Song's Closet

It's all jumbled together, but it's all art

[strawberrycamel]

we really should be calling it fanworks, not content

[strawberrycamel]

I'm here for fun and community not to rp a mega corporation's underpaid social media intern

[kiefbowl]

Let’s say your matrilineal line is fairly consistent and everyone has their daughter at 25. So four women in your matrilineal line are born every hundred years. In a thousand years, that’s only 40 women. Like the math is so simple and yet ? You don’t think about it. So in 2000 years, 80 women. So basically, 0 AD started roughly about 80 mothers ago. That’s it.

[hawthorn56-deactivated20230602]

I’m……… i’m a little drunk n cannot deal with this right now

[thevideowall]

Yep

The advent of agriculture around 9500BC was about 450 mothers ago

[quousque]

you can’t just say shit like that without a warning

[annechen-melo]

Many, many mothers ago, when the world was new….

[systlin]

Many of the notes here are saying “But women used to have kids earlier”

Okay. So, assume every woman had her daughter at 20 instead. 

That’s five mothers in a century. 

Fifty mothers in a thousand years. 

One hundred mothers in two thousand years. 

That is five hundred and seventy five mothers since the dawn of agriculture. 

Less than six hundred women, between you and the dawn of civilization. 

You are never so far from your ancestors as you think. 

[selkie-on-land]

I love so much this one :

Many, many Mothers ago, when the world was new…

[funny-tik-toks]

[brightlotusmoon]

[ruffboi-mags]

"How many lines do you have?" "Oh, well let me see... *picks up the script with a human hand and holds it to the muppet's face*"

They're fucking real, okay, they can clearly READ.

[anistarrose]

if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"

[brainrockets]

Do not let your child suffer from spicy bananas!

[yourrottingwife]

SIMPLE GUIDE:

Body Horror: Things that cannot happen in real life. EX: The Thing, stomach mouths, eyes on hands, etc

Gore: Fresh injuries, often severe. EX: Severed leg, gutspill, deep gashes, etc

NEITHER: Healed injuries and burns, congenital differences, missing appendages, etc. If I could theoretically go to the store and see that character browsing the isles- It isn't body horror or gore. That's just a person. *AND the amount of people that tag, not just fictional characters, but real human beings as body horror is staggering. Its not solely a fandom issue, ableism and bigotry against anyone that looks sufficiently "different" is prevalent in real life and has devastating consequences.

(Modified) from my comment left on this post.

[poll-position]

You are given a short-lived curse in which you have a song stuck in your head for a week. On the bright side, you get to pick the song. Which do you choose?

American Pie (Don Mclean)

Bad Romance (Lady Gaga)

Cotton Eye Joe (Rednex)

Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)

Dancing Queen (ABBA)

Happy (Pharrell Williams)

Hot n Cold (Katy Perry)

Single Ladies (Beyonce)

Take Me Home Country Roads (John Denver)

Wannabe (Spice Girls)

We Didn’t Start The Fire (Billy Joel)

9 to 5 (Dolly Parton)

Voting ended onJul 16

[digitaldiscipline]

picking the one that actually did

[theresthesnitch]

Hold on, this is fascinating. Reblog this and tell me in the notes how old you are and if you ever had typing lessons.

[irishironclad]

What in God’s good name is a “typing lesson”

[intjint]

I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not

[irishironclad]

I’m serious what is a typing lesson? What would they teach you? To type? My brother in Christ it is like writing with a pen but technically easier.

[intjint]

Before home computers were very common, people typically only typed for business-related things, so the only people that actually knew how to use typewriters and word processors were authors, secretaries, accountants, etc. These people would take classes for typing bc it was seen as a skill. This gradually fell out of fashion, much like teaching kids cursive

Typing is only intuitive to gen y & z bc most of us learned through computer games or had someone tell us where to rest our fingers. People who never learned to type use just their index fingers, hit one key, take a long time to find the next letter, hit it with an index finger, and repeat until finished

[robin-hood-for-freedom]

34 i played this:

[stilldickslappinthestate]

33 and i started with Mavis Beacon

24 and I had typing lessons all through school.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

34, had typing lessons in 3rd and 4th grade and Mavis Beacon as a kid and I’ve still never used home row except when I was forced to. I type everything with my left hand. The only thing my right is for is using the shift, backspace, and enter keys.

