love is a question mark

AC. 31. queer ace. they/he/il. "Foolish heart, what do you fear?"

[hiveswap]

I hope none of you disappear in the coming days. Seriously don't do anything that can't be undone.

[hiveswap]

I know i'm just a random person you follow online but I mean it. People (all kinds of marginalised people too!) Have survived all types of horrible times and managed to find happiness eventually. If for no one else, survive for them. And also, try to survive because the people making you despair don't want you to live. Don't give this to them. Don't give your life. The best thing you can do is cling to it with everything you've got. Lay in bed for a day if you have to. but please promise you won't hurt yourself.

[what-eats-owls]

So there's something I want to say re: intentionally withholding your vote, and I want to do it without coming across as condescending or dismissive.

I've worked as a field organizer in two campaigns, 2010 and 2012, and my job was to help turnout the vote for Democratic candidates up and down the ticket. Technology may have changed, but people are still knocking on doors for specific voters the way they were 12 years ago.

If you say you're not voting/voting 3rd party, the campaign volunteer is supposed to mark that and move on. Their job, in the final month of the election, is to make sure the campaign's supporters have all the information and resources they need to cast a vote.

They aren't collecting data on why you're withholding your vote. They aren't submitting opinion polling results to the campaign. Something like 155 million people voted in the 2020 election, and if you say you're not voting, the campaign is not going to waste a volunteer's time and morale begging you to vote when there are literally millions of other voters to turn out.

Let me repeat that: The campaign does not track why you're not voting. They simply note your vote is not a priority for turnout and move on.

I say this because I see a lot of promotion of non-voting like that's a boycott, when the function is not the same. A boycott is a coordinated mass refusal to engage with an institution—which sounds similar if you see a vote as a good or service to withhold. Unfortunately, it's not.

A vote is a choice you're making as part of a community hiring committee. Your abstention doesn't prevent someone from being hired. It just lowers the threshold for the worst candidate to succeed.

All this to say: In my direct experience as an organizer, abstaining from the vote sends a message. That message is not "You need to try harder to win my vote." It's "Don't waste time on me."

[small-bambi]

Harrison Wood Hsiang

[only-tiktoks]

[xmagnet-o]

Spread this video

[kick-a-long]

spread this video for awareness.

to me it's counter intuitive that little person and dwarf are more acceptable so it's really helpful to know.

also spread this video to appreciate the fucking killer mustache on that one guy in the suit. holy shit, it's like a work of art.

[spiribia]

Dandelions have a symbiotic relationship with little kids who make wishes

[weaselle]

this is... not entirely false, actually 

[bumblingbabooshka]

Vulcan teen on Vulcan [tiktok] saying "I have just lost track of my father in the grocery store." The camera turns to show the viewers the grocery store in which almost every single older middle-aged man has a bowlcut and long robes. Camera turns back to show the teen's face which is expressionless and yet communicates all it needs to.

[couch-of-friendship]

Tags by @eggtrolls

[doccyuk]

One reply says "I understand; I too 'lost track' of my father when he accompanied me to the Vulcan Learning Centre in a garish and unnecessary shade of grey"

Replies are split between Vulcans agreeing he took the correct course of action and humans begging to see a "garish and unnecessary shade of grey"

[andhumanslovedstories]

One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.

[andhumanslovedstories]

if I make and post an insanely detailed powerpoint on the twenty different equations I run mentally during casual conversation to make it flow better, everyone has to say that it's sexy and cool and not weird at all

[andhumanslovedstories]

remember, everyone promised to be cool! also disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer assume I said all the things you'd say to be like "i know human interaction is complicated, i know some of what i listed here would be very annoying to some people," and all that

[catchymemes]

[undercover-witch]

Reminds me of this story:

[kvotheunkvothe]

I just love her stomping on the notebook at the end, comedy gold

[take-a-dip-in-the-deadpool]

If you like frogs. Or possums. Or cool builds. Or happiness. This is the video for you.

[donjuaninhell]

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows to drag select multiple hyperlink and automatically open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst, mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips", and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

[donjuaninhell]

Addendum!

I forgot to add, Firefox has skins and themes! And many of them are good! And of the many small creators making themes and skins for Firefox, my favourite is MaDonna an 85 year old great grandmother who's just making browser skins for fun. She's made thousands of them. I'm using one of her creations at this very moment, Dark Polygon.

[wheeloffortune-design]

In time travel movies, when the time traveler asks 'What year is this?!?' they're always treated like they're being weird for asking.

When in reality, if you go 'What year is this?!?' people will just say '2024. Crazy huh.' and you go 'Wtf where has my youth gone.'

And if you ask 'And what month??' people won't judge you, they'll just go like 'SEPTEMBER!!! Can you believe it?!?!' and you go 'WHAT?!? Last time I checked we were in May?!?'

[marlynnofmany]

That is a great point. Especially if you time travel to a period of Big Historical Events, when everybody's looking a little wild about the eyes.

"Hey, what month is it?"

"January already, can you believe it? I swear I was just at Pompeii, but no one's going there again."

[aphony-cree]

In the same vein:

Stumbling into a diner and asking "What town is this" isn't weird, the workers will think you're on a road trip

If you ask them "Where's the nearest Nano Deck?" they'll assume it's a shop they've never heard of and say "Sorry, I don't know where any of those are"

Going into a store and telling a cashier "I need pods for my comm device" will just get you a "Never heard of those, maybe try Radio Shack?"

I think the problem is that people who create sci-fi movies have never had to work customer service jobs

[random-brushstrokes]

Frank Paton - Witness my Act and Deed (1882)

[wizardshark]

Absolutely fucking dying over the name of this painting. We've had cats figured out since day fucking one

[were--ralph]

can't stop listening to this

[louisegluckpdf]

we're settling this once and for all. no nuance

to be

not to be

Voting ended onOct 7, 2024

[nochd]

Is it nobler in the mind

to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

to take arms against a sea of troubles

Voting ended onOct 7, 2024

[pseudo-boyfriend]

[mellific]

Towards the end of last year/beginning of this year, a few friends and I did a little collab project: each person put together a small themed playlist then designed an accordion zine with one page for each song. The final "book" was a collection of zines packaged inside a clear cassette box.

It honestly came out AMAZING. There's a huge range of styles & they look so good as a set, I cannot emphasize enough how much everyone crushed it.

This is just a brief documentation post since it's an extremely high effort, limited edition project that only exists in physical form -- a concept I've been generally enamored by (as seen in the log zines, which I'm hoping to write up next).

Everyone got a copy of each zine so we ended up printing, folding, and assembling 255 accordion zines (a hands on lesson in exponential growth for me specifically), and then I designed a little bit of packaging for the boxes. Shoutout specifically to the MTG Cube Draft guys also looking for "cassette boxes with no pegs in them" for solving a super foreseeable packaging problem (cassettes have holes in them but paper zines/MTG cards do Not) that I did not foresee.

Some final detail shots, and then slkdfjsksf I put an edition number on the inside of each label as well, to give it that Art Book street cred:

Extremely fun! Cannot recommend enough grabbing some pals for a group art project!

[meridionalis]

the decrease in costuming quality over the last 20 years has been soooo precipitous & nauseating. i’m not even talking abt marvel’s cg supersuits or anything this time, look at the fabric quality, structure, layering, character, and craftsmanship of older costumes in 102 dalmations (2000) vs cruella (2021)

ever after (1998) vs cinderella (2021)

lord of the rings (2001-2003) vs the rings of power (2022)

this trend should upset you not just because it looks cheap, but because it suggests a strong anti-art and anti-labor movement in film and tv making. don’t forget costumers are unionized

[ocqueen]

I WORK IN COSTUMES AND CAN TALK ABOUT THIS MORE SPECIFICALLY

It's not just that we're unionized, though that absolutely plays into the financial aspect of it to a degree. There is 100% not just an anti-labor and anti-artistic sentiment, but also just an overall shift from these productions being treated as less like storytelling and performance, like they were in the past, and more like corporate investments and business endeavors. Everything is bottom line vs potential profits, marketability, and modern trends, or what will trend on tiktok, and you have to design to that constantly.

It's also that filmmaking has developed the expectation of making movies on such a short production time that there's no time to MAKE amazing beautiful pieces like this. A good gown may take weeks or months to complete and many rounds of fittings and mockups, and might be very heavy or restrictive to actors and limit how long they can shoot in a given costume. From my experience, things are decided on one day and have to be ready to shoot in a few weeks, and that's only if the writers aren't constantly having to make last second changes because the directors and producers change their visions constantly on a dime, down to the very last minute, and there's nothing we can do as the costume team except make it happen or make a REALLY good case for why we can't just find some cheap option fast that would work instead. So you might spend thousands on that beautiful dress only for them to completely cut the scene, change the context entirely in rewrites, or just decide they don't like the dress and want something else.

And because directors and producers get last say, and often they have Bad Taste and want things that are modern and marketable, and often will think things look great that are actually pretty unfitting for the character or make no sense for the design of the film, they insist on bad choices that then get pushed through to the end result of the film. Actors do this too sometimes, like what happened with Emma Watson and Belle's dress in the live action Beauty and the Beast remake, but usually only the big name actors have enough star power to swing full changes like that.

And of course, yes, there's not enough budget for high quality work. Costumers, like everyone else on film sets right now, are expected to stretch the budgets they're given to 'make it work' because so many have (in order to make the producers happy and keep their jobs). And in return, quality goes down, because in order to build a costume you need good fabric, embellishments, and labor. Good fabric costs a lot of money, embellishments cost a lot of money, hand fitting and skilled labor cost a lot of money, and costume budgets are being given none of that because the studios are incredibly strict and frugal with what they expect you to spend so they can make the most profit off of a given project, so cuts to quality end up being made somewhere in order to make up the difference and get the actors clothed.

I've rambled enough, but basically, yes, unions, but also there's a lot of deeper layers that go into why these things have been declining that are all interconnected and related to the general commodification of art and framing of art as content to consume rather than stories to tell that's happened in the past ten years or so.

[marzipanandminutiae]

and it results in VERY VERY GOOD costumers being hampered

Rings of Power? that was Kate Hawley. who also did Crimson Peak (2015) and produced costumes like this:

so it's not always a skill issue, to be sure

[mygreatadventurehasbegun]

To continue with “it’s not always a skill issue”, Jenny Beavan designed the costumes both for Ever After and Cruella.

It just shows what a talented designer can do with time and resources (and no interfering from directors, producers or actors).

[wizardarchetypes]

I am not vagueposting in bad faith, but I want to followup on a post going around without adding to the post itself and seeming combative. the post is about eating meat from wild animals, and it claims that the majority of harmful pathogens in meat that make humans sick is introduced into processed meat by humans & that E. Coli is only a problem in processed supermarket meats due to contact with human fecal matter. The post states that E. Coli comes from poop—totally correct. But it also emphasizes the role of human fecal contamination, and if you kill a wild deer and eat its meat raw, the risk is comparatively negligible. The post also stated, “wild predators don’t get food poisoning from raw meat” (not true).

This may seem extremely pedantic, but as a wildlife manager & a hunter, I wanna discuss E. Coli and other pathogens connected to meat consumption and how they exist naturally in the wild animals which we (and other predatory mammals) consume.

In fact, wild deer are natural vectors for E. Coli, and wild birds are natural vectors for Salmonella (1) (2)

We can not only contract E. Coli from direct contact with wild deer, but from contact with shared water sources (3) This is by exposure to deer fecal contamination.

