Feels Like Summer Again

CA East Bay queer foster/adoptive mom

[koiagain]

im going to fix my entire life

[fruitcakebro]

When?

[koiagain]

Like Um. later

[the-future-now-deactivated20170]

That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

Follow @the-future-now

[dopeluminarydreamer-blog]

Reblog if you:

Have an iPhone and are in need of repairs

Have a friend with that problem

Hate Apple and are more than happy to spite them in some way

No one will know which is it

[weaselle]

This guy inspired me to repair my own macbook. First of all, you should know that I am not… like, I have to look up HOW to look up what my computer specifications are. Tech, that ware either soft or hard, is not a subject in which I experience comfort or competence. But my puppy peed on my keyboard, and I asked the apple store, or the fucking mac cafe, or the godsdamn Computer House Chill Zone or whatever cute ass name they have for their bullshit store, and they said it would be TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS TO REPLACE MY KEYBOARD. I’m not even exaggerating.

So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.

So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.

These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.

anyway, this guy is also fueled by spite, and doing holy work, and I have mad respect

[dragonfox-in-a-teacup]

This is awesome. Man is doing good ass deeds 24/7 because he’s giving people control.

[dantes-infernal-chili]

How dare you not leave a link to his channel, this guy is the savior of the modern world.

[the-original-b]

vittoria alla ribellione

[nonamehorse]

Fuck Apple, Fuck every big tech company

[theinfamousdoctorf]

iFixit: The Free Repair Manual

iFixit is a global community of people helping each other repair things. Let's fix the world, one device at a time. Troubleshoot with expert

And if you need the ‘proprietary’ tools; go here!

[twinanimatronics]

I Fixit is actually how I repaired my dad’s old iphone 12 and then claimed it as my own!

[lizardlicks]

ifixit also makes kits and instruction for nearly every part for consoles, computers, phones, tablets, just about anything. We’ve replaced multiple parts on our old 3Dses at this point. It’s not nearly as hard as you might assume and very worth it to learn how to repair your own electronics.

[proseuctorwalton]

Getting in on the Fuck Apple train

[johnturturro]

living in the us right now is just a constant stream of

[wordfather]

not my circus not my monkeys but thanks to my mutuals i know some of the lore

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[sazandorable]

I just spent 2 hours debating and testing and arguing in circles and bitching about library catalogs with two colleagues and I just want to say

AO3’s website is really, really, really impressive, functional and ergonomic and cohesive. the tag system is INCREDIBLE and AMAZINGLY maintained. this is my professional librarian appraisal.

I’ve found 1 library catalog that meets my standards. even the national library of France’s catalog is shitty in comparison to ao3.

praise.

[flo-nelja]

It’s awesome! As a total ignorant, can I ask what AO3 does and library catalogs don’t?

[sazandorable]

i might actually type out a longer answer but what it really boils down to is: YOU ACTUALLY FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

[sazandorable]

ok so here’s the long unreadable (and probs uninteresting to anyone else than me) version:

- the site design and overall look. it’s easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to notice what you can click on. Makes good use of fonts and text sizes and styles to make important things stand out and be easily found at a glance, and is just overall very readable. The icons with hovertext! The tags! the amount of info that’s readable at a single glance and actually fits on the same page!

this is BASIC STUFF and it is not a given on a LOT of professional library websites i run into regularly and that drives me INSANE. (Mostly bc one of the very popular, cheap, and easy French-language library catalog softwares has a default online catalog design that sucks and which librarians generally don’t tinker with much.)

- again this seems obvious, but the filters when you’re inside a fandom/tag are SO VISIBLE and SO EXPLICIT. The filters menu makes it instantly clear what it’s for, is easy to navigate and understand and use, intelligently suggests the most popular tags first (which also immediately gives you a lot of information).

My library’s online catalog (which uses the default website set-up I mentioned above) has exactly the same thing, but stupidly executed, unreadable and incomprehensible, and somehow completely unnoticeable despite being exactly in the same place on the page. The site design makes very bad use of the space on the page and basically you just don’t even look over there because it’s so far away from where the rest of the information is and it simply never catches your eye, and even when it does, the vocabulary used is so obtuse you don’t realize what it’s for.

IT’S SO… STUPID AND EASILY FIXABLE… but apparently no public library in the french language can afford a website designer, or they’re all horrifyingly bad

- and finally: THE TAGS. One of the biggest issues we have in catalogs is that people use different words for the same thing. In order for you to find books relevant to your search, we have to apply topic keywords to them (basically: tags), but of course there are Norms so that all libraries, or at least all employees in the same library, use the same keywords. Except despite the norm that still doesn’t happen. I don’t know how it goes in the English-language world but for French language it’s all horribly complicated and surprisingly non-functional, despite how easy it seems in theory, and leads me to complain about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about once a week at least.

Easy example that I’ve complained about today (for the 6th time this year): ADHD. The term used by the BNF, that we are supposed to use, is “Trouble de l’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention” (“hyperactivity disorder with attention deficit”). That’s… not only outdated but flat-out inaccurate (according to French’s current stance on it) — the term people actually use nowadays is the opposite way around, “trouble de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité” ( “ADD with or without hyperactivity”), commonly abbreviated to “TDA/H”. The BNF’s system does accommodate for various synonyms, but it appears unaware of this one, so if you search “TDA/H” in the keywords, you won’t find anything. You’d have to look in the title, and if none of our books have it in their title, you’ll find nothing at all, and won’t even be redirected anywhere if we strictly follow the BNF system. (WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEYWORDS THEN, one might ask.)

Tl;dr: you look for the word you and most people actually informed about a topic use, and find nothing at all because some rando has decided that’s not the word you should be using. (Unsurprisingly, this problem pops up a looot for keywords related to minorities, mental illnesses and LGBT+ topics.)

It’s like if you tried to search a site for “fluff” and didn’t find anything because the site has decided to continue using “WAFF” instead. Also, the site has decided that hurt-comfort and guro fic are the same thing, makes no distinction between levels of romance and eroticism so there’s no way to tell cute handholding from smut, and believes that the word “furry” means they get a dog.

=> The system of letting people use their words and linking them — making them synonyms — with what other people have used for the same meaning completely blows my mind. I am in awe of the fact that it works, and that it’s still happening, even though iirc tag-wranglers are unpaid volunteers. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that in just our catalog, and AO3 is massive.

The result is: not only do you find what you’re looking for, but if your search accidentally picks up other things too, you know what it’s actually about because you get it in the author’s words.

AO3′s tag system is an incredibly clever and simple solution to a very real and thorny problem that I run into almost every day.

tl;dr AO3 is just generally a perfectly functional and user-friendly site, instantly easy to use in order to tailor your search to exactly what you want (and even more so with the addition of the exclusion operator to the filters sidebar), and on a technical library-science viewpoint, it’s fascinating.

[madmaudlingoes]

This is taking me back to when AO3 was first born, and I was having a conversation with someone (@icarusancalion, I think?) about how I didn’t think the tagging system was ever really gonna be useful. 

I knew the kind of top-down tagging system that libraries use was often useless for the same reasons you’re describing here: academics like the idea of a priori systems and exclusive classification schemata, but AO3 tagging is useful precisely because tags can be messy and overlapping rather than strict hierarchies. You’ll never get all fandoms everywhere to agree on a common tag family, I said c. 2008. It’ll be outdated before it’s even implemented. But relying entirely on user-generated tags will be a logistical nightmare, past!Maud also argued, because there would be no way to manage synonyms and near-synonyms and typos that would rapidly bloat the system to uselessness. 

Well, 2008!me was right about top-down schemata but wrong about user-submitted tags, thanks almost entirely to the work of the tag wranglers: human curators who take the time to link and nest related tags as they come up, without relying on a pristine (and utterly dysfunctional) a priori system to do so. 

Would real-world academic libraries benefit from tag wranglers? Absofuckinglutely, but I really don’t think most of them would ever implement them for the same reason past!me was skeptical of them. Maybe if they were shown how well it works on AO3 (where the wranglers are all volunteers!) they might be persuaded to hire some workstudies or under-employed PhDs to wrangle for them. And then the world would be a better place. 

