another underappreciated tumblr feature that you dont get on other sites is the queue. i love it when something i thought was funny six months ago and then forgot about a week later crawlts its way out of the processing vortex and i get to see it all over again.
A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.
If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.
That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.
Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.
Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”
It’s genuinely funny how people say supporting the “lesser evil” is wrong and then push for violent revolution, as if a violent revolution is not evil. Countless innocent people would die in the fighting, the disruption of society would lead to deaths from starvation and a lack of medicine, etc. Violent revolution will not be glorious. No war is glorious.
so you're taking care of your computer's software health. NICE! but what about its physical health?
because yes, computers do need the occasional real-world checkup to make sure that they're running well. but what exactly does that entail? i see many posts about maintaining software health: limit your browser tabs, ensure your antiviruses are working properly, so on and so forth, but checking the physical components is something i sparsely see discussed here.
so what's the deal with physical maintenance? well, have you ever had your computer hack and wheeze trying to keep up even if your OS and all your drivers are up to date and functioning? if you've never opened up your computer before, you may be shocked to find just how FILTHY it can get in there:
take a closer look at that snout dust! PTOOEY .. BLECKH
computers are much more likely to accumulate internal dust if they're sitting on the floor, and especially if they're near any vents and/or if you have pets.
ok, you've figured out how to open your device and now you're staring at the second coming of the dust bowl in your gaming rig. what now? let's explore some basic cleaning tips, deep cleaning pointers for your CPU/GPU, and tips to help keep maintain your computer's physical health in the future.
first of all, turn off your computer and unplug it (for my computer, i turn it off, turn off the PSU switch, unplug it, and then press the power button for about 30 seconds to drain the capacitors and minimize static risk)
generally, you're gonna want to have THESE items:
some sort of face mask (dust masks are best, but anything that'll help keep the harmful dust out of your lungs will generally work)
a can of compressed air (or an electric duster if you're ~fancy~. they look and function like turbo blowdryers)
a vacuum will be useful if there's a LOT of dust, best to use in combination with an anti-static cleaning kit
if you ARE gonna use a vacuum, spray every attachment you use with an anti-static spray. disturbing large amounts of dust creates a lot of static, and electronics are very sensitive to that.
it's never a bad idea to grab an grounding wristband as well, but as long as you wear loose clothes and always keep some part of your skin in contact with the case, you should be ok. (i don't know how much this applies to laptops and smaller devices, since the cases for those are typically plastic)
if there's staining (like from smoke) or there's more gunk caked on than you thought, you can gently clean electronic components with a brush/paper towel/microfiber and medical-grade isopropyl alcohol ONLY. do not use any other cleaning alcohols for this task.
before you do anything, TAKE THAT FUCKER OUTSIDE! always clean a dusty device where the wind can carry that shit away, because oh my GOD will it fuck up your lungs like crazy. (that, and compressed air cans have fluorocarbons in them, which isn't great to breathe in either)
most of the time, you'll probably be fine just using an air duster. for compressed air cans, spray the dirty surfaces in short bursts. an electric duster can be constantly blown. when dusting fans, make sure that you're holding the blades still as to not accidentally make them spin too fast (ESPECIALLY with an electric duster!), since that can damage the mechanism that makes them spin.
however, if there's a lot of dust, it may be better to give it a vacuuming first. anything from a handheld to a shop vac will work, and attachments with brushes on the end will help tons with loosening up even more dust. and of course ALWAYS make sure that you're spraying any attachments with anti-static spray, and keep a hand on the case of the computer to electrically ground yourself since the hose will be in contact with the internals.
if there's any left over, give it a blast with the duster.
in some rare cases, there may be some extra gunk caked onto the internals, and you may have to really get your hands in there or take components out individually. if you don't have an anti static wristband (the ones with an alligator clip) do your best to ALWAYS keep your skin in contact with the case as you're finagling around in there.
it's probably a good idea to have disposable gloves on for this. grab your isopropyl and towel of choice (microfiber is ideal, but dirtier PCs may need disposable paper/shop towels), soak it a little bit, and gently scrub off the gunk n' grime as needed.
