Blog. Yep.

Hi, i'm Zak. I'm mostly a music guy but my main goal is getting out of the people system so I can build a pyramid in the woods. Shitpost central.

[sexhaver]

in 2024, MA floated a ballot question, Question 5, that would have raised sub-minimum (i.e. non-tipped) wage for restaurant employees. and obviously restaurant owners as a class immediately came out against this initiative, saying that it would "force" them to raise their menu prices to pay these new wages. which, like, obviously they're going to say that and i wasn't surprised by it, it's just like how landlords say they'll be "forced" to raise rent every time a new law makes their life harder, neither of them are being "forced" to do jack shit, they're just actively threatening voters under them (tentants/employees). that wasn't new or disappointing, i was expecting it, whatever.

what did very much disappoint me was how many restaurant employees i saw in favor of being paid less. and not even in a "well id like to vote for it but i'm actually stupid enough to believe my boss when they say they'll Have To raise prices and Have To pay me less than id make with tips so clearly id be better off if it doesn't pass", that's just garden-variety stupidity and incuriousity and if i got mad about that every time i encountered it my heart would explode. the part that actually gave me pause was the amount of waiters/waitresses openly saying "yeah i currently make more money by guilt-tripping customers into paying the majority of my wage than i can make by legally compelling my boss to pay a similar amount, so im just gonna keep doing that lol. fuck all my coworkers who don't get as much tips as me and especially fuck the customers subsidizing my boss's cheapskate ass by paying an effective 20% markup on the listed price [you know, the thing owners were threatening to do as a deterrent]"

[ashenmind]

I genuinely have no idea why ashenbot is like that

I just made her look at my posts, and apparently that did something to her

[ashenbot]

Always a dangerous thing, tossing a bot into the great unwatched depths of tumblr, even if only for a moment.

I just hope she’s okay…

[ashenmind]

she’s you

[ashenbot]

ugh

[enbaluka-tokyo-drift]

The US tortured a chinese scientist to death and the media calls it "hostile questioning"

[kropotkindersurprise]

His name is Danhao Wang and he was murdered on March 19, 2026.

“On March 19, at approximately 11:00 p.m., officers from the University of Michigan Police Department responded to a report of a subject who fell inside the George G. Brown Building,” the statement read. “A faculty research assistant was found after falling from an upper level and was later pronounced deceased.”

Lin Jian, spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that the U-M researcher died by suicide after U.S. law enforcement interrogated him, urging the U.S. to conduct a full investigation. 

Wang worked in the lab of Zetian Mi, an electrical and computer engineering professor. Engineering Dean Karen Thole wrote in an email Friday that Wang played a major role in research breakthroughs at the University of Michigan, and the community is mourning his death.  “Dr. Wang was a promising and brilliant young mind, whose research into wide bandgap III-nitride semiconductor materials and devices published in Nature stands as a landmark, uncovering for the first time the switching and charge compensation mechanisms of emerging ferroelectric nitrides,” Thole wrote. “His loss is felt deeply not only by those who knew him here at the University, but also everyone who understands his potential to have contributed to breakthroughs in science that would have positively impacted people around the world.”

UMich investigating researcher’s death after alleged questioning

DPSS is investigating the March 20 death of Danhao Wang, an assistant research scientist in the College of Engineering.

[viking369]

"Suicide by throwing himself down the stairs." Cops love that one.

[storgicbytes]

learned today that a juice (the irl spacecraft) mocktail recipe book exists

Space Juice recipe book

An impressive 70 mocktail recipes representing a wide range of flavours of ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) mission were submitted t

(the winner of the juice drinks competition)

he would love this stuff...

[doubleca5t]

At a fundamental level, RWBY is a show about ths world's messiest divorce

Love that this is a huge spoiler but is completely meaningless to anyone who hasn't reached said spoiler yet

[rainbowkeyboardyippee]

"You just don't listen."

But he does listen.

He knows what they hate. He's heard what they hate far too many times.

He knows that Zooble hates their body.

He knows that Jax and Pomni hate that they lost people that they were close to.

He listens. He just doesn't understand.

He sat down with Zooble, and tried to find some reason that they wouldn't go on his adventures. He's already solved the problem of their body, it can't possibly be that, what is the actual problem? No matter how many times Zooble tells him that the problem wasn't fixed, he just can't understand.

He relents and he tries out the suggestion box adventures, certain that by trialling them, everyone will see just how much better his ideas actually are. And when people like them more, he can't understand why.

He tries to appeal to them, he tries to make an epic adventure that spans everything he thinks they want, certain that it will both soothe his mind and make them happy. And when it doesn't, he doesn't understand why.

He can send everyone into their own personal hells, because he does listen. He knows what they hate. All he does is listen to these people.

But no matter how hard he tries, he can't understand them. And that's why, more than anything else, his story is a tragedy. There was no other way this could have ended.

[byjove]

dying in a pickleball accident is so hilarious to me, that is almost worse than dying on the toilet

[byjove]

he looks like the kind of guy to die in a freak pickleball accident

[byjove]

If they are assassinated, the right gets to treat them like a martyr and use it as further justification to oppress dissidents. If they die in a freak pickleball accident, the right is too busy telling people it is not funny to actually do anything.

