, enby, lvl 28. Never forget to be yourself!

[kineticpenguin]

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

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

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.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[charlesoberonn]

Female Dwarves - With or without beards?

With beards

Without beard

Remaining time: 3 days 17 hours

[charlesoberonn]

Child Dwarves - With or without beards?

With beards

Without beards

Remaining time: 3 days 17 hours

[charlesoberonn]

Baby Dwarves - With or without beards?

With beards

Without beards

Remaining time: 3 days 17 hours

[charlesoberonn]

They shed their baby beards to make room for their adult beards. Like with baby teeth.

[beardedmrbean]

One more in the W column for Japan.

[supersoftly]

Link for extension :3c

[dragon-in-a-fez]

I think companies with lots of desk workers should install this by default

[dreamycastaway]

The original pride flag and the sewing machine it was sewn on

[iwriterobots]

[standandwatchshitburn]

why so silent good messieurs

[nsfwitchy2]

I’m SEVERELY disappointed this post didn’t include the eye witness statement of the mirror crash incident in question

[foldingfittedsheets]

Back in my early twenties when I weighed about 90lbs I was always freezing cold. For this reason I wore jackets like an exoskeleton, layering a button up, hoodie, and an outer long wool coat. The upshot of this was always having tons of pockets, in which I carried a vast array of things.

Practical things like my keys, wallet, chapstick, of course. But also less conventional things like stray buttons, paperback books, little toys, nail clippers, and open bags of candy when I offered strangers new acquaintances candy they always said yes which either says they weren’t raised right or I’m more charming than years of being told not to do that.

I really loved my coats but I did sometimes need to move quicker than they allowed. I remember a friend’s utter astonishment when I saw someone I needed to run up to and said hold my coat. He was left holding my carapace and when I returned he couldn’t stop staring. “You’re so small under there, I’ve thought you were a normal person this whole time but it was all coat!”

At the doctors office getting weighed a week or so later I asked if I needed to take off my coat and boots. She said no, and I stepped on the scale. “A hundred and twenty pounds,” she announced.

My eyebrows shot up and I said, “Sorry, hang on.” I shucked my coat and boots to her impatience and stepped back on.

Her eyes widened and she looked back from me to the coat before saying accusingly, “Ninety seven.”

I nodded and redonned my protective carapace.

[bannertanks]

[ghosthierophant]

[luulapants]

If we wanted to engage in nuance (lol, lmao) on the "are audiobooks reading" debate, we really do need to bring literacy, and especially blind literacy, into the conversation.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.

So, yes, audiobooks should count as reading. But, no, they should not count as literacy.

[naamahdarling]

Finally, a good fucking take.

[creature-adjacent]

Carnivorous plants doin this is so funny to me

They don't wanna eat their pollinators :(

[questionablepastries]

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

this is so petty and hypocritical but I get so annoyed by fictional depictions of people getting drugged or roofied because they always read as people bullshitting something they have no experience with, but then if you asked me to describe it better I’m just like. well I don’t fucking know. on account of the drugs.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

actually I think if I were writing about someone getting roofied I’d have a full chapter of blacked out bars with a few sentences of readable text here and there. the publisher would be annoyed.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

like this but a full chapter:

[existennialmemes]

It's funny when people act like Earth was made for humans. Because like, have you seen the Earth? This place was made for saltwater fish.

Yes humans evolved to live here too, but if we're entertaining the idea that an all powerful deity created the earth for any particular species, it's definitely gotta be something from the ocean.

I'm just saying. If you're looking at a place like "who was this made for?" And around 70% of its surface is not habitable, and actively hostile, to your species, then it's a safe bet it's not you.

[bogleech]

It's giant squids. They only have one predator, which is severely impacted by humans, who find the giant squid inedible

[bogleech]

No i mean they're actually *inedible,* not like small squid. Giant squid flesh is saturated with so much ammonia it will taste like pure piss and make you violently ill no matter how it's treated!

[poondragoon]

They're so freaking jumbo-large that they need some method to manage their buoyancy, but since they're deep-sea *squid,* they don't have the environmental wiggle room or the evolutionary starting material for a swim bladder full of air. Thus, they need to manage it chemically. Their solution is to fill their tissues with an ammonium chloride solution that apparently tastes like salted licorice. When they die, they lose the ability to moderate the levels of this floaty juice in their system, so it floods their tissues, making them taste absolutely vile.

[flootzavut]

"tastes like salted licorice" oh so it's like the Finns and the Dutch who are gonna eat it then.

[knight-of-ashes]

It's midnight on a Sunday and my dash is several reblogs of an unscrollably-long and ridiculously well cited article on hagfish sex. I'm never leaving this website.

[skitskatdacat63]

Love when you watch a period drama and theres some random one scene character who has the most historically accurate looking face ever

[skitskatdacat63]

This is about a random innkeeper in Turn LOL

[scytheofdelphi]

—ˋˏ✧ dragon by witold pruszkowski, 1896 ✧ˎˊ—

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

went to brush my teeth in the dark and thought “huh it’s taking a moment for the mint flavor to travel to my brain, my sensory system is lagging” and then soapy bubbles poured from my mouth as it became evident that I had used pip’s vanicream facial cleanser

[womanenjoyer]

like at least 50% of internet lgbt discourse would evaporate if people quit using the term "spaces" when they mean "discord servers" or "tumblr blogs" because we would collectively realize how stupid that shit is

[otabekisautistic]

“this is a lesbian-only space” no this is the tiktok comments on a chappell roan video

[fae-they]

so are we keeping our glasses on or off during sex

glasses on or off during sex

on

off

i do not wear glasses (u better rb this)

Remaining time: 1 day 1 hour

[queen-mihai]

I don't wear glasses but I'll gladly put some on