Retitled

[dragon-in-a-fez]

today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

reblog this post to help a child break the law

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[animentality]

[poppyseed-art]

[librarycards]

"girls could NeVeR!!1!1! beat '''''males''''''™ in athletics????? it's BiOlOgY!??!?!?"

idk bud have you tried um. feeding them

[librarycards]

these murderous idiots are teaching young girls and women to be afraid of calories when eating a LOT of calories is literally vital for performing well in competitive sports. and then claiming it's 'natural' to uphold sex segregation bc of this imposed malnutrition. it's fucking crazymaking.

[librarycards]

the mechanics here are truly horrific. systematically deny [cis] women athletes adequate nutrition and hydration, overwork and injure them. deprive them of the ability to realize the true extent of their strength and skill. segregate athletics based on false ideas of "sex" based on generations of malnourishment and poor training. blame trans woman athletes for the mere possibility that one might beat a cis woman, while claiming that the cis woman's defeat is inevitable. create emotionally stressful and often sexually humiliating tests to "purify" competitive athletics rather than foster the physical health of athletes. continue punishing all women for daring to play sports + have bodies.

[thatdisasterauthor]

Plotting my new novel! The fire tower/lighthouse one.

Used my Novel Navigation Notecards that are funding on Kickstarter right now for this one. You can check them out here, if you want to know more.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Humans are like "let me hold the thing. Let me pick it up. It's cute and I want to hold it, I want to wrap my weird elongated front feet around it, I want to encircle it with my freakishly long, oddly flexible front toes. I HAVE to hold things I HAVE to or I'll die."

[elisabethdeep-blog]

I know normal people can just pass their bill over and around an object and know most things worth knowing about it, but humans don't have electroreceptors At All. They only have mechanoreceptors. Which are most concentrated in the aforementioned 'hands'... and in their mouths.

They do also have eyes, and their vision is actually pretty acute. But their optic and mechanic sensory inputs aren't integrated together like electro-mechanic sense is. So they have these two fairly sophisticated sensory complexes that Barely talk to each other.

No wonder they try to bring the two inputs together in their environment then; picking things up and turning them around allows them to apply both their mechanical and optical senses to the object. They're just trying to make up for a deficiency of neural organisation.

And like. I mentioned the other concentration of mechanoreceptors is in their mouth... So just be glad they mostly grow out of constantly wrapping their viscera-looking tongue around everything.

[spell-bloom]

Hey here's some free Sims games. Don't pay for digital media in this economy.

Sims 1

Sims 2

Sims 3

Sims 4

Sims Medieval

Here is also all non-PC sims games. As well as links to a variety of emulators:

PS2

PS3

XBOX

XBOX 360

PSP

DS

Wii

GameCube

Game Boy Advance/Other emulator

EDIT (2/11/25) I completely forgot that Vimm's Lair got a lot of games nuked recently, here is a link to the 🏴‍☠️ games megathread.

[spell-bloom]

REBLOG THIS VERSION ALL LINKS WORK 👹👹👹👹

AND REMEMBER TO USE A VPN

[galileosballs]

I guess a more general version of the point is that in the last 50-ish years, everyday language has borrowed more and more of both the terminology and structural features of technical language. This happens for a lot of reasons. But I think it's mostly not a good thing. For one, being abstract and technical is not actually very useful in the messy real world, where concepts are fuzzy and vague and most things of importance are not quantifiable. For another, if natural language borrows too much of the authority of science and the law, it might find that there's not enough left afterwards for science and the law to do what we need them to do.

[galileosballs]

Why are you saying 'minor' when you mean 'child'?

Why are you saying 'they're a narcissist' when you mean 'they're being mean to me'?

Why are you saying 'hyperfixation' when you mean 'interest'?

Why are you saying 'gaslighting' when you mean 'lying'?

Why are you saying 'plagiarism' when you mean 'rip-off'?

Why are you saying 'war crime' when you mean 'immoral act'?

Are you so afraid of your own judgement that you need to borrow authority from a more objective domain? Does using a word from a technical language actually make what you're saying more objective? Or is it just a way of hiding behind the ever-diminishing authority of academia? Why are you too afraid to speak in your own voice?

