Flummoxed @tincake - Tumblr Blog

Posts

cassolotl

A poll for Firefox users

I use up-to-date Firefox and I have used the AI kill switch

I use up-to-date Firefox and I have turned off some AI features but not all

I use up-to-date Firefox and I have not turned off any AI features

I use up-to-date Firefox and didn't know you could turn off AI features

I use an older version of Firefox with no AI features

I don't use Firefox

Remaining time: 2 days 21 hours

cassolotl

I used my free 🔥BLAZE🔥 to get more votes on this poll from more different kinds of people, for science, and that was a good call! I can tell because the "I don't use Firefox" number is going up. Bring me your numberssssss~ (you know I have already made a spreadsheet)

tanoraqui

I’m starting a collection.

i-can-swear

I am pretty sure I have already reblogged this once

mysharona1987

Gee, if only Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg had made a blockbuster movie about how this was a bad idea.

quasi-normalcy

So what I think is that there's this default belief in patriarchy that men are superior to women and therefore the "masculine" sphere is superior to the "feminine" sphere. And so, as feminists have fought to expand the number of allowable female activities, men (on the aggregate over generations) have retreated from those activities because they're now seen as "feminine", and so partaking in them is incommensurate with their belief in their own superiority. And, unfortunately, as this has progressed, this has resulted in a lot of men sectioning themselves off from, frankly, everything that actually makes being alive worthwhile. It's a misery spiral, and the only way out is to abandon male supremacy.

adulthooliganism

i hate fun

adulthooliganism

april fools !!! look at these elephant watering cans

okjohnrich

Dear Readers,

The good news is that I've completed the full manuscript for John Rich & The Big Picture, formatted it and killed some darlings, and have sent it to my agent. What started out as a practice novel has become, truly, A Regular Novel. That practice worked—I learned so much! You guys taught me so much. With your gasps, groans, and laughter, you showed me what hit and what didn't. Thank you.

The inconvenient news—I will be closing this Tumblr in the next few days. This is, yes, for #publishing reasons. You will only be able to read John Rich & The Big Picture at the dedicated website for the foreseeable future.

Tumblr is where I got my start sharing stories. I love how I can, like, post 400 words of smut and have that up for 48 hours. I can type up a random thought on the current chapter I'm working on. I can rant. Or drop a poll about whether or not you think John is inspired by John Mulaney. (For legal reasons, he's not. Why would you even think that?) Tumblr is a great place to build community, but not the ideal place potential publishers wants certain stories to exist. (That gay hockey comic is an anomaly.)

Chapter 19 and all subsequent chapters will be up on okjohnrich.site. You'll read the ending there. That site, too, will have to be taken down at some point, but I'll let the finale breathe before putting it under lock and key. This means your friends should start reading now before they have to buy the eBook for the price of two Manhattan lattes.

Thank you for reading, Ngozi

the-tao-of-fandom

The thing about golf as a sport is that there's like.... nothing Inherently evil about hitting a ball with a weird club. We've got several sports like that that DON'T require massive tracts of land kept mowed to within an inch of its life. To say nothing of the pesticides and water use.

Which is why I'm proposing Golf 2.0: Hard Mode! Where you just play Wherever, no high maintenance landscaping necessary. I want to see what kind of trick shots and weird modified clubs golfers can come up with if you need to get your ball out of knee-high grass and across a bog. Also you should bring back the all-plaid look. Give a lil boost to the Harris Tweed economy.

errorschacha

Not to indulge in childish fantasies but what if every time I checked the news it wasn’t worse?

orphanedsource

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

revcleo

This is called a "superloo" and terfs are actively trying to steal this from you, in the UK they changed bathroom regulations to mean new buildings have to prioritise gendered toilets rather than build superloos.

This also upset a lot of architects and designers who like the superloos. They're also typically more like small rooms rather than having doors you can look under.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Sam Handwich.

sufficientlylargen

If Pikiwedia says it it must be true.

zooperdoopers

I made Pikiwedia real. Works for any Wikipedia page. Use this wisely :)‌

sufficientlylargen

Oh, wary dell vone

zooperdoopers

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.

Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))

marzipanandminutiae

help some Racist Nonsense someone came at me with has sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how common enslaved dressmakers were in the antebellum southern US, but the continued lack of understanding even among historians that Seamstress and Dressmaker were two different things in the 19th century is making it REALLY difficult

(the Nonsense being "well of course it's realistic in Gone With the Wind that Scarlett makes the curtain dress herself with patterns her mother formerly used to make clothing! plantation mistresses had to know how to make adult clothing from scratch so they could direct the enslaved women who made their clothes!")

(like. yes, enslaved clothing-makers were AI clothes generators who had no skills of their own and had to be given very precise instructions to produce the desired output. of course. sounds legit. </s>)

marzipanandminutiae

Also just speaking of the book in question, genuinely, it is so 1930s to be like "oh yes, we make clothing ourselves now, so in the olden days before modern technology, they must've made their own clothes even harder!!!!!"

Filtered through a heaping dose of the classic "well, women of the past could do everything and women of the present are spoiled and incapable!" Which in the US you see all the way back to the 19th century fiction of the totally self sustaining colonial household where the wife did absolutely every domestic task somehow

Like just in case you had any suspicions that Margaret Mitchell did a lick of research when writing this. Please throw those suspicions in the trash

(really the period when it was at all a money saving endeavor to make your own clothing at home from scratch was so small in western history, and the practice was geared at such a specific subset of the population, that it's not at all what people today imagine it was. Like for most women, making your family's own clothing at home being a thrifty or even just viable proposition was more likely to happen in the 1950s than in the 1850s. I'm not saying that nobody in the 19th century was in that position, but far fewer people than anyone imagines in the present)

achronalart

I recently read a book* on British women dressmakers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There was a whole invisible, disregarded and mostly unrecorded economy of independent self-supporting businesswomen making clothes for sale. (The author had to pore over local records all over the UK just to pull together the information. Working women were not given much visibility or mention in those centuries.)

One thing that's really clear is most women did not make their own clothes.

Rich people had servants and professionals to make their garments, and later on couture houses. Many of them used enslaved labor which would have had to have been highly skilled.

Middling sorts had local dressmakers, sometimes professionals, sometimes a local woman or neighbor who would do it for pay. There were itinerant dressmakers too, who would come into houses and make up the family's wardrobe. And there were shops of readymade garments far earlier than most people realize.

Poorer people bought their clothes secondhand. There was a huge secondhand garment trade.

American pioneers in homespun is pure modern-day fantasy. Women in the territories had mail-order catalogues from which they could have clothes delivered by trains or by ship.

As far as I can tell, the idea of self-sufficient women doing a constant round of spinning, weaving, and sewing is a fantasy of the post-industrial age projected onto women. But spinning, weaving and clothing-making has long been a professional industry.

*The book is Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid: British Dressmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries, by Pam Inder, Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2020.

marzipanandminutiae

Book recommendation! Thank you! And such a good breakdown too

(worth noting that slavery was in something of a legal gray area in the UK during the 18th and early-mid 19th century when it was legal in other parts of the Anglosphere; it was never technically legal in the UK itself, but of course it was legal and commonly practiced in their colonies, and many enslaved people who were brought to the UK Were treated as though they were still de facto enslaved until they were taken back home again. And of course you don't have to rely on chattel slavery to make a business off of unfair labor practices, which was extremely common even after slavery was outlawed and/or fell by the wayside)

it's interesting also that some dressmakers offered a sliding scale of services, from making up entire outfits on the high end, to cutting and fitting and basting the pieces together in the middle, to cutting and fitting but leaving the women of the household to do the physical sewing themselves as the Budget Option. I find that fascinating

elbiotipo

More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"

paperdragonsong

I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.

tiredtransgal

i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!

tzikeh

Maryland will become the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in retail stores, after passing Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Jesus fucking christ that this exists in the first place

boyslit

I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭

eclipticasolaris

Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.

