No title available
No title available
Today's Document
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosimo Galluzzi
d e v o n
KIROKAZE
sheepfilms
DEAR READER
dirt enthusiast
Peter Solarz
art blog(derogatory)
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
tannertan36
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
izzy's playlists!
Love Begins
Show & Tell
almost home
I'd rather be in outer space šø
seen from Bulgaria
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Brazil
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from United States
@uswe
Ugh wtf why canāt I post chats on mobile.
Anyway, this was playing
And I go to Tristan, like a child sharing dinosaur facts: āZagreus and MelinoĆ« do!ā
Tristan replies measuredly that this is true.
āI know true facts about video games!ā
A beat.
āI probably know as many true facts about video games in general as I do about Renaissance Italy as featured in the assassinās creed games.ā
@sarumans
Me, when Tristan walks in on me wrapping my torso in saran wrap and packing tape: Do you require an explanation? Tristan: No.
Flooding Season
I got an email in my inbox yesterday warning me about flood risks and home insurance. Coincidentally, the APR group chat was discussing the proposed redesign of FEMAās role and the proposed buyouts in North Carolina. A few weeks ago we had a big storm in south-west Wisconsin. My parents lost power and the basement flooded because the pump was out for a few hours; a sister-in-law sent photos toā¦
View On WordPress
The satirical research field "parachute use to prevent death and major trauma" is such a goldmine. The two major publications
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/
and
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
are pretty much perfect satire of the way pseudo-skeptics dismiss domain experts and demand "hard evidence" in the form of exclusively flawless double-blind controlled studies, while clearly demonstrating that they have no idea what that entails, or what the limitations of RCTs are.
wild way to say "kill yourselves"
But the randomized control trial that was actually performed (second link) found no evidence that parachutes prevent mortality! (because they could only recruit people willing to jump off small, landed aircraft)
āThis portrayal of a marginalized group was wrong then and is wrong nowā and āThis portrayal of a marginalized group was very progressive for the time period and paved the way for more representation while likely limited by factors outside of the creatorās controlā are two statements that can and should ABSOLUTELY coexist and be kept in mind when interacting with older media
Great example
A YA romantasy writer filed suit against another writer for copyright infringement, and as is always the case with these things, she padded her claims with delusionally spurious examples. The judge issued a 160-page ruling against the plaintiff where you can tell from the start how resentful they (or whatever clerk actually did the work) are to have been forced by duty to have read the works in question.
"Alaska is a place known to the public, so setting a novel in a Alaska is not copyrightable."
Changing my belief system from "this is the hill I'll die on" to "this is the hill I'll kill you on" has done absolute wonders for me 10/10 do recommend
"you really gonna die on that hill?"
"someone is."
*releases pack of dads into home depot* goā¦ā¦be free
invasive species encroach on lesbian territory
This is a common misconception because theyāre such similar environments, but you should be aware that dads are native to Home Depot, while lesbians are actually native to Loweās. At this point, however, both dads and lesbians have made themselves at home in both Home Depot and Loweās to the point that trying to separate them back into their original ranges would probably do more harm than good to the delicate ecosystem of large chain hardware stores.
A properly raised and socialized Dad will be perfectly comfortable cohabiting with Lesbians. Its not reallyĀ āencroaching on anotherās territoryā. You wouldnāt say that about foxes in a forest that also homes bobcats, would you? No. Itās just two different species that have both evolved to live in similar/the same environment. As long as they recognize each other as equals, Dads and Lesbians are more than capable of cohabitation.
Now, if you were to release a pack of Lumberjacks into a Lowes or Home Depot, thatās where chaos will reign. Being adapted to a far harsher and more demanding environment, the Lumberjacks would simply push Dads and Lesbians both out and also consume far more than a sustainable amount of resources. It would be like releasing bears at a country club.
As a former timber-harvesterā¦ I feel this is potentially accurate in theory. But highly improbable in actuality.
Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.
This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.
A āpackā of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.
Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.
One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.
Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.
Getting a āpackā of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.
Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.
Please stop labeling Lumberjacks as dangerous roving social predators. They are intermediate level omnivores and remarkably peaceful unless threatened.
As a hardware store worker I can say that this is all 100% accurate.
now how in the FUCK am i supposed to leave tumblr when a god tier post like THIS is just is just waiting for me daily?!?!?!
question where does theĀ āart studentā orĀ āDIYerāĀ ācrafterā or āsoap makerā or āminiaturistā etc. who has ventured into the store for supplies fall into the ecosystem/what is their impact of said ecosystem?