with heat sinks specifically, since they're just big blocks of metal, they're the one part of a component that can be cleaned under water. if a dusting doesn't suffice, gently scrub it with a brush under warm, soapy water, rinse thoroughly, and let it dry on a towel for a few hours before reassembling it into the electronic components.
if there's still little bits stuck in the radiator fins, stick an isopropyl-soaked q-tip in there to push it out.
the dust settles, everything's put back together, and it's all clean in there again. YAY!!!!! but what if you're still experiencing temperature problems? well, it typically comes down to either the CPU or GPU:
IF ITS THE CPU: if you took off the cooler to clean it, then i hope you remembered to dab some fresh thermal paste on there. you should be replacing thermal paste few years, otherwise it dries out and loses its effectiveness.
the type you use makes a huge difference too; i like to use arctic's mx-4, it has excellent thermal conductivity while still being an electrical insulator, so spillover isn't a problem. if you go for a liquid metal compound, please do your research first, since some of them can run the risk of corroding the cooler pipes and/or the CPU's outer casing.
to replace thermal paste, make sure that the crusty old paste is sufficiently scrubbed off the contact points of both the CPU and cooler. again, use isopropyl for this. once it's all cleaned off, put about a pea-sized amount of paste on the CPU and carefully lower the cooler onto the mounting bracket before fastening it in place. (also it really doesn't matter how you put the paste on, as long as it ends up covering most of the contact area)
also if you're still using the cooler your CPU came with, you should probably get a better cooler. especially if you're doing gaming or using graphically/mathematically intensive software. sorry. the stock coolers that most CPUs come with are mid as hell. you can get a nice ARGB one for less than 20 USD i promise its worth it
IF ITS THE GPU: like CPUs, your graphics card also needs to have its thermal paste cleaned out and replaced every so often. but they also utilize a second thermal material called thermal pads. these are usually made of either silica gel or a very thick clay-like grease, and come in different thicknesses. my favoured pads are owltree's 12.8w grease pads, the assorted pack comes with enough for about 4-5 GPUs.
taking apart a GPU seems scary, and understandably so; they're incredibly expensive and hard-working pieces of technology! but i've done it twice now, and it's actually surprisingly simple (as long as you keep track of all the damn screws... im lucky there's a magnetized screw mat in the house i can use)
i recommend watching a deep clean/teardown video of the GPU model you have before digging into it yourself. generally, they separate into 4 distinct portions: the outer shell, the heatsink, the board, and the backplate.
the shell contains the fans and any possible RGB elements. it'll have 1-2 controllers plugged into the board, one for the fans and one for the lighting elements if there are any. once the case is unscrewed, unplug these connectors with a firm squeeze and tug.
these tend to be surprisingly dusty on the inside, so it's probably a good idea to blast it with a duster. again, make sure to hold the fans so they don't overspin. you can also remove the fans from the shell and clean them individually if you'd like.
the heatsink is BIG and heavy, and you can do all the same stuff here that you would with a CPU cooler heatsink. it may take a bit of effort to tug off if the thermal materials are really making it stick to the board. once it's off, scrub the old thermal paste, blast it with a duster, and wash under soapy water if needed before rinsing thoroughly and leaving it to dry for a while.
the backplate is just a flat piece of metal that protects the back side of the board. usually all this will need is a simple wipedown.
the board is where all the magic happens, and will usually have a layout that's something like this:
clean up as needed; gently scrub off old thermal paste, scrape off the old thermal pads (but take close note of how thick they are so you can replace them with the correct pads), and brush/wipe down the dust and grease on each side as needed. take care to avoid touching the PCIe connector too much (the bar of golden pins that juts out from the bottom)
thermal padding varies from card to card (i recommend checking thermal pad placements for your gpu in water cooling guides, even if you're not doing water cooling) but it's typically gonna be on THESE spots:
the VRAM chips surrounding the die (main chip) along with the small black chips next to the capacitors will require thermal pads the most. cut each one to size, carefully peel off the plastic films, and press each piece onto the chips.
now you can grab your thermal paste and put some on that big shiny die. now take your freshly pasted/padded board and CAREFULLY lower it back onto the heatsink. i highly suggest having a good source of lightning for this, since shifting around the pieces too much trying to get them to align properly can displace the thermal pads and mess with how the paste spreads.
screw the heatsink tight to the board, and double check to make sure that the pads and paste are snug against the heat sink. now put the backplate and shell back on and BAM YOU'RE DONE! with the paste and pads i used, i was able to bring down the temperature of my cards by a good 10-15 °C.
ok you've done all this deep cleaning shit and your computer is happy and healthy. what can you do for your computer's health in the future?