[deuceofgears-deactivated2022101]

43, first had typing lessons in 4th grade on some type of Mac, then my mother bought me a book and a manual typewriter and made me learn to touch-type, for which I am still grateful 30+ years later. I remember how excited we were when we upgraded to an electric typewriter.

Of course, I got hit by nostalgia so hard that I recently bought a manual typewriter and have been writing letters to people with it! I love it to pieces.

[zarohk]

28 and I learned to type through Type To Learn. I have severe dysgraphia to the point where I couldn’t keep up with writing in school early on, so the summer after second grade my parents trained me intensely on all the typing programs they could get, and found ways to help me learn to type fast.

I’m so nostalgic for those games.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

“It is like writing with a pen but technically easier” my brother in Christ children also take writing lessons

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#LMAO yeah^#i had computer class in 2001 where we eventually had to put paper over our hands to take a test to see if we could type without looking#we also played games#i hated the paper thing at the time. i knew i just needed MORE practice. i dont think i got GOOD at typing until a few years after that#also.. when you have a pen. you can just create the letter you need. with a keyboard you have to FIND IT. and its NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER#how is that easier??#but i guess i dont know any kids whove grown up with computers and could probably type before they could write….????? 😳 

Modern kids can’t type before they can write. I mean, most kids understand how to use a keyboard, and pressing letters takes less coordination than writing them so can be started at a younger age for learning to spell, but I’ve worked a lot with kids in the 8-14 year age bracket and they’re usually FASCINATED by how fast I type. (My typing speed is… not impressive. If they made me take one of those speed/accuracy tests they used to do for admin or data entry jobs, I would NOT pass.) But many of the kids I’ve worked with take my comfort and familiarity with a keyboard (I’m a writer) as some impressive, magical skill, because an awful lot of them are letter-peckers.

[peregrineggsandham]

24, learned actual touch-typing when I was maybe 4 or 5 with this, the sound effects still live rent-free in my brain:

The shift keys on our computer were broken, so up until high school I would type capitals by turning caps lock on for a single key and then back off again.

[average-monster]

I’m 39. We had typing lessons every year throughout elementary school. I never really got good at it until I started playing mmos, though.

My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. They’ve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesn’t even know the term “home row”. I don’t know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.

I’ve gone what I can to help them learn how to type, but I’m not a teacher.

[iconuk01]

Mid 50′s.

Typing classes were only availble to those taking the secretarial class, which was not open to boys.

It should be noted that there is a distinction between typing as it used to mean and word processing. Typewriters were unforgiving machines, not only could you not cut, paste or delete (for obvious reasons) so your spelling had to be very, VERY good, but the legibiity of each letter produced depended on how hard you hit the key (unless you went to a fancy school which had electric typewriters, which were not the norm).

Those of us who were subversive enough to learn keybaord skills through computing had a MUCH easier time of it. Though it was often offset by the shitty keyboards some computers had, and YES, I’m calling you out ZX81!

If you can’t see any depth to those keys, you are correct, they have none because the ZX81 keyboard was a damned membrane!

But believe me, if you could learn to typeat a decent speed on of these, then NOTHING could stop you, expcet for the fact that the odds were good you were typing faster than it could process input.

It’s successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.

[physicist-pi]

Genuinely as a computing teacher in the 11-18 age group, I’m saying this now:

We need to bring back typing lessons to the curriculum. The kids will fly if you give them a tablet or smartphone but they have no clue on how to use a keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. If the senior PE class decides to be twats and pry up the keys and swap them round, I will still have 14/15 year olds unable to type because the keys are swapped. And I often don’t notice when helping them because I just.. touch type.

I legitimately broke a Higher Computing Science (so a 16 year old who had chosen to do computer stuff) by showing him how Ctrl+H let him find and replace because he’d made a consistent error in his code and I could see him going back and adding up all the time he’d spent trying to find all the incidences of a specific variable in his code and there I was showing him CTRL+F and all these things.