Most of the above are native to craft and hobby stores (art students, historically, are native to museums, but having been introduced to hobby stores, have found a niche for themselves and thrived), but all can be seen in hardware stores on occasion due to territorial overlap. They are generally low-impact, as they tend to stick to specific small areas and primarily utilize different resources.Ā While a large group of any of them can be disruptive (art students, in particular, are known to travel in packs), in general, they are more likely to have territorial disputes with one another than with the local fauna.Ā
A point of clarity -ācrafterā is a bit misleading; while it conjures a specific image, much likeĀ āfishā orĀ āreptileā it actually covers a broad array of wildly disparate species, and in general, more descriptive nomenclature is preferred. Fiber artists in particular are a genus to watch out for, particularly in groups. Beware a roving pack of domesticated quilters. They fear nothing, will go anywhere, and due to their social nature, will often seek interaction from other species that thrive best in solitude. They are quite friendly, and will happily adopt members of other species; the concern is that their adoptees do not always wish to be adopted.Ā
#in search of taxonomic precision and peaceful coexistence (via welkinalauda)
I do wonder how lesbian/bisexual lumberjack-mimickry fits into this
I can say as a former craft store worker that if you wish to see true fear, look into the eyes of a Dad who must venture into a craft store. Despite the overlap of familiar beings known to him from his native hardware store habitat, Dads are instinctively aware that craft stores are not for them; they contain unfamiliar perils and even the seemingly familiar may have strange variances and unnerving secrets. (āWhy is this airbrush so small? What do you mean nails, why would youā¦ WUT!!ā)
Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.
Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.
Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbiansā temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.
Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.
The only truly invasive species that threaten craft stores are Brides-to-Be, who are mere annoyances individually, but like locusts may descend in hordes and lay waste, leaving swathes of destruction in their wake. Fortunately for the Craft Ladies, Brides-to-Be are seasonal and usually only a threat in the spring and early summer.
It Got Better
Is anybody going to address the newly invasive species of BuJo enthusiasts into the craft store/art supply store environment? Why arenāt we talking about the dangerous proliferation of Leuchtturm 1917s and the growing threat of Dotted Moleskins? I had to liberate a Dad from a tangle of washi tape in the art supply store the other day and it wasnāt pretty.
The natural habitat of journalers was stationary stores, which have been replaced by office supplies stores, not the same. Journalers invade the craft stores and art supplies stores to get the markers and washi tape and Sakura pens they require for survival.
@great-art-and-a-purple-tongue @onbearfeet THE LORE HAS BEEN UPDATED.
VERY IMPORTANT AND ENTIRELY ACCURATE now excuse me I gotta hit Lowes and Michaels.
Another thing to note is all of those habitats must adapt to the seasonal migration of goths. As soon as the faintest hint of spooky can be detected at those stores, goths will arrive in packs. A small pack of goths determined to forage can strip the shelves of a seasonal section bare in 30 minutes.
Too important not to reblog
I for one stand in fascinated trepidation to see how the major habitat destruction wrought by the loss of JoAnn Fabric will impact the greater ecosystem.
SCAdians can often be found in any of these environments, and while they do not necessarily travel in packs outside their native lekking grounds, they are gregarious and are not in fact one species but a colony of cordyceps-symbiotic Crafters, Goths, Dads, Lesbians, Cosplayers, etc. that are directed by the cordyceps inhabiting them to find others to pull into the āSocietyā. This particular symbiotic fungi, c. recreatoris, causes hosts to behave similarly to Historical Re-enactors, but SCAdians tend to create their own internally consistent timeline of events taking place in a shared world, whereas Re-enactors are a species of Museum animal.
I wish to address the percasive rumors directly: the loss of JoAnnās happened prior to and was not in any way caused by the annual Goth feeding cycle. Notwithstanding that much like cicadas and locusts, the craft store ecosystem evolved to handle and even rely on this phenomen, it simply had no relation to this unfortunate occurrence. While there remains some debate on the subject, the immediate cause seems to have been a disease which hit the elderly crafters on whom JoAnnās relied the hardest.