DUST AT LEAST ONCE A YEAR. haul that thang outside and spray that shit out to stop it from building up for too long.
KEEP IT OFF THE FLOOR. if you can, of course, not everyone has the desk room for it. computers accumulate dust easier when they're close to the floor. if you do need to keep it on the floor, you might have to dust it every 6-8 months rather than once a year.
AND STOP PUTTING YOUR LAPTOPS ON SOFT SURFACES I SWEAR TO GOD
GET A FAN CONTROLLER. motherboards are DOGSHIT at maintaining fan speeds!!!! there are physical fan hubs that use controller software, but if you can't afford that, fancontrol by rem0o is a stellar software-only option.
IF YOU DON'T ALREADY HAVE CASE FANS, GET THEM. the number of fans depends on the motherboard form factor your case can accommodate (ATX cases typically have 6-8), but having that air circulation is very important to maintaining ideal temperatures. arctic makes fantastic budget-friendly fans.
IF YOU HAVE AN NVMe HARD DRIVE: please put an aluminum heat sink on that thang. they get toasty :(
OK THATS IT I THINK. if anyone else has tips they wanna add, go right on ahead. ok thank you bye your computer will love you
Someone in the notes said shes doing this with 200 lbs and i cant stress enough how wrong that is. Thats at least 160 kg she’s lifting, so closer to 350 lbs.
some of y'all need to learn how to accept hospitality. stop assuming people are only offering to look after you out of twisted obligation that they don't actually want to do. when you assume that, you are often denying someone the opportunity to genuinely show a friend or stranger love. even if you don't really care about what they're offering, it's respectful of their desire to be kind to accept it anyways.
i had a bunch of girls i've never met over for a women's group. every single one of them denied my offer to make them tea (despite already making myself a mug anyways), get them water, a scone, etc.
i can tell when people refuse to let me be a good host because they "don't want to be a bother". like no!! please be a bother!!! i want to serve you and make you comfortable in my home!
not to be like "we live in a society" but really do live in a modern culture than emphasizes individualism to the point where people will reflexively deny any help or kindness from others for fear of treading on their independence. newsflash: dependence on each other is what makes a community. next time someone offers you kindness, accept it instead of making excuses for why you don't need it. otherwise you've robbed both yourself of being loved and someone else from showing love.
in my dream world that i live in sometimes we stop saying things like “NOBODY is gross or dirty!!!” And start saying things like “being gross or dirty isn’t a moral flaw or failing”
being told I wasn’t gross online by posts by well meaning people when i was a very depressed young teenager for not showering for weeks did not make me feel better, because i felt gross and dirty. What would have actually helped was engaging with the reality (that it was a little gross, what i was doing/unable to do) but that it did not make me a bad person undeserving of help. “Youre not gross and (so) you deserve help!” Okay well i feel gross. This cant be aimed at me.
it also goes against your own brain- everyone thinks things are gross sometimes & to say Nothing is gross rings false. You can be gross and be loveable. Grossness is not failure. Grossness is not a flaw. Gross is not a moral thing. It’s just what it is and has no effect on personhood and i think preaching “having things about you that are dirty or gross does not make someone lesser or unworthy or failed” over “nothing is gross” will carry us a lot further
works for me, anyways. maybe it won’t for you, but it’s helped me a lot more than anything else has.
There was an episode that critiqued luxury drug rehab facilities but the way they got there was that Brian the dog got addicted to cocaine while working for airport security
Quagmire is a rapist and an airline pilot and he’s also over 60 years old but looks 30 or 40 and canonically this is because he shoves carrots up his ass
Quagmire’s dad is a trans woman that Brian the dog had sex with literally the day after her bottom surgery and he couldn’t tell she was trans and he threw up when he found out he had sex with a trans person but then Quagmire found out Brian had sex with his dad and they had a massive brawl that Brian ended with saying “Hey. I fucked your dad.” like it was an epic last line.