[francescacoppa]

I have given talks about our “curated folksonomy,” which is what it’s called, to librarians and archivists! And @cfiesler has done great work re: tags and such!

[fucking-relax]

reminder: your meds

whether that's taking them, refilling them, or whatever you need!

this is your reminder to do what you gotta do

[fucking-relax]

if your auto-refill is not on time for whatever reason and you're low, or sooner to pick-up is easier than later, but you think "Oh i'll be fine without meds for a few days!!"

no you won't. go pick-up early.

[cats-and-confusion]

Hey can anyone tell me what the FUCK this behavior means

[landmineblogging]

[brionysea]

this has been in my projects for a year and i'm only posting it now for some reason. eliot, parker, and hardison from leverage x in the middle by dodie. for @blueskiesandstarrynights

fanvids tag list (ask to be added or removed): @mike-wheeler-defender-boi @madwheelerz @dungeon-master-mike @its-celery @sunnyhanako1505 @teradrama

[andhumanslovedstories]

I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#IM SORRY THEY DO HOME FUCKING WORK IN ANIMORPHS??????

Yeah they're students. If they don't keep their grades up or if they miss too many classes (or miss classes at suspicious times) then they risk drawing the attention of the faculty and/or their parents, some of whom are the enemy and some of whom can just make future espionage a whole lot harder. There are multiple missions where they're like "okay, this is incredibly time sensitive but it'll take a full day or longer so it has to wait for the weekend and we'll have to all lie to our parents about sleeping over at each others' houses. It's gonna have to be done at the last minute because we've gotta go to class. Also, remember to get that English paper finished, we can NOT afford to have you grounded right now."

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

They also get disembowelled and/or eaten a lot

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#animorphs#its actually devastating i bever got into these#they wouldve been a million times more up my alley wtf was i reading harry potter for

It's not too late. You can still read them.

[cheerfulomelette]

These have been out of print for an age, and the authors have given their blessings to share the PDFs. Here's everything, including companion/side books and the non-canon Alternamorphs books, in reading order:

Animorphs PDFs : K. A. Applegate : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

All of the Animorphs books by K. A. Applegate, as well as the other books set in that universe. I got them here. I am not the one who collec

[odinsblog]

“First season of LEVERAGE - so he's 21 years old - he shows me his watch designs. I'm expecting, y' know, celebrity strap branding or faces. No, it's engineering schematics of GEARS and shit. Pages of them. Even then, there were none so cool.” - John Rogers

[superpeanutgarden]

I need this beautiful and talented man on my blog. *especially* for Black History Month

[nealashitposts]

A year or so ago I went to wood carving club with a bruised eye from my dog slamming his nose into my eyesocket and like every old lady there pulled me aside at some point to ask if my partner hit me here are some of the solutions they had in case he did.

-Replacing his vitimens with poision

- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.

- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.

-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?

- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.

-One lady just cheerfully informed me she had a gun and only a few years left anyway

[janedrewfinally]

Accurate tags:

#and this is why no-fault divorce brings down the murder rate

[autistobrat]

this too shall pass but the fuck was that for

[emmaklee]

[pourquoiwhy]

I learned a new concept

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure. (Tech Target, first result on the search engine)

[biglawbear]

Literal opposite of planned obsolescence. I love you graceful degradation.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Oh neat the first time I heard of the concept the guy described it to me as "catastrophic functionality".

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

I've been having a few bad years mental health wise, and thinking about those robots a lot .

[maddie-2022]

This is also why NASA missions usually keep going so long after schedule. They are *masters* of graceful degradation, able to keep machines limping along on minimal power and after sustaining heavy damage

[dasenergi]

[natalieironside]

Due to my weird childhood and my weird brain, I have this very unhelpful compulsion to conceal Everything I do from Everyone. I Cannot be observed performing any action, no matter how mundane. My nervous system is convinced I'm gonna, like, Get In Trouble for eating food at dinnertime or sleeping in my bed at bedtime.

I've taken to asking myself, "Okay does this task actually require subterfuge or am I stealing a balloon on Free Balloon Day"

[junglejim4322]

People don’t even want to say le sigh anymore. le sigh

[monsterofmaplestreet]

#but I am more le tired than ever