Onto the meat: If you hunt a wild deer, you must immediately ‘field dress’ the carcass. Field dressing in this context is the act of removing organs, especially the stomach & intestines, to trigger an immediate decrease in the animal’s body temperature, which buys you time to transport the meat before bacteria grows.

You must be extremely careful to avoid puncturing the stomach and intestines, which would contaminate the meat, because, once again, deer are natural vectors of E. Coli.

It’s also crucial to kill a deer efficiently (not only to ensure minimal suffering to the animal). A gut-shot can contaminate the abdominal cavity, and the animal is likely to live longer after the shot, allowing for a longer contamination period, which increases risk of contracting E. Coli through meat consumption (4)

You could argue that in the end, the contamination is still caused by human error, even if it’s not by human fecal contamination. So let’s talk about non-human species contracting illnesses from eating wild meat.

Someone else on the post supposed that predators such as wolves come into contact with harmful pathogens in the raw meat they eat.

In fact, predators can and do contract diseases in the act of predation.

Harmful pathogens do exist in wild meat untouched by humans, but predators and scavengers can demonstrate a resistance to more serious infections.

One example is predatory mammals contracting Anthrax infections from sick prey animals. Anthrax infection is caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, which lives in the soil and infects prey animals, especially grazing ungulates. Predatory mammals can contract Anthrax infections by consuming the meat of infected prey animals.

However, Anthrax infections caused by meat consumption tend to be milder in predatory mammals, with decreased mortality: “Anthrax resistance in predators is not absolute. It manifests itself not as an inability to become infected, but rather as an ability to transfer the disease in a non-lethal or even asymptomatic form.” (5)

So illness-causing pathogens spread by meat consumption do exist in the soil and in wild meat. Predatory mammals have an advantage against infections caused by meat consumption, but not an immunity! 

Another example of predatory mammals contracting a disease by eating wild meat is wolves and bears contracting Brucellosis by consuming infected prey animals (6) (7)

I DO caution against overestimating the danger of food borne pathogens in nonhuman predatory mammals. In Wyoming, some people are sensationalizing the alleged risk of Brucellosis in wolves as a strategy in the age old settler colonial war on wild canids, but there is no proven risk of transmission from wolves in the state (8) I only bring up the infection and wolves to demonstrate that predatory mammals can contract illnesses by consuming wild meat.

Game meat and the hunting of wild animals is extremely important for both nutrition and culture throughout the world. I would caution people against buying into sensationalism about the dangers of ‘bush meat,’ which is often exoticizing and racist.

I do not think we should be any more afraid of eating wild game than we should worry about processed meats. And often there is a distinct advantage to eating wild game. I especially encourage learning about hunting in your region for subsistence and ecological conservation.

So this is all to say, there is inherent risk to eating game meat, much like many other things we eat, and predators do contract illnesses by eating wild meat, but you should be informed, not afraid!

While the risk may be lower than meat processed in factories, there are important safety procedures and protocols to follow to ensure it is consumed safely.

TL;DR: You can, in fact, contract illnesses such as E. Coli from eating wild game. Predatory mammals other than humans do, in fact, contact illnesses from eating raw wild game. BUT don’t worry too much about it! Just know the facts!

[wizardarchetypes]

Bringing this post back to add Vibrio to the list. Vibrio refers to multiple bacteria which occur naturally in the environment—in this case, coastal waters.

Some strains of Vibrio are extremely serious, killing 1 in 5 infected people. Of the 80,000 general Vibrio cases reported annually in the U.S., 65% are caused by consuming raw shellfish, an extremely common way to serve & eat oysters and similar dishes (source).

I am presently recovering from one of the more serious Vibrio infections, although I contracted it from a wound (cut my foot open on a barnacle. Swim in shoes, folks!)

But the fact remains that we must be knowledgeable of the health risks which exist naturally in wild food sources so we can handle and consume food accordingly.