Opening Physical Commissions!
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Janaina Medeiros
Not today Justin

#extradirty
TVSTRANGERTHINGS

Origami Around
$LAYYYTER
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oozey mess

PR's Tumblrdome
Three Goblin Art
DEAR READER

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blake kathryn
Cosmic Funnies
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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JVL

@theartofmadeline
Stranger Things
Today's Document
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@thefroglab
Opening Physical Commissions!
You provide: character, United States mailing address, $12 USD
I provide: ~4x6 ink drawing, hand-sent from the FrogLab to you!
so, dogs are good, right? its practically a truism that dogs are good. and then dogshit is bad. so there's a connection there.
horseshit is false, unreliable, and horses are very reliable. bullshit is also false, but carries an additional implication of trickery, while bulls are extremely straightforward and guileless.
so, with the pattern established... what's up with bats? are they particularly sane? is a bat's view of the world more accurate than ours? much to consider.
I mean, look at how serene a bat looks
they've obviously got something figured out
https://a-z-animals.com/articles/the-purple-toad-that-doesnt-even-look-real/
Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0
If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.
I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:
"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"
No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!
Web 2.0 was:
blogs with comment sections
wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)
forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)
bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us
user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)
on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)
AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page
Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash
RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content
when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.
I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!
The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."
It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.
Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!
You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.
Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:
running your own server is a pain
running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video
signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1
once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)
non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up
the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in
Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.
To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:
the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.
for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.
people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node
in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.
in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums
if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!
What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:
cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting
portable data standards
antitrust enforcement with teeth
privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable
a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media
I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.
Run Linux apps on Windows 95 with Windows 9x subsystem for Linux
Pretty neat idea!
thank you scherz et al. for bringing us the frogs Mini ature, Mini mum and of course, the Mini scule
Every time I see someone take a picture of their fit on campus with their phone leaning against a bench or tree or whatever shit I remember this gif and honestly consider doing exactly this every time I see it
Hidden PCB silkscreen art
Slide 2 of 2
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What you're looking at is a subtle artistic inside joke within the world of electrical and hardware engineering.
During the design process of PCB's, engineers have to map out the board's silkscreen (aka the nonconductive layer of apoxy ink, typically in white, black or yellow, that is used to indicate components, design, and test points). This is an essential part of circuit board building that is an integral part of the design process, serving as essentially a communicative manual to anyone servicing it, or something fun to find for teardowns. Think of it as a medical diagram to the board's meat and bones. It is layered on top of the solder mask which in turn protects the copper of the board from corrosion.
Many designers opt to put hidden messages, symbols or popculture references within the leftover/non-essential spaces as a fun way to connect them to their work. It's a piece of the artist within the art, and acts as a fun little real life easter egg to anyone brave enough to open up the tech housing it.
They don't serve any functional purpose to the board, but they sure are cool :)
Images and info sourced from flickr, r/hiddenpcbeggs, and pcbgogo
you spill dr pepper on the concrete and a single perfect rose pushes up out of a crack
Easy Being Green, It's Not by Peter de Sève
@cursedchildofchaos
In my joyful dreams I never frown. Smilent Hill
we got a full redbox and now we're playing go fish with the redbox movies
I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away
here's my dad and i taking it away
a redbox makes a wonderful addition to your patio
for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.
so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.
there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.
luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).
the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.
there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.
if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.
remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life
Frog studies from life, sitting by my grandma’s pond.
@bloodypoet