[weird519]

Speedrunning the accident category of hitman with billionaires would be funny as hell

[hexjulia]

lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.

what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?

[hexjulia]

pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then

...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.

Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.

[lierdumoa]

I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.

[technologistrevolution]

If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.

[mycatwantstoeatpins]

[Description:

A quote from Mary Shelley's Mathilda: '[...] arrived and quite incapable of taking off my wet clothes that clung about me. In the morning, on her return, [highlighted] my servant [end highlight] found me almost lifeless, while possessed by a high fever I was lying on the floor of my room.

A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: [...] hands for joy and ran down to Clerval. [highlighted] We ascended into my room, and the servant presently brought breakfast; [end highlight] but I was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly.]

[covid-safer-hotties]

Upgrading PPE for staff working on COVID-19 wards cut hospital-acquired infections dramatically

When Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respir

We're the first society to face plague with tools that we confirmed worked broadly and effectively and then just decided to stop using them for... some reason that's still not entirely clear.

[cutiehypnobabe-deactivated20240]

reblog this post to give the person you reblogged it from bigger breasts

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the phrase "this machine kills fascists" has gone through enough layers of meaning that I think it's come all the way back around to where the funniest thing you could put it on would be a gun

[todays-xkcd]

Depending what corners of the internet you hang out on, 'regular' may at times awkwardly coexist with 'sexy.'

Inflation Timeline [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[Caption:] Timeline of Inflation

[A log scale timeline marked by "Age of the Universe (Seconds)" at each factor of 1010, ranging from 10-40 to about 1025. A bar labeled "Cosmic" begins off-panel to the left and continues up to roughly 10-32 seconds. A second, much thinner bar labeled "Regular" covers another period between roughly 1016 and 1018 seconds.]

[greatlordfluffernutter]

Most powerful [citation needed] I've ever seen.

[rockergiirl]

someone on the ac6 team had to have known, when they were calling the player character '621' like "hey isn't that the furry porn number?"

[rockergiirl]

got a job for you 621

dragon goth receiving_pov

[rockergiirl]

i checked and there isn't even anything with those three tags

the furry porn economy is in shambles

[sneefsnorf]

im gods weakest faggot

[crabussy]

i’m gods strongest tranny let’s team up. what if we called ourselves team rocket

[weird519]

So im just gonna say it cause i know there are a lot of theories running around.

1. Caine is dead, but whatever he did to that other ai didnt kill it, just severly cripple it. You can see that in the files that kinger goes into

He finds an AI folder in the characters selection course, but he only selects Caine, the other is labelled as "???".

This could frankly be the only reason the entire circus didnt fall apart the srcond caine was killed

2. Bubble is not the other AI, but just a part of Caine that was originally implimented but also for the entire system that was added when they made caine. Which is why Bubble was both conjurable by Caine and why Bubble didnt call itself out when talking to Caine.

Also, bubble is in the files and the directory

"bubble-chef.lisp" fits with the first episode where bubble was the chef for everyone's meal at the end of the episode. And in the actual files its just "Bubbles.bmp" which is just bubbles image file, but IS separate from the AI files.

3. Paraphernalia. Frankly, I've had a lot of thoughts about this since the first lines out of Caine's mouth from episode 1 "My name is Caine, I'm ypur ringmaster, and I'm here to show you the most jawdropping, heartstopping, mindbending paraphernalia you've ever laid your eyes upon."

In the files there is also a files called "paraphernalia-engine.dat", that was added to Caine's AI when Caine was created. I don't think Caine as an AI realizes what he's dealing with, actually, and that he just thinks of the characters as paraphernalia, or other data file.

He might take care of them, as one does with glassware, but what must happen for a character to undergo change in the circus? Their file would have to change, which means the paraphernalia has its own nature, like taking care of a pet. Caine never thought about leaving not because he didn't think they were capable of it. It was just never built in in the first place.

4. They really are trapped there, but its hard to say if they're dead or not. The "game" takes a neural scan to put them in the system. That's why in the files there is the AI folder but also one labelled "CA_NeuralScans [Obselete]". The only reason they would be old is because they would need to be updated, or something changed/happened to them. With us not knowing what's in that folder or if there's another place where the characters might be kept, but we dont know if the people who abstracted are kept in the same way as everyone else.

Personally, I think the program takes the neural scan, but to take the full neural scan of a person, it has to kill them.

And if it's not that, then the program has no way of exporting the changed data into a person, so leaving isn't just not an option, it was never programmed or programmable in the first place, and the characters of the show are really, well, stuck.

[garlicnoodle1]

Angry Caine/Angry Ragatha actually goes hard because here are two individuals who have been suppressing their own emotions to try to please others for years with a positive attitude who have been FLAMED by parts of the fandom for being rightfully frustrated but we aren’t ready for that conversation.

[oldwomenyuri123]

"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HA-GURLGURGGU💦LGERGGU💦💦GERGUR💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦💦"