talopine

This tumblr may include but is not limited to: bad puns and silly jokes, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, feminism, Bujold proselytising, fanfic recs, Buffy, niche law humour, gifs, and pictures of cute animals. Now with 100% more crafts!

[5thconsecutivec]

Siblings don't approve of how dirty Hornet is

(They're such nice older siblings lol)

[talopine]

Hey tumbl-ppl, what's the current iteration/replacement of xkit for tumblr?

(photo of some wacky fungus for attention-grabbing purposes)

[talopine]

me: *forgets about tumblr for 4 years* also me: *is reminded of its existence* me, today: oh wow all these cool posts from all these cool people I follow!! *likes ALLLLL the posts*

[kaelio]

dude Star Trek fans: why do women like cardassians so freaking much i don’t get it.

Women: we can relate to them on a deep and complex level

Women: *work in an office where the thermostat is set to 64F* this sucks

[higgsboshark]

The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.

Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.

Checkmate, nihilism.

[animatedamerican]

This is how I feel about cooking sometimes.

Maybe I can’t fix everything – hell, maybe I can’t fix anything – but look, I made soup; look, I made bread; look, now there’s dinner.

[talopine]

good god yes - knitting is so comforting, because it requires brain power but not that much brain power, so you can’t get too distracted by terrible things, you just keep doing a stitch at a time. i am so glad i took up knitting.

[lonely-silhouette-blog]

[harcules]

relationship goals

[the-open-future]

[talopine]

Humpf at all the people excited about season 3 of Wynonna Earp, season 4 of Lucifer and season 4 of the Expanse when I can't even get seasons 2, 3 and 3, respectively, in this godforsaken media blackout hole of a country :(

(Ok that's not fair, I'm actually happy you're all excited, but I'm also damn jealous I can't be too without resorting to piracy.)

[bongmamaw-deactivated20210105]

i’ve stopped trash talking comic sans after learning the font is actually one of the only dyslexia-friendly fonts that come standard with most computers and i advocate for others doing the same

[not-safe-for-earth]

In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans, other dyslexia-friendly alternatives include Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic and Trebuchet.

[bigbardafree]

thank

[invaderxan]

Random fact: Verdana is one of the few fonts which was specifically designed to be as easy to read as possible, even at smaller type sizes. It was designed this way for use on screen, but the same principles apply in print too. This is part of why some Universities use Verdana as their default font for documents.

[sanctum-sanguinem]

“In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans” is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this website

[writernotwaiting]

@pedeka @lunariagold @darklittlestories

[anastasiaoftheironwood]

I’ll take Comic Sans over Arial any day. 

[writernotwaiting]

Century Gothic and Trebuchet are both quite handsome typefaces.

[iamhisgloriouspurpose]

I’m partial to Century Gothic as well. It’s serif, but not boring.

[catwinchester-deactivated201901]

There’s also a dyslexic font designed especially for dyslexic people to read.

You can install on your tablets, laptops and browers etc, so not only can you change things like documents into it, you can change websites into that font as well! 

[catwinchester-deactivated201901]

I’m sure you’re bright enough to do a google search, but since I’m dumb enough to forget to post a link, here it is. Better late than never

https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/dyslexie-font/

[captainlordauditor]

I default to arial for this reason, but I will now be defaulting to verdana or dyslexie. nice.

[formlessdemi]

I don’t think I have dyslexia but that dyslexie font was the easiest fucking thing to read ever. Books should be written in that shit.

[lunariens]

ALSO!!!

For computer reading, when you mix up lines of text, there’s a web browser app called Beeline Reader. It looks like this

The colors are also customizable, to an extent and while I don’t have dyslexia, I have adhd which makes reading large amounts of text harder and this helps A LOT.

[jenndoesnotcare]

@sjwashere this looks pretty cool!

[talopine]

I found Beeline Reader to be helpful when reading case law on my desktop computer for assignments (judges do like to go on and their paragraphs are loooooooong).

[teh-nos]

[tansyrr]

always reblog

[talopine]

I love this.

[afragmentcastadrift]

“Ladies first,” you say, stepping aside, puffed up in your gallantry, thinking this is how it must be - men protecting the fragile women, men cordoning off a woman’s space.

But I think your so-called chivalry masks a deep fear - for you’ve seen how sharp we keep our knives, you’ve heard the rasp of the stone, and if you walked ahead of us you wouldn’t know or see when the blade would be drawn.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.

[morkaischosen]

and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.

[duckbunny]

well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?

[bunjywunjy]

I just want everyone to take a step back for a second and really think about how we’re using the most powerful knowledge tool in history to make jokes about a specific dude who lived almost 4000 years ago.

it’s fuckin wonderful, is what it is.

[squeeful]

Ea-nasir has been dead for 4700 fraudy fraudy years.

[astercrash]

I don’t know what to do with the fact that there is Ea-nasir/Nanni fanfiction. Imagine writing a complaint about this one jerk and four thousand years later people are using hyper-technology to imagine the two of you fucking.

[talopine]

I keep seeing people recommending Throne of Glass, and it's just like....did we read the same book??

I assume (hope) that it improved throughout the series, because I understand that she wrote the first one when she was 16, but the first one was so terrible that I didn't want to find out. (And I have a very high tolerance for bad prose - I have, in my time, read *a lot* of very bad Harry Potter fanfic*.)

[*there was also some great stuff, but Sturgeon's Law applies to everything.]

[audreyii-fic]

The entirely unnecessary demise of Barnes & Noble

“Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. Among marine architects this is known as the zero-moment point – the point of no return.” –Sebastian Junger, “The Perfect Storm”

Posts like this aren’t my usual fare, but there’s a lot of readers on Tumblr. So y’all might be interested – or, if not, you really should be.

On Monday, this went down:

That’s the bloodless, matter-of-fact, ho-hum business event way of describing it. Let me paint you a different picture.

On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location – that’s 781 stores – told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the people responsible for handling the money), the receiving managers (the people responsible for bringing in product and making sure it goes where it should), the digital leads (the people responsible for solving Nook problems), the newsstand leads (the people responsible for distributing the magazines), and the bargain leads (the people responsible for keeping up the massive discount sections). A few of the larger stores were able to spare their head cashiers and their receiving managers, but not many.

Just about everyone lost between 3 and 7 employees. The unofficial numbers put the total around 1,800 people.

People.

We’re not talking post-holiday culling of seasonal workers. This was the Red Wedding. Every person laid off was a full-time employee. These were people for whom Barnes & Noble was a career. Most of them had given 5, 10, 20 years to the company. In most cases it was their sole source of income.

There was no warning.

But it gets worse.

Keep reading

[fade-touched-eezo]

Ahh, so this is an excellent start to my week: I just got my @masseffectholidaycheer​ gift from @talopine​ in the mail, and it’s excellent. There were two delicious smelling teas in there (and as soon as it cools down some, I shall be sampling that earl grey for starters!) and a fantastic knitted hat!

(Which is going to see so much use over winter with all the early, eaaarly morning public transport I see in my future. Freezing ears, begone!)

Thank you so much! I love it!

[talopine]

I'm so glad the hat works :)

(Knitting commentary: I really really wanted to make the stripes vertical, but turns out it's really difficult to knit vertical stripes in the round! 😭 Intarsia only works when you can work back and forth, and fair isle would have left too many long floats. The pattern is the Spin Cycle Hat from Ravelry, which I've made before and really like, but adapted for 10 ply yarn.)

[continuous-sketch]

My gift to @talopine of Jane and Garrus taking a stroll! <3

Thank you to @holidayharbinger for putting together this event! 

[talopine]

Wow, thank you, @spec-sketch! This is such a great picture :) I love the way they’re both looking at each other -- like they are having fun and enjoy being with each other (which is kinda what I think Shepard and Garrus’ relationship should be about -- apart from merely saving the galaxy, obv: it’s being in a mutually respectful relationship with your best space buddy *while* you’re saving the galaxy!) The hoodie is the best, clearly (so comfy, so practical) :D

[Sorry I did not reply earlier -- I saw the post and loved the picture, but have been on mobile and not computer for a while due to stuff and I just cannot tumblr properly on the mobile app]

[eponymous-rose]

I feel like a major percentage of all disagreements on this dang site are based on half the combatants shoring up an argument based on respecting individual choice and the other half throwing their banner behind acting based on large-scale patterns, without realizing that both can exist simultaneously.

Like, if a woman decides to quit her job and start a family, I think folks can generally agree that the right thing to do is to not be a jerk and to respect her choice and to even make sure plenty of resources and support are available for people like her wanting to make that transition. But if, at the same time, a lot of the women in a field are quitting, that’s a large-scale pattern, and that’s a problem where you have to start looking at the societal factors and pressures at play—is there harrassment? What’s going on in this field that’s pushing women out? What can be done to prevent that?

You get friction when “this is a problem at a large scale” gets filtered down to the individual scale, when “it’s a problem that so many women quit this field” becomes interpreted as “it’s a problem that Mary’s quitting this field and she should stay no matter what”. When you look at the individual, there are endless factors that come into play, some of which may legitimately give an airtight explanation for why Mary should get the heck out of Dodge. But that shouldn’t necessarily be the conversation in the first place. When you look at larger statistics, those smaller individual explanations start to come out in the wash and the major issues (and major players!) can be tackled head-on.

It’s like how there always seem to be incredibly long-winded explanations for why it’s okay that such-and-such specific film failed the Bechdel test: because it’s not meant to be a single point, it’s meant to be a statistic summarizing a whole dang dataset. The productive argument often isn’t that a specific movie didn’t pass, it’s that so few movies pass at all. Examples are helpful and illustrative and enlightening, but they generally have to be part of a larger discussion for anything to be accomplished.

Just, you know, be wary of filtering the general down to the specific, and recognize that if someone takes offense at your having pointed out a larger pattern, they may be doing just that: feeling the need to defend a specific example (”but it snowed today!”) when the problem and the conversation should usually be based around the larger-scale pattern (”sure, but the world’s climate is warming overall”).