They had a y2k episode where nuclear apocalypse happened and Stewie turned into an octopus creature that reproduced himself a bunch of times by laying eggs but it was all a dream of one of the characters from Dallas
Also canonically in the Family Guy universe 9/11 stopped a second American civil war and nuclear apocalypse from the reforming of the confederate states of America by George W Bush.
Also Jesus is dating Carrie Underwood and is an asshole boyfriend. Heaven is a luxury resort also and people there have keys to their rooms because someone in Heaven has been stealing laptops.
publishing companies will be like ~ooh this is a hardcover oooh it's so durable that will be $35~ and then you see the actual book and it's like. "perfect"-bound with endbands glued on crooked and a completely plain paper cover under the dust jacket. my dudes this shit is a mass market paperback with delusions of grandeur
i can explain in more detail with pictures when i get home from work, but executive summary:
both trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks are usually constructed via perfect binding, where you take a stack of loose-leaf sheets and dunk the spine edge in, basically, hot-melt glue (low-temp thermoplastic with a little flexibility to it). stick a cover on the outside of that bad bitch and you're done. very easy and cheap to manufacture, but not durable; not only does the soft cover provide no protection, pages can fall out individually if the glue fails for whatever reason. (i don't have a picture handy but just grab any mass market paperback off your bookshelf and look at the spine)
typically, or perhaps traditionally, when binding a hardcover ("case-bound") book you assemble the sheets into signatures, which are sewn to each other to form a text block, like so:
(well, admittedly, using both linen tape and french link stitch is sort of the belt-and-suspenders of textblock construction. in my defense though look at the fucking size of this tome) but the point is that even before you've gotten around to gluing anything, the textblock hangs together and functions as a book, albeit an unusually wobbly one -- so if the cover completely falls off or something, the rest of the book still hangs together.
the other method of construction i see on many mass-manufacture hardcovers and some trade paperbacks is that they've folded the signatures and sewn them individually (one at a time, not to each other) -- this is easy to do on a specialized sewing machine -- and *then* potted the spine in glue, like you do for perfect binding. this is less liable to lose pages if you fuck up the spine, because instead of each page being glued in individually, they're sewn together into signatures which provide more glue surface area apiece. (i can post a picture when i get home...)
uhh oh yeah endbands. endbands are the little decorative bits that get glued onto the textblock before it gets cased in -- this is in itself sort of a cheapo mass-manufacture imitation of more traditional sewn endbands, which actually provide some structural stability; modern glued-on endbands are really just decorative. here's a picture of a sewn endband on an example book from the bookbinding museum in sf (left), and a different textblock with endbands glued on (right). (the latter also has mull glued onto it, which is like... starched cheesecloth, kind of? you can use kozo paper here too; it also helps stabilize the spine for extra durability)
anyway on mass-manufacture hardcovers i often see really half-assed endbands that are glued on crooked or slightly undersized or something and i'm like "are you even TRYING" (they are not)
and also usually on recently manufactured books the entire case (the "hard cover" of a case-bound hardcover) is covered in paper, including the hinges, which is a terrible decision because the hinges are the part of the book that MOST needs the durability, being The Primary Moving Part. at least fucking cover the spine and hinges in bookcloth i beg. please. for me
@just-evo-now i am back home! where my books live!! so i can take pictures of the bindings :D
a couple of perfect-bound paperbacks:
the benefit of perfect binding, such as it is, is that all the pages can be aligned with each other and the spine is nice and square. (the other benefit is that it is cheap.) but if you're folding pages into signatures you're always gonna get some creep where the inner pages of the signature extend a little bit further towards the fore-edge [edge opposite the spine] than the outer pages do; you can either leave it like that for a deckled edge or trim it off for a neater finished look. (personally i am not a huge fan of deckled edges but Madame La Guillotine can only handle so much book, you know)
a paperback and a hardcover with the signatures-potted-in-glue style (i wish i knew what it was called):
i quite like the green endband on this hardcover! matches the cover nicely, is an appropriate size, aligned well, etc. (in addition to gluing them on crooked, the other common Endband Sin is to make them too damn short and it looks ridiculous)
the cloth-bound hardcover from the first image in this post, pub date 1978:
as you can see, it has much more flexibility than the potted-in-glue style (which can bend a little bit, but cracks if you open it too far), because the signatures are sewn to each other, with some kind of mystery green paper glued over them for stability (and, deeper in the spine, brown... something. fabric?? some of my other vintage books seem to use thin brown canvas...). no endband, but honestly it doesn't really need one.
and! here is a 1945 pocket handbook for engineers (you know, with useful integrals and trig tables and unit conversions and stuff in it) in norwegian, which was falling apart when i got it (i picked it up on the cheap with the intention of hopefully fixing it someday):
the cover is nonfunctional and the stabilizing paper on the spine has gotten so crumbly as to be useless (i got about halfway through peeling it off), but the textblock itself is in pretty good condition, because the signatures are sewn securely to each other -- if you squint you can kinda tell they used kettle stitches on the ends and chain stitches in the middle and i thiiink the chain stitches are where the loose loops on the top came from. anyway, i can pretty much finish peeling off the old crumbly paper stuff and glue on some new kozo paper (and ensure the loose loops are tucked safely away/glued down) and this bad bitch will be ready for a new cover!
Your small, otherwise unimpressive, kingdom is suddenly one of the strongest powers in the land. This is due to the sole reason that, unlike other rulers, you’re happy to work with the local orcs, goblins, dragons, and several other races that are usually attacked on sight.
“The first rule of diplomacy,” you say, “is really quite easy. Just be honest and kind.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that’s it. The orcs that everyone complains about all the time, the roving bands that attack and are so viscous?”
“How did you deal with them? They’ve repelled the Golden Armies of Paladramus!”
You shrug. “I asked their leader what they wanted, we drank a couple of pints of truly hideous orc mead, and I gave them seven hundred acres of land.”
“What? That is almost a fifth of the total land of your kingdom!”
Again, you shrug. “Yeah but it’s largely that barren dessert up north. We weren’t using it, the orcs really wanted it. Apparently they’re almost like lizards and love sunning themselves on hot rocks so the dessert is actually perfect for them.”
“Really? That was it?”
“I mean we have some more complicated trade deals. Water, crops and such in exchange for some stuff you can only really get out of the dessert. There’s a mine over there and most important our northern border is that expansionist jackass.”
“The Golden Army!”
“Yeah ever since Grammark beat the crap out of them a couple years back they don’t want to have anything to do with the orcs. And we’re buddies now so it works out for everyone I think.”
I hate that as Indigenous people, we have to slowly explain the concept of LandBack to basically every colonizer.
Like no we're not going to just throw you out, or put you in camps, or any of that shit. We just want to be able to take care of our ancestral land and be the ones in charge of protecting it.
Like I know these people were raised with a colonial mindset but after a while I just start to lose sympathy.
Like oh you're worried about having your home violently ripped out from under you?? What a fucking tragedy.
I wasn't gonna add to this, but like, no, I wanna add to this.
What will change for you, Whitey McWhiterson, if LandBack takes place?
Not a whole fucking lot.
You might be incentivized to switch to less-polluting modes of transportation, such as biking. Gas might be discouraged.
The environment might be prioritized.
You might become a citizen of, say, Mi'kma'ki instead of the USA.
Your kids might be taught an Indigenous language in schools.
History class would be a lot more up front.
But your day to day life? Very little will change. You're not gonna be kicked out if your house. You're not gonna be rounded up and put into a camp. You might be required to have the minimum basic decency towards the environment. It will be the Sovreign Peoples running the show.
But you, Joe Shmoe, will be left alone to live your life.
Which is more than we can say your people did for us.
We're gonna make environmental regulations that might impact your business if your business sucks. We'll rezone single-family zoning areas to allow for mixed, walkable communities. We'll rewild public lands.
calling the cops on an unhoused person for being weird/rude/"scary" in public is so weird to me on such a fundamental level... like even before you get to political beliefs about jail and homelessness, you are beefing with a dude who has to live on the sidewalk. like sorry if he was rude to you dude sorry if he made you uncomfortable but to be fair he lives and sleeps on the fucking sidewalk. sorry if hes being too mentally unwell on the street late at night but like you gotta understand that he lives on the fucking sidewalk. sorry if he seems a little bit "off" today dude i think maybe its because he lives on the fucking goddamn sidewalk