Professional Amateur

30 he/him, minding my business until a special interest is mentioned. Hobbies are HEMA, small keyboards, TTRPGs, several more in hibernation.

[guadalajarafacelift]

Literally stop having anxiety it’s not real.

[bitesu-bitesu-bitesu]

[itswalky]

[quixoticanarchy]

I do think it's kind of funny how john green wrote a book about tuberculosis that brought a lot of renewed attention to the subject and he's since become the darling of the tb world, speaks at tb conferences, my dad and every other tb researcher I know is absolutely smitten with him, and they'll be like "we love this guy! have you heard of him??" and I have to be like well yes, I have. for other reasons

[knownqueerbaiter]

idk who needs to hear this but it’s healthier for you to just accept that you’re gonna be kinda fat than it is to live the rest of your life miserably trying to monitor yourself to maintain a skinny weight your body doesn’t want to hold onto

[knownqueerbaiter]

“nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” what feels even better is living a life where your self-worth isn’t entirely dependent on your thinness and you don’t constantly monitor and shame yourself. attaching the tweet that was worth at least five hours of therapy for me

[magic-the-girlbossing]

Nigel Farage 'unaware Parliamentary investigation would restart' after by-election - report

As it turns out, Nigel Farage might have wasted most of his summer by spending it fighting with a man wearing a bin on his bonce.

endlessly amused that Farage seems to think he's a Magic: The Gathering card

[magic-the-girlbossing]

blunder of the century: Farage plays Ephemerate into non-targeted removal

[realness-remade]

[acidcatbath]

remember that guy that had a single auditory hallucination that told him he had a brain tumor and the exact location and then he went to the doctor and it was fucking right

[penglue]

[theswisscheeserag]

You gotta be really publicly passionate about things if you want your friends to text you. Bc people will forget to text you because they’re human. But if you’re really openly the friend who loves identifying ants your friends will think of you when they see ants. And they’ll text you “what ant is this [blurry photo]”. And then they’ll ask you how you’ve been and we should get coffee sometime. But if they don’t know what you love they’ll never know what you like

[theswisscheeserag]

And then when the ant convention is in town they’ll be like dude… we should go to the ant convention. But they would never think to go if they didn’t know u loved ants

[theswisscheeserag]

And sometimes you need to ask them to go to the ant convention. But you Will not get anywhere hiding your passions

[rohirric-hunter]

"We're gonna achieve immortality by turning ourselves into machines" buddy I want you to find yourself a 15 year old laptop and try to run a 10 year old piece of software on it please. Connect to the internet, if you can, and attempt to log into any of your online accounts

[100-bugs-in-disguise]

tech just has a different kind of mortality. there's incompatibility with newer stuff, sure, but there's also just like. maintenance. how long are they gonna make replacement parts for you? and even if you can do most of your own upkeep yourself, how long will it be until the people with the skills to do upkeep in spots you can't reach yourself are all gone, because your tech is obsolete? (would a normal car mechanic in 2026 know how to do maintenance on a model T?)

any robot that wants to live forever will need to have parts manufactured for them forever, and for the skills to actually use those parts to be passed down forever. which is. you know. not super realistic

[depsidase]

[gloryofdawn]

I don't think there's a single nation with more right to this proverb than Haiti

[vexheart]

— Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs

[thestuffedalligator]

What I admit I do like about early Pokemon is how rarely they went for the easy ideas first. They had to create 150 monster designs in one game, and I’m sure it could’ve been so easy to phone it in with some generic RPG-ass monster designs, but it took six generations for them to make a Pokemon based on a tree, seven generations for them to make a wolf. The grass type representation in gen 1 is palms, rafflesia flowers, pitcher plants, and cordyceps fungus

The first games introduced the concept of reanimating fossils, and the first fossils you can resurrect are horseshoe crabs, ammonites, and one (1) pteranodon. It took four generations before you could reanimate a dinosaur, and it took two more generations before you could reanimate a Tyrannosaurus rex

Gen 1 did have some generic RPG-ass monster designs (slime, snake, bat, Big Guy Made Of Rocks) but a lot of it is weird biology, visual puns, and references to Japanese folklore and pop culture. It was so much more important to make a Pokemon referencing the phrase “a duck comes bearing green onions” than a wolf, and I think that’s a load bearing pillar to the series’ ethos towards monster design

[tanadrin]

According to the book, when a rich man made a flat mochi from leftover rice and shot an arrow at it, the mochi transformed into a white bird and flew away, and after that, the man's rice field became desolate and barren.

love ancient folklore that is just completely inscrutable

[apricops]

the moral of this story is, don't shoot at flat mochi with an arrow

"I was never going to do that"

good!

[mangonetics]

[datsderbunnyblog]

This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.

[catboycommunist]

evergreen

[eraserheadadult]

the situation with harry potter is kind of unprecedented in some ways imo because it is maybe the largest media franchise in history to be created & owned by a single person who still has direct creative control over it. who is also a billionaire with significant cultural/political influence. like the usual "no ethical consumption under capitalism" type excuses shatter on impact when the bigoted author in question is logging onto twitter every day saying explicitly that when you buy the tim hortons ravenclaw donut she is using your donut money to fund the genocide of trans people. like with big franchises usually there's at least a little more diffusion of responsibility than this

[dormitionanddominion]

[6-phds-and-no-sense]

sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it

[6-phds-and-no-sense]

new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys?

me: dONn’t touch those

new guy:

me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.

new guy:

new guy:

me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that.

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

Science is rational, scientists are human. 

[eabevella]

In Taiwan we have a special brand of snacks named 乖乖 (literally means “well behaved” but in a casual way like when one’s compliment a child or a pet of being good) that has green package.

It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.

It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.

This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.

You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack.  Or some newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a disastrous crush down.

The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass spectrometer etc.

When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.

[askfordoodles]

Broke: Humans are inherently good

Broke: Humans are inherently evil

Woke: Humans are, for good or evil, inherently ridiculous