These kids might not pick a computer based subject after the age of 13 and half of them don’t understand file systems, version control, difference between cloud vs local storage, how to save, etc.

So many kids would just turn off the monitor and think that was the computer, usually leaving themselves logged in (to the point I locked the monitor power button and had multiple posters up reminding kids to press the spacebar on the keyboard to wake up the monitor first).

Basically, digital literacy is being fucking stolen by the appification of the digital platforms available to kids.

[doomhamster]

I’m in my 40s and I had typing classes in my second to last year of grade school, using some really ancient computers that took forever to boot and AFAIK only ran that one program. I still technically know how to touch type properly, though I never bother because my own hybrid system works well enough.

[rebels-cairn]

I’m 40 and I had to take a typing class in high school. I can still technically touch type, but I do it in a half-assed kind of way that isn’t very fast and results in a lot of mistakes.

[alienbooknose]

40s and typing class was one of the required ones in the middle school rotation. (We also had a basic cooking skills class, basic sewing, wood shop, metal shop and foreign languages. For the languages, you took each one that would be offered in HS so you could pick what you would take. Everyone took all of these and other specials in a rotation that meant you had about 8 weeks of each.)

My school was unusual because we had computers but they had a room full of actual typewriters for the typing class. So I learned to properly touch type on a typewriter even though it was the 90s. I happened to get involved in an online RP chat at the time that was on a website where it didn’t load what everyone else was saying until you hit send on your text or refreshed the page. So I had some incentive to learn to type fast and I did. (Steelsings I miss you!)

I’m a teacher now and kids still marvel at my ability to look at them and have a conversation and type something else. I also regularly teach high school seniors how to use things like CTRL F. I have been saying for pretty much my whole career that we need to stop assuming kids are naturally good at tech (fuck you concept of digital natives) and go back to teaching this stuff. It’s not better with the ipad generation- it’s worse. They only understand apps and not real computers.

Also, for the person upthread who mentioned the letters being not in order - there’s a reason for that! They invented the QWERTY keyboard arrangement to slow typists down because people were going too fast for the machines. There were other keyboard arrangements (DVORAK for example) that people can actually type faster at once they learn them but qwerty has stuck.

Huh… apparently that’s a myth! It was designed to speed up typing? TIL

QWERTY - Wikipedia

QWERTY - Wikipedia

“Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[4]: 162  but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that to place often-used letter pairs farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands.”

Well there’s still a reason for it.

[digitaldiscipline]

In my 50’s; typing was an elective in high school into which my parents forced me, rather than let me stay in small engine maintenance shop class I enrolled in because it was more fun and interesting.

This was doubly offensive, since I already knew how to type from writing school papers since second or third grade (ie: the early 80’s).

[songscloset]

56, and I took a typing class. On typewriters (I still miss the clack of the keys and the Ping,swoosh!! is the carriage return). I think the class was offered in early high school, but it wasn't required.

I still touch type and very quickly.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

BREAKING NEWS: screenshots from your phone not an appropriate format for submitting work in college classes.

[json-derulo]

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

probably would've been quicker and easier to just photoshop them in but no, this student took a refreshingly creative, arts-and-crafts approach to getting an academic misconduct case

[chaotic-archaeologist]

The one thing I will say for AI is that it's made me much more appreciative of homebrewed bullshit

[birdandmoon]

What to do if you find a baby bunny.

Patreon | Mailing list

[songscloset]

This leaves out the important task of cooing at the bunnies (baby and adult) from a distance.

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[millenniallust4death]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[millenniallust4death]

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

[psycorax]

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

[millenniallust4death]

Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.

[mushroomjar]

[ID: A photo of a man and dog at a water park on a sunny day. The man is barefoot, wears a red shirt and glasses, and is ducking down (so you can see the top of his head and only a slice of his face) as he runs through a series of arches in blue, yellow, red, and green. A leashed black dog with golden coloring on back legs and at the ruff of the neck runs at the man’s side. The arches spray jets of water, hitting the man and dog from nine angles around a three-quarters semi-circle. Both are soaked. The dog’s face is turned outward and up, appearing to bite at the water. /end ID]

[vixvigil]

it’s never a normal temperature anymore it’s always some fucking bullshit

[tahthetrickster]

did a bit of driving through the state of georgia today and wound up driving through a small town that i later discovered was called newborn, which is an odd name but doesn’t technically have anything wrong with it, except for the fact that i nearly gave myself whiplash doing a double-take at a building sign advertising NEWBORN TAXIDERMY

[o-craven-canto]

NEWBORN TAXIDERMY

your move, Hemingway

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[alpaca-clouds]

Okay, you know what? Given that over the last week I have seen at least one of the common myths of "things you should not do in the heat" come over my dashboard, let us quickly go over this:

If it is hot, you will need to drink more than normally because you are sweating. You can drink too much, though usually your body knows how to regulate it.

Yes, if it is liquid and not alcoholic it counts to your drinking intake. Yes, drinking lemonades, coke and whatever counts. All of it is still mostly water with some sugar and flavors added. It is fine. Be careful about taking in too much caffeine though, as it is a mild diuretic (means it makes you pee more and hence lose more water).

Yes, you also need electrolytes as you sweat them out. But you do not need to drink sports drinks. Eat some yoghurt with fruits, or some watermelon with salt, or maybe cold soup. It will refill your electrolytes.

No, it is not dangerous for you to sleep in front of a ventilator. This is a complete myth that has absolutely no basis in science whatsoever and literally originates with an Urban Legend. Especially with the recent heat wave in Europe for a lot of people the alternative is the possibility of heat stroke. It is fine. Sleep in front of that ventilator. Just make sure you are not getting too cold.

No, using sunscreen does not stop you from taking in Vitamin D, unless you are permanently using super high standard sun screen and are reapplying it every 6 hours as intended. And let's face it: you are not. Your skin gets enough UVB to make Vitamin D, don't worry about it. Skin cancer is worse.

Yes, switching between a very hot outside and a very cold context (be it super high AC or just jumping into cold water) can be a danger for your cardiovascular system, though unless the weather is very hot or the water very cold making the contrast very extreme, it is normally not a danger to people who do not have otherwise issues with their cardiovascular system. Though being a bit careful and allowing yourself to acclimatize is not a bad idea in general.

Yes, you should definitely not leave any living thing in a car while it is hot. Just don't. Cars heat up while standing very quickly and will become a death trap. If you leave an animal or a child alone in the car for even just 5 to 10 minutes, they might die. Don't do that shit.

Yes, you need to be extra careful about your medications. For once, most medications are not meant to be stored at above 25°C (don't ask me what this is in American units). But also a bunch of medications - especially psychoactive medications - will make your body worth at temperature regulation. So be careful.

Yes, you need shadow. Ideally the shadow of trees, because there is indeed a difference between that and the shadow of a building. But any shadow is good, especially during extreme heat.

In the same vein: be also careful about drugs during heat waves - like, the recreational type. Some of them work differently when your body is warmed up like that. Just... ideally read up online on possible side effects that might occur/be worse if taken during the heat.

Generally speaking: stay hydrated. Stay cool. Try to do it as well as you can in your respective situation. Stay safe.

[babbleismysuperpower]

25ºc = 77ºf for the overheated americans in the audience.

[fairycosmos]

i hate when rich people condescend with the whole 'money can't buy happiness' argument like listen. just because buying your fourth car didn't fill the void in your deluded disconnected-from-reality life doesn't mean not having to worry about food/ bills/medicine wouldn't greatly improve the mental health of literally everyone else on the planet

[durnesque-esque]

Fun fact: they've done studies and money DOES buy happiness, but it tops out after a certain amount (nowadays around $500,000)

So yeah, having food / bills / medicine & a fair amount of leisure covered by income DOES buy happiness, but excess wealth depletes the effect exponentially.

[s-leary]

Amazing moments in Dads: my friend’s dad’s critique of Frankenstein was, “I just don’t think the author had read science fiction before.”

[commonplacefolklore]

he's right but at what cost