[scramratz]

My vampires CAN walk into the sunlight but doing so would reveal what they would look like if they aged normally

Younger vampires don’t have much to worry about but older vamps have reason to avoid sunlight as they age. They are still immortal, but their aged, sunlit selves are significantly weaker than their non-sunlit forms. Vamps over 100 years old run the risk of crumpling over, fully immobile, but still conscious

[agwitow]

That is a very cool twist on the standard vampire tropes!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

[parttimepunner]

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

[adeptarcanist]

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

[im-flashtoo]

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

[ferncube]

Scale tree swamps are the only one of these I know anything about and they were SO WEIRD. There's definitely some controversy about how they functioned cause these things are hard to work out from fossils, but the current thinking is that these trees shot up to around 100 feet tall in 10-15 years, grew more tightly packed together than basically any modern forest, produced spores one time and then promptly keeled over and died. Forests just do not work like this anymore! It's not just different types of trees, it's a whole *different type of forest* that has gone extinct! Different nutrient cycling, different natural rhythms, different everything!

Even today there are all kinds of niche hyperlocal ecosystems that function in their own distinct ways - shale barrens, waxcap grasslands, cataract bogs. What else have we just never seen??

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Anxiety over all the prehistoric organisms we’ll never know, meet your big sibling: anxiety over all the prehistoric ECOSYSTEMS we’ll never know

[viralfrog]

[dollsahoy]

I cannot stress enough that all those things in sewing pattern instructions that seem pointless are actually very important

Yes, how you fold your fabric before putting down the pattern pieces and cutting matters, because it influences how the fabric drapes, and ignoring that can cause fit issues in ways you wouldn't expect

Yes, cutting an entire separate piece to sew to the edge to finish it is going to be better than turning the edge and stitching it on its own, because there are geometry issues in play that make it actually harder to just fold a curve to the inside.

Yes, cutting clips or notches into the seam allowance around curves should always be done, because those geometry issues will work on the seam allowances and keep the curve from laying flat (remember, clip when the curve goes in, notch when the curve goes out)

Yes, interfacing may seem completely superfluous and frustrating and an extra step to work with, but it adds rigidity and stability to areas that need it (especially under buttons)

Yes, using a fun quilting cotton print for lining looks nice, but the point of lining isn't to make the inside pretty as much as it is to make the inside slip smoothly over the layer under it, and quilting cotton is going to instead be prone to grabbing everything under it, so you really should use those annoyingly slippery lining fabrics

Yes, in general, you should use the kind of fabric the pattern tells you to use, because there have been centuries, if not millennia, of people throughout the entire world figuring out what fabric best suits what kind of garment, for reasons beyond aesthetics

I know that a lot of people new to sewing see these things and feel like they're things that just aren't necessary, because they skip them when they sew and the item ends up just fine. And if you don't mind the idea of your clothes looking homemade, then it is fine. But...if you're consistently skipping these things and end up unhappy with how homemade your items look, please consider that that result is at least partly because you're not following the entire directions

"Sewing" involves so much more than just the stitches

[elljayvee]

All this is true, but I will say: people will tell you not to make shirts out of quilting cotton, even though quilting cotton has BY FAR the best and most fun patterns.

Is it as good as fabrics designed for shirts? No. (My personal favs for winter are a cotton sateen with some stretch, and for summer a nice linen, if you must know, but I often use cotton double gauze for summer, too.)

Can you make a perfectly good button-down shirt out of it that will last you 5+ years of regular use? YES. I've made several. It's fine. Wash the fabric with super hot water and dry on hot first to make sure it's not going to shrink on you. The shirts last longer if you hang them to dry but that's true of most things.

If what you are looking for out of making your own shirts is The Most Fun Shirts Possible, use the quilting cotton.

[dollsahoy]

Oh, yeah, quilting cotton makes fun shirts! People just need to be aware that it does not always make a soft and drapy shirt XD

A "menswear style" button-up shirt will probably work out fine in even the sturdiest quilting cottons. If the shirt's goal is to be soft and flowing, then the weight of the fabric becomes more important.