The loss of the JoAnnās feeding grounds has been devastating to the Goth population, and conservation efforts are ongoing.
you will never catch me complaining about an actress on a tv show having an imperfectly concealed pregnancy or a character going on a sudden trip somewhere while her actress is on maternity leave. so many actresses (and women working in any other field) are fired, punished and pressured into making reproductive decisions for their employers' convenience & if i have to try a bit harder to suspend my disbelief then that's absolutely what i'm going to do if it means people are getting to exercise reproductive & bodily autonomy without punishment
I have a lot of feelings about how pregnancy exits are handled - how is it written around? How is the absence discussed? Do they write it in or try to minimize it? Is the character sidelined? Do they video call in like Sophie from Leverage?
Hands down my all time favorite way a pregnancy exit way handled was Sameen Shawās when Sarah Shahi went on leave from Person of Interest. If-then-else is the episode name, and it is brilliant television. Itās a time loop episode in a show without time loops, and Shaw is the big damn hero of the episode, wandering around in an oversized black coat as is appropriate for New York generally. It is a crucial turning point, and Shawās absence after she is considered kidnapped or dead at the end of the episode has incredible weight and emotional resonance and drives further action.
And then when sheās back thereās a lot of shots of her separately, implying a more flexible shooting schedule, and the character is still central. Just incredibly well handled.
Didn't end up finishing all three on Saturday because Corporate Enthusiasm is hard, didn't do them Sunday because that's 'skip the adderall so i don't build up too much of a tolerance too fast' day and so i have no brain.
But! For anyone interested, I have three different posts on ethics and aesthetics:
Alliance for Policy Research Blog
Personal Professional Blog
hellsite
Part of this is an illustration of modulating how we frame things for audiences, because I think we're probably all stuck in the 'we won't lie just because they don't like what we're saying' thing, which, yeah. But like we gotta convince people to trust us to do work and then pay us. Also it'd be rad if other people also wrote for the APR blog because we've got a lot of cool expertise and I just want people to express that expertise in 300-800 word chunks with images and links to reputable outside sites to boost our search ranking. And also at a 6th grade reading level and not the Flesch-Kinkaid grade 15 I ended up at, fuck.
Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!
I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D
Amazing concept
I'm planning to write 3 posts today about ethics & aesthetics. This is first and most informal because I am not yet adequately caffeinated - and also because this is the only platform where I can talk about some background (because inappropriate for think tank and my mom who reads my blog doesn't know I'm married).
In the summer of 2018 there were two weddings relevant to the conversation. First was mine, to @alwaysboth. We went to the city/county building in Wilmington, then took our two witnesses ( @ereborne and brother) to Waffle House, and then we both went to work. We did this because it was an appropriate time to formalize the 'favorite person, probably keeping around' thing because I couldn't get affordable dental through work and Tristan's was available for spouses but not domestic partners. Also with me still a student, theoretically tax break. Tristan made much more than I did, but I theoretically had the anticipation of not just more money (because that's what a PhD is supposed to get you) and also inheritance, but we didn't do any legal paperwork beforehand because boring & expensive, we planned to move to a community property state, and we had a decade of solid trust at that point.
That was in June. In August I was Best Person at a really good friend's wedding. She wore a tux, and in every way presented male, to give the aesthetic of the wedding the participants had wanted. It was lovely - in a rented historic mansion with a lovely garden, lots of family and friends, all the AFAB people in the wedding party could wear whatever dress they felt suited them best as long as it was in the David's Bridal color. It wasn't a legal marriage, because that would have meant my friend who was disabled would no longer qualify for things. The US doesn't have marriage equality for disability. It's hot garbage.
But also, the bride, who was presenting as a lawyer despite not having passed the bar, apparently didn't actually mean 'in sickness and in health' if it meant it would cost money. And so there was no marital property, just the slow chipping away at my friend's inheritance to invest in capital improvements on property they had to walk away from when they broke up along with some light gaslighting and other financial abuse. Anyway Alexa, you're not the worst person I know, just the worst person who had to take graduate level classes on ethics; get fucked.
Two weddings. One light on aesthetics, one all aesthetics. Tristan and I are still happily married, in part because both of us actually care about ethics.
In the broader conversation, both matter. Aesthetics are how you convince people you have ethics. I'm thinking about this a lot recently because I have joined a startup think tank, the Alliance for Policy Research and am the quality assurance manager. Part of that means collaborating with two brilliant lovely people on figuring out how we actually define quality.
A fair number of us are ex-RAND, which has really well-articulated quality standards. All of us have at least an inchoate instinct that research should be done right, with good methods and facts and findings that come from facts and not the desires of the sponsor. We want to find and contribute to truth and knowledge in the world and make it better - hit the "healthier, wealthier, happier" goals that are our tagline. But how do you nail that down into a set of research standards?
