Starful

Welcome to the mildly chaotic, tiny habitat of a weird, creative human. I'm Starful. :) "When it rains, look for rainbows. When it's dark, look for stars." -Oscar Wilde

[herpsandbirds]

Blue Clipper (Parthenos sylvia), family Nymphalidae, Chiang Dao, Thailand

photograph by Michael Khor

[croaksac]

via Seattle Times:

Local Ballard raccoon has been spotted thriving in a remarkably unique and charming body

Yes he(?)'s actually factually real and has even been given an extremely millennial nickname: Jimothy. Wildlife experts advise everyone to just leave him alone and let him live his life

[herpsandbirds]

May I ask for some buntings? The brighter the better!

Rose-bellied Bunting (Passerina rositae), family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to a small area of southern Mexico

photographs: Birdquest & Saad Towheed

Orange-breasted Bunting (Passerina leclancherii), family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to Mexico

photograph by Greg Lavaty

Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea), male, family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes

photograph by Robert S. Parker

Painted Bunting (Passerina ciris), male, family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes, Eastern U.S.

photograph by David Morgan & Joseph Morlan 

Varied Bunting (Passerina versicolor), male, family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes, West TX, USA

photograph by David Hollie

Lazuli Bunting (Passerina amoena), male, family Cardinalidae, order Passeriformes, Idaho, United States

photograph by Ceredig Roberts

[yourreddancer]

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.

[destiel-news-channel]

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

JK Rowling deadnamed and posted 'upskirt' photo of trans woman on X

The wealthy author escalated a social media spat that resulted in posting a photo from a 2023 event at the Institute of Economic Affairs in

[solarishashernoseinabook]

Let's not beat around the bush: Children's author JK Rowling sexually harassed someone. In some jurisdictions, this would count as sexual abuse. JK Rowling has committed a sex crime against a woman and fell back on the old rape apologist standby of "she was asking for it".

I hope your nostalgia is worth it

[existennialmemes]

[scrolling social media] Who the fuck is Jimothy?

[a brief internet search later] Ahh yes, ok I understand. Jimothy is my religion now.

[brekkbrekkel]

Maybe ill make a sticker pack

[wyn-sketch-o-vyn]

I imagine grace is whispering something like "Let me take this burden off of you." While they're slow dancing in the mental health node.

[orbitaltheatre]

The alabaster nudibranch, white-lined Dirona, or frosted sea slug (Dirona albolineata)

[shhawwww]

The Number Two!

[allcops]

“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”

— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)

[noneedtofearorhope]

since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner

Killing of Eric Garner - Wikipedia

this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.

[alanshemper]

On this day, 17 July 2014, Eric Garner was murdered by police enforcing a civic ordinance.

[emeraldspiral]

[questionableadvice]

~ Every Day Home Advice and The Practical Business of Life, Containing The Best and Most Practical Advice in Household Management, 1882

[ariaste]

See, this sounds insane at face value, until you remember that Louis Pasteur had only invented pasteurization in 1865, that Robert Koch published his postulates on the link between microorganisms and diseases in 1884 (after this book was published), and that Dr John Snow's research on the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854 (in which he proved that cholera was waterborne and not caused by bad smells, as the entire medical establishment believed) was not publically accepted until 1866, eight years after his death (and only 16 years before this book was published) -- and despite that, there were still people who doggedly insisted on believing in miasma theory (aka that disease is caused by "bad air" or bad smells) well beyond that.

So the writer of this book isn't actually.... wrong, per se. In an age before they had clean, sanitary, safe drinking water, you probably DID get at MINIMUM awful diarrhea pretty regularly after drinking water. This is why so many people drank small-beer (very low alcohol content, but the fermentation process (and by some preparations, boiling the water) killed the dangerous microbes and made it safe to drink). The popularization of tea actually really cut down on cholera outbreaks and other water-related digestive troubles as well! not only because you have to boil the water, but the tannins in tea also kill off (at least some) bacteria.

And in case you cannot comprehend the state of how breathtakingly "they didn't fucking know" -- If you were really poor in London in the first half of the 19th century, you were often literally dipping a bucket into the nearest gutter, letting it sit for a day for the solids to separate out, and drinking what was left. Even the well-to-do houses with fancy newfangled running water were at risk of waterborne illnesses, because a lot of those water supply companies had intake pipes stuck into the fucking Thames (you know. the famously polluted river that all the sewers dumped into) and were so negligent about filtering it that people sometimes got live eels coming out of their faucets.

So yeah, drinking many glasses of water IS a potentially injurious one and DOES weaken digestive power -- IF you are unfortunate enough to live in the 19th century before public health became a government concern.

(I just read a book on the Broad Street cholera outbreak yesterday, The Ghost Map, and it was riveting, highly recommend -- the Broad Street pump's well, which provided water to thousands of people in a neighborhood of London, was situated two and a half feet away from a cesspit where residents of a house were dumping their sewage. According to reports by the inspectors after the fact, the bricks lining the cesspit were so degraded that they could be removed with hands, and upon excavation, the earth between the cesspit and the well was muddy and saturated with human waste. The well's water level was eight feet below that of the cesspit.)

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[chekhovs-raygun]

@bonyfish

[unheardoracle]

If Your Scene Feels Lifeless, Someone Is Being Too Polite

Stories stall when everyone behaves. Real tension appears when someone:

• asks the wrong question • says something they shouldn’t • notices something uncomfortable • refuses to drop the topic • misunderstands something important • interrupts at the worst moment

Conflict doesn’t always look like shouting.

[ariaste]

Couple more options for tension:

They want something REALLY REALLY REALLY bad, but for some reason they can't ask for it -- or can't have it even if they did ask.

They don't notice something that the audience HAS noticed (like in a horror movie when the monster is sneaking up behind the protagonist, or if someone drinks a glass of unboiled water during a cholera outbreak because they don't know about germ theory)

Takes a risk (or otherwise does something they "shouldn't" do) which the audience has to sit through for a prolongued period of time (e.g. slips away from the party to go into the host's private office and rifle through their papers before the guards catch them)

Loses when they thought they were going to win

[aroarolibrary]

I’ve been meaning to make this for everyone asking for weeks and I finally found the time to do it. Thank you everyone who loved this cover, it is truly overwhelming the positive response this has gotten. For all of you that wanted a printable book cover this is for you!

Top = dimensions for a hard cover.

Bottom = dimensions for a soft cover.

And, because I am worried about Tumblr messing with the quality I’ve officially set up a Google drive to share these as PDFs along with the high quality tiffs for anyone that wants to do a custom hardcover (Please see this amazing bookbinding job by @autumn--stars!!!)

Additional thanks to @dathen who let me quote this post for the back panel of this cover~

Thank you again everyone and enjoy!

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick