[symptomofloves]

home in cardigan, uk

[targetedknowledge]

[r2x2]

The Amnesty International report that JK Rowling is trying to censor through legal threats.

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

[cbarc]

Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.

[hunter-rodrigez]

Accessibility tip:

If you want to automate your home a bit, but you don't want any "smart" tech, you can just buy remote controlled power sockets instead

They are a lot cheaper and easier to set up and use than some home automation smart tech nonsense

They don't need an app (but some models come with optional apps and there are apps that are compatible with most of these)

Many of them use the 433mhz frequency to communicate, which makes most models compatible with each other, even if they are from different manufacturers

The tech has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time to come

You don't have to put any fucking corporate listening devices like an amazon echo in your home

Models for outdoors exist as well

[bisexualbaker]

[Image: Five electrical outlet enhancers accompanied by two remotes; each of the remotes has ten buttons: Two for each outlet (one on, one off).]

[ofwordsandwaltzes]

Cannot express enough my love for these. My entire apartment is on five circuits, controlled by two duplicate remotes. I can turn off the living room lights from my bed, if I forget, without getting up. And no apps needing so nothing to hack or spy on you.

[epiphainie]

paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul look at him paul loo

[thingsfromthedirt]

hand-painted Coney Island souvenir brooch

[cleverartcollection]

Marginalia on my jacket! This was such an impulse project but I’m very pleased with how it turned out!

Details:

[sca-nerd]

omg omg omg omg omg

[haaarpb]

[roseredfingers]

[one-time-i-dreamt]

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

[red-mercer]

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

[sreegs]

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

Yahoo’s grand plan for Tumblr was to turn it into a “next-generation PDF”

They didn't really get it.

[noctumsolis]

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

[sreegs]

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

[virdigrishammer]

you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.

[ralfmaximus]

Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.

But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.

But first, some context.

See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.

Adobe changed all that with PDF.

Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.

Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.

Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.

Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.

Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.

If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.

(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)

So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.

The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.

"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"

Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".

@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.

[cyle]

the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)

[hugtheteadrinkthekitten]

Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.

[prokopetz]

Level 1: The author's unintended implication.

Level 2: The author's unexamined assumption.

Level 3: The author's ill-informed opinion.

Level 4: The author's misleading conclusion.

Level 5: The author's mendacious justification.

Level 6: The author's We Don't Talk About That.

[draconym]

It's nuts how common it is to not allow children to be angry, even (especially) in households where adults are angry all the time. As a child I knew my own anger was unacceptable--not just expressing it outwardly but feeling it at all. So now as an adult my immediate reaction to my own anger is often to feel guilt instead of like. Noticing when someone is being rude or unfair or my boundaries are being violated or whatever. fucked up.

[maxknightley]

being a jack of all trades is dope as fuck honestly. it's like I'm doing crop rotation inside my own brain

[alliluyevas]

at a-levels when we were in the russia side of our history course there was a girl who kept referring to "zinomenev" which was a ship name for zinoviev and kamenev, but then a different girl used it in a mock exam under the apparent impression it was the name of a single individual, so she was banned from using the portmanteau in class

i’m deleting my blog because nothing can top this honestly

[mapsontheweb]

US climate with equivalent cities from around the world.

Keep reading

[shabbytigers]

This is the greatest map I have ever seen. I want an interactive version where you can click on any city in the world and get a pop-up list of all the climate-equivalent cities.

[shabbytigers]

so it turns out this exists and it makes a fine rabbit hole for passing the time during a conference call

[queenbookwench]

OK, this is super neat and also a great tool for writers’

[eroscestlavie]

everyone envies me for my Mateo Point

[lost-lycaon]

Lilac breasted roller, surveying the insect buffet on the savanna.