"Button up shirt made from quilting cotton = fabulous" versus "Button up shirt that, If I had made it in quilting cotton, probably would have looked--and felt--like a tent"

Of course, if "shirt that is a tent" is your goal, that's fine! It's all about being aware of all the things beyond print/color that the fabric contributes to the finished item.

[vinceaddams]

And you've got to iron your seams!!

Sometimes with a press cloth, depending on the situation. You can cut a piece of silk organza to use and it works nicely because you can still see through it.

And staystitching the curved edges is absolutely necessary if you're working with a soft drapey fabric and you don't want the neckhole to stretch out horribly.

It's worth learning to use a thimble, I promise it makes hand sewing so much easier.

And ffs, clean your sewing machine regularly, and oil it! AND clean your iron now and then when it gets gunky! You can buy these melty sticks of iron cleaner to do it with.

Some people may say that mockups and basting are for the weak, but it's the other way around. Skipping them is for reckless fools.

A recent commenter on my 18th century shirt tutorial said:

"It came out fantastic, other than all the places where I did not follow your advice."

[stitchnknit]

It really comes down to what you're trying to get out of your sewing. If you're new to garment making I would highly encourage you to follow the patterns very accurately. At the very least so you learn all the different skills. Once you got a grasp on it. THEN start playing around to see what does and doesn't matter to you!

[vanilla-bean-buttercream]

There was a phrase that I used in my classroom when my students would ask me about doing questionable things, and my response was always, "Technically you can, but should you?"

The reason I used this instead of a simple yes or no answer is because it opened up conversation. Instead of blindly looking for permission, the conversation became more about cause and effect. Usually it navigated the "well you can't tell me what to do I'm going to do it anyway" instinct in kids when I'd say no, because all they were looking for is something to challenge them.

For example: "Can I jump off the slide?"

"Technically you can, but should you?"

If they answer no, I'd ask why. Usually they'd say because it's against the rules or I don't know.

If they say it's against the rules, I'd ask them why they think it's a rule. And if they'd say I don't know, I'd explain that the slide is five feet off of the ground, and jumping that high is a good way to hurt your knees or worse.

And then the most important part: if you did do it, how can you make it safer?

That's when the creativity juices started to flow. I'd get anything from pillows to beds to bouncy shoes to wings to someone catching them (which became a whole different conversation). And I told them since we didn't have those things here, it wasn't safe. And safety is everyone's number one job at school.

It stopped them from doing it behind my back. It got them to engage in critical thinking. And it helped them figure out how to do things without help.

However, there's always been an itching thought in the back of my head. Somewhere out there, did one of my past students drag their mattress out to the slide and jump off of it?

[catchymemes]

[selfundiagnosed]

Pierogi pillows

[ultrafacts]

In the cave mines there are tenfold less bacteria in the air than in the most sterile room in a hospital, so it also helps people with skin problems. Again, 300 meter deep, but the temperature here stays pretty much the same the whole year round – around 22 Celsius.

For decades, hospitals have sent patients suffering from asthma, hay fever type allergies and various bronchial blockages to spend time in the dark and humid galleries of the mine, where the salt-permeated air is believed to have decongestant and curative qualities.

(Fact Sources: 1 2)

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

[maculategiraffe]

last week my parents and I went over to my sister's house for lunch and hung out for awhile afterwards and finally the baby was like "I am ready for everybody to go home now" and my mom got a little bit shirty about it. not a lot in front of the baby (endless bitching afterwards to me and my dad 🫠) but enough that my sister definitely would have noticed my mom being Displeased and probably the baby would too because he is incredibly observant and intelligent.

BUT today the baby was playing in the sandbox and my sister was singing quietly to herself over a craft project and I said "is that a mama nous song you're singing?" and she said yeah and I said "she's so great, thanks for introducing me to her" and she said "yeah I love her. I actually made up a song kind of in her style for [baby] after last week, you know when he asked y'all to leave?" and she sang it to me. I wish I could remember the lyrics exactly but it was something like

"it's okay to have boundaries, it's okay to say no / it's okay to tell people when you'd like for them to go! / they might be sad about it, they might wish they could stay / but it's not your job to fix that and your feelings are okay!"

and I honest to god almost cried right there. she's so amazing and I can't believe how lucky I am to have her for my incredible sister and for the mother of my incredible nephew