I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
---
(If you laughed, please consider supporting my Ko-fi or preordering my book of Strange Stories on Patreon)
It's that time of year again and I think we should all enjoy this, as well as familiarize yourself with your local fireworks laws, the non-emergency line or see if there's a fireworks reporting hotline. I would very much like to not be in the path of a wildfire.
Happy Birthday to my Marceline, 8 years ago today (July 2, 2025) she came into this world five days before her due date to see wtf was so funny 🤣 this post, like many other things, are on a long list of topics to discuss when she’s older lol
It’s July 2 2026 internet, help me wish a Happy Birthday to my brilliant and beautiful 9 year old, Marceline! I’ve shown her (most of) the comments and she says “thank u internet 😁😁”
When you go to the doctor's office, if you're a woman, they should give you a gun to use on the doctor if they dismiss your problem. Same if you're fat. Fat women get two guns in case the doctor really deserves it
I love that Leverage really goes out of it’s way to show us that just because you break the ‘rules’, it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the rules. Rules and laws and society are all made up, at the end of the day, and all you really have is your own moral compass and sense of justice; is this just to you? Is it right? Should it be OK for companies to put people in insurmountable debt for the rest of their lives just because our medical care is so expensive in this modern day and age? No law or rule should change what you know in your heart is right and wrong, and I think that’s the key thing that makes someone a good person in my eyes.
#there was a time when parker wouldn’t have noticed, #not because she lacked the capacity to care, #but because she had narrowed herself, #to stay alive she cut off as many unnecessary things as possible, #watching her get them all back, #is one of the glories of this show (via @seananmcguire)
This scene hit me like a brick. My parents were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt when I was 16 bc I’d had cancer the year before (my treatment ended up being free but the initial ER bills and such were not).
But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.
Ever since I saw this the first time, I’ve imagined it was Parker doing it. That she and Hardison had a free weekend and decided to take it out on a collections agency. That I was one of the lucky ones who got a little Leverage.
Okay but like yeah, that is actually a thing that happens, albeit not exactly like this. I don’t remember the exact process but basically there’s a booming industry to sell peoples debt - the business you owe money to sells it to someone else for a fraction of the money owed, wipes their hands of the whole affair, and now whoever bought your debt is riding your ass to get you to give the money to the. But it’s also entirely possible for people to just… buy up massive amounts of debt for pennies on the dollar, and then just. Forgive it. Because capitalism is a living nightmare, but the system is broken enough that it’s possible to exploit it for good sometimes.
Like, the main reason I know about this is because John Oliver did a piece on debt buying a few years ago, and ended it by revealing that he’d bought 15 million dollars worth of medical debt just so he could forgive all of it. Both to expose how broken the system was because some random fucker like him could buy millions of dollars in peoples debt with zero regulations, and also just to take the record for biggest TV giveaway in history.
yes! if you want to help with the medical debt crisis in the US and have some extra money please donate to RIP Medical Debt if you can. They’re completely legit and really do what they say - you really CAN relieve an incredible amount of debt for the needy with even a small donation. I’m a monthly donor and receive a quarterly report of the debt they’ve abolished, and it truly is amazing. Based on those reports the average amount of debt abolished per person is actually I would say about $600 - which means, if you’re doing the math, that with a $6 donation to RIP Medical Debt, you can potentially pull one person out of a poverty spiral - maybe even one family. For six dollars. that’s a pretty good deal, I think.
I've entered the final phase of my graduate degree program in Folklore and Ethnology. My coursework and fieldwork/data collection complete, I am now in the process of writing my thesis during this summer trimester.
As planned, the support so many of you so generously provided, in addition to an education stipend I earned through environmental work, enabled me to enroll in and attend courses in my program, afford housing, and generally live everyday as a student for the duration of my course modules.
The funds lasted exactly as long as planned (literally to the day, I couldn't believe it lol!), and I could not be more grateful for every cent and word of support I received over this last year and a half.
In the final leg of my program, I must ask for support of one final need: There are quite a few books I need which I cannot access through my university, from friends and classmates, my professors, online archives & epublications, or any other means. Some are difficult to find in the first place to be able to purchase at all.
Put simply: I need some help buying books!
Many of them have Ebook editions for as little as €15,00! Others I have to actually email the authors and ask for personal PDFs, but they still aren't too expensive.
I began a new job recently and am on my way, but I won't have the couple hundred euro it will ultimately cost to purchase all of these books this month in order to have them while I work on my thesis.
If anyone has a few bucks to throw at me, I'd be very grateful for the support! Thank you, so much, for all you've already done!
MY KOFI: https://ko-fi.com/slorglvr1000
Did you know? Tumblr DOES have a post length limit. Strangely, though, it's based on how many blocks of text you have. Supposedly this implies that you can have any length post so long as it's one block of text? Very strange, will have to investigate further.
Two limits! You can have a maximum of 4,096,000 characters in 1 [one] tumblr post. I would work out how many combinations this is, but 26^6,000 is already considered to be "Infinity" by most calculators, and a program I wrote threw an error code.
26^95,000 is already over 134,000 characters long - which would take 33 different text blocks to convey via tumblr. Whenever somebody says we're running out of posts, don't forget that tumblr is needlessly designed for MASSIVE amounts of information [no matter how detrimental it may be for mobile phones].
There are SOME works of fanfiction which are lengthy enough that you couldn't fit the whole thing into one tumblr post, but this is enough to fit Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy in it about 14 times over.
The Lord of the Rings is generally my go-to measuring stick for "long-ass pieces of text", so I must additionally point out that, if written out optimally, about 2 full Lord of the Ringses would fit into one Tumblr post, apparently.
Though I'm not certain if that character count includes spaces, unfortunately, as I got that figure by googling "how many letters are in lord of the rings" and came upon a TikTok that counted the number of letter characters in LotR in order to figure out how many Spaghettios cans would be needed to re-write the entire thing, if one were to cut and paste each individual letter from the cans blackmail-letter style.
For those curious, the numbers are 2,261,081 letters in LotR, which calculates out to 8,795 cans of Spaghettios needed, which would cost about $12,225.
What a way to start my day. The internet truly is a beautiful place.
Hey! Guy who programmed most of the core pieces of the editor here!
So, those are the theoretical limits, yeah. But in practice, the editor is not even close to be optimized to handle these kinds of huge posts: there is a point, far far away from the size of the lord of the rings, that your browser would just crash.
So if you are planning to post long fanfiction, or anything, you better work on something that's optimized for long form (locally, or some alternative to Google docs) and then post in chunks.
So no, Tumblr is not designed to support these massive posts. It's theoretically possible, but that never was a real scenario we were trying to support
I'm honestly very curious of what it would happen if someone tries something like using the API to post the entire Lord Of The Rings. I would assume the request would timeout, but it would be a cool test to run. Anyway, if it works, anyone trying to reblog that post would just insta-kill their browser :D
oh yeah, almost a million characters, 365 text blocks, and the editor is handling it pretty well
Honestly, it works way better than I expected! I guess being plain text and not having to render any fancy formatting is enough for a modern browser to handle it well. Reblogging it took a few more seconds than usual, but went through too. Good job tumblr!
I just tested on my Android phone and it froze the app for about 30 seconds, but when I thought it was going to finally crash, it actually loaded the blog and started working normally
Yes, someone asked me to add a tag so they can filter it out, and I tried that over from the web interface.
For the first post (first book only) there was no issue. Edit loaded, I could add the tag, press Save and done. Note: this was on a PC using Chrome
For the second post (all three books) it worked the same way as the API. I could load up the page and edit it, but when pressing save I'd get an error message. However the edit did go through actually and the tag is now there.
Haven't tried to edit the text itself, but don't think it would make a difference - if your browser can load it'd just work.
(On mobile on a low/mid-range Android the App could open up the post without problems, but haven't tried editing. Using a mobile browser - Firefox in my case - the page could load but it was super slow, and buggy, and it also did crash once)
Also as a public service announcement: if you want to filter the post out from your dash the tag is #full-lotr-test
Also if anyone is interested I loaded up the entire LOTR trilogy in TXT file, then wrote a code that split it out into NPF (Neue Post Format, you know the new PDF or whatever) blocks of at most 4000 characters, then simply called the Create Post API with the resulting NPF block. I believe there's around 900 blocks in the second post above, each block containing somewhere between 3000-4000 characters, so close to the theoretical limit
That's interesting, opening it in the editor means that you don't only have the rendered html version, but also the JSON object containing all the blocks. I would expect it to at least stutter a little.
I tested it again from the android app, and scrolling through the post is really painful: it freezes the app for a few seconds every time you scroll an entire screen... So yeah, I think it would take hours to scroll through the entire thing . So anyone reblogging it is probably earning an unfollow from their beloved mutuals if they want to be able to use Tumblr at all that day 😁
btw if you wanna tip and support a disabled black artist, my link is here!!! (you're not obligated 💜) thank you for supporting me and enjoying my art!!! <3333
One of my favourite "exaggerating a physical feature for horny reasons" things for a kink I'm not into is how some artists draw people sweating. They draw people sweating like Studio Ghibli draws people crying – all oozing out out of their pores like Jello. Some of these characters are straight up sweating Orbs.
Today is Juneteenth an we’re still in pride month please consider donating to the Black Trans Travel Fund which helps provide support and safety to black trans women. I donated $25 if anyone wants to match my donation but any amount helps