antisocialxconstruct

I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.

materassassino

If there is enough widespread complaint about it at store level, it WILL get back to corporate. You can also make complaints online.

lierdumoa

Every time an author reassures readers that the smut is skippable I sigh a disappointed sigh. This is not a reassurance. Why would anybody who likes smut want to read smut that was only included as an afterthought and has no impact on the narrative? Insulting. Just don't write it at all if you're not going to make it matter.

lierdumoa

#on the one hand I understand that some people don’t want to read smut

Like 85% of tumblr users hate and loathe embarrassment based comedy with every fiber of their beings, but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure their audience that the embarrassing scenes are skippable.

Lots of people dislike tragedy but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure the audience that the death and grieving scenes are skippable.

Stop trying to pass off self-censorship as “accommodation.” Stop trying to pass off pandering as “inclusivity.”

Your audience can smell your fear, and it smells rancid.

hoovesandfloorpaws

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

<3 Proper way to help these lil buddies on their way <3

jenjen4280

If you’re in the habit of helping small creatures, as I am, here’s how for snail. Prob also applicable for aquatic snails.

dataandphilosophy

“For example, if you’re trying to convince people to boycott a segregated store, your object is to convince them that boycotting the store will have a strategic effect, not that desegregation is morally important. For whatever reason, on a cognitive level human beings have a really hard time with this. Smucker cites an example of a Lefty roleplaying session where people were tasked with selling an action to people who agreed with them on principle but didn’t see the strategic merit of the action. Surprisingly, the sellers couldn’t make the conceptual switch to sell strategic merit: instead, they doubled down on THIS ISSUE IS IMPORTANT — even though it had been stressed to them that the people they were selling to bought into the importance of the issue. People react poorly to “this is important, so do WHATEVER I SAY”; they want to be convinced that what you’re proposing will work.”

Source.

myfootyrthroat

Also from above:

“Bob Wing, a grassroots organizer, explains this nicely: “If winning feels impossible, then righteousness can seem like the next best thing.” But righteousness is not conducive to getting normies to join your team if your team cannot demonstrate ability to, at least sometimes, win. Nor does righteousness help you make real inroads with regular people.”

victusinveritas

"Now I've shot so many Nazis, Daddy will have to buy me a sable coat." (From his Wikipedia article).

Neil Munro "Bunny" Roger

June 9, 1911-April 27, 1997.

Bunny Roger killed a bunch of Nazis and then invented Capri pants.

He was expelled from Oxford for his indiscrete gayness (discrete gayness being perfectly fine at Oxford and part of the curriculum until...today probably, at least like 1992?). Then, having been sent down to London, he started his own fashion business, and his first client was Vivien Leigh.

Bunny served in WWII, killing fascists in North Africa and Italy, and often wearing a mauve scarf in the field. Roger claimed that he had gone into a battle brandishing a rolled-up copy of VOGUE and commanding: "When in doubt, powder heavily!"

Roger was known in high society for his themed soirées; Diamond, Amethyst, and Flame Balls were held to celebrate his 60th, 70th, and 80th birthdays. He wore a curious plum colored catsuit with a feathered headdress at his 70th birthday ball in 1981. At his 80th, he made his entrance in a catsuit of scarlet sequins with a cape of orange organza, greeting his guests from behind a wall of fire. His parties were covered by the newspapers, including a New Year's Eve Fetish Ball where the proper upper class mixed with young guests in rubber S/M gear.

From an obituary: "Beneath his mauve mannerisms, Bunny was stalwart, frank, dependable and undeceived; to onlookers a passing peacock, to intimates, a life enhancer and exemplary friend."

From another obituary:

He served valiantly in every way.

shabbytigers

happy 125th birthday to bunny roger

victusinveritas

Found this color photo:

And this in-memoriam piece.

marzipanandminutiae

(he did not precisely invent capri pants- Sonja de Lennart did, and they popularized them together)

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Flummoxed