Part of what inspired this post is that we were workshopping and one of the things that we had come up with is we want our research to be credible. But then one revisits dictionary definitions of things to make sure that they are precisely and accurately what one means. And what we found for credible was:
ableĀ to beĀ believedĀ orĀ trusted
possessing the quality of being trustworthy
And we all kind of went 'hmm, no.' Because yes, we want to produce research that people can believe, trust, and rely on. And we want to be considered trustworthy. But we want those things to be based on observable and actionable things - on our utility, not just the impression we give.
Though I pointed out, and this is some of why I'm posting, that we do also need to give the impression. It's important, because it's how we convince people to pay us to do the research where we can prove it. We need the aesthetics in order to get the chance to prove our underlying ethics. But for people who deal in facts and policy and want to save the world (and also for people who only had to talk to Congressional Relations sometimes and Marketing never) the need for deliberate focus on the aesthetics feels antithetical and somewhat unclean.
So we're taking this weekend to think about how we want to break down the idea of credibility into principles and keywords that we feel are more accurate, precise, and representative. I'm also taking the weekend to write things up as a demonstration of how now that we're writing in a less constrained environment we also need to think about how we incorporate aesthetics into our external quality standards vs our internal code of conduct vs how we talk about these processes and how transparent we want to be. It's fun!
In the meantime if you work for an organization that needs data or policy analysis done by a bunch of really intense world-class nerds you should hire us. Everyone is uncomfortable talking about pay rates so you've got a limited window while you can get incredible talent surprisingly cheap.
āthe protagonist should be endearing and relatableā the protagonist should make the audience scream and start banging on the one-way glass of the fourth wall. the protagonist should burn their entire life down and make the worldās worst sandcastle from the ashes. if they arenāt the cause of at least 50% of their own problems what are we doing here
I started watching Billionaireās Bunker and apparently itās supposed to showcase how extreme wealth makes you crazy. But all the crazy so far doesnāt seem discernibly different from anything you could find in the average American trailer park
I really have zero patience with the whole "man vs. bear" / "you're alone in an elevator with three adult men BUT you feel completely safe. Who are they" / "male night joggers are the natural predator of female night joggers" thing. Like, it's jokes, but it's also sincere, and it reinforces the idea that it's normal and good for women to be afraid all the time, especially of men.
It is not good for women to be afraid all the time, and we should not encourage it! When you consume a media diet of mostly true crime, buy a surveillance device for your house, and commiserate with the girlies online about how scary it is to see a man in a public place, you are basically cultivating an anxiety disorder. This will make your life more unpleasant, because you have trained yourself to be scared all the time, and it will not benefit you, because your fears are based on memes, not reality. You're not protecting yourself from anything; you're just giving yourself an extra flinch response.
And it plays right into the hands of conservatives! The right wing would love it if all women, especially all white and/or wealthy women, were terrified to leave their houses alone because they might see a strange man. They want you to be on a quest for One Good Man who will protect you from all other men and to be too scared to go anywhere without him. They want you to be on a hair trigger, ready to call the cops on anyone who makes you uncomfortable, because that is your function within their hierarchy.
If you are a woman, especially a white woman, then your fear is used to justify violence against poor people and people of color, especially men. From the perspective of conservatives, this is what your fear is for. And your fear is, in large part, what you are for.
Don't let them use you. Don't cultivate your fear.
It is far far more likely for women to be hurt, abused, and murdered by that One Good Man. Isolating yourself from others will in fact put you in more danger!
Later today a strange man Iāve met like twice is coming to my house. Not one of the tradespeople I generally pay to do this! This is a man from garden club who will be handing me technology for my role as local millennial technical expert. I was mildly surprised I had to tell him where I lived, because everyone knows my house. It is practically how I introduce myself. Hundreds of people know I live in a house with a glass front door, one other afab person and a couple of cats.
Itās fine. The worst thing thatās happened recently is someone left a yard sign for a political candidate leaning against the front door and now I have to decide whether to put it up or if even applying to a local gov position means I shouldnāt.
The last time I met a strange man our conversation consisted of me grabbing him and showing him committees he should join.
Actually no it was Sunday, and we walked partway home together and talked about how we liked how walkable downtown was.
Anyway, being an active part of your geo-local community is a great way to be less vulnerable and also feel less vulnerable. Fewer strangers and less opportunity to be isolated by people who will hurt you.
