Avatar

Andreil Minyasten

@andreil-minyasten

Fight Because You Don't Know How To Die Quietly

A family of cheetahs sleep with the forest guard every night. When the Forest Dept. heard about it, they decided to check the veracity of the claim by installing a CCTV camera. This is what the camera recorded! Just amazing.

Kitties will be kitties 🐈‍⬛

Avatar

i will never understand the insane takes against having games be more accessible

Avatar

“does every game NEED to be accessible to disabled people? 🤨” yeah, actually

Avatar

also the pissing and shitting over difficulty settings. just play the game on the normal difficulty dumbass it’s not for you

Avatar

Same with stuff like screen shake, particle effects, flashing/lightning effects: “But the game would look terrible without them!”

Then Just…. Don’t turn them off then, dickface…

Meanwhile, *having the option to turn them off* would greatly increase the number of people able to play the game.

Shout out to Massive Monster, an Australian indie games studio who incorporated multiple accessibility options in their glorious game Cult of the Lamb.

Cult of the Lamb is an adorably cute and devilishly fiendish roguelike which smashes together crunchy combat and fast-paced action with farm-sim and village elements, and allows you to customise many features of your gameplay experience:

  • Difficulty can be adjusted from easy all the way up to extra hard
  • Text can be bolded and adjusted for size
  • Flashing text, text movement and colour can be toggled on or off
  • Vibration can be toggled on or off
  • Several quick-time mini games can be toggled to ‘auto complete’ to reduce stress
  • The passage of time can be paused while away from your home cult, so your followers are safe and sound even without your supervision
  • The soundtrack has full volume sliders for speech, sound effects, and music
  • The dithering fade distance (the little bubble of visibility around you when you move behind objects) is fully adjustable
  • The controls can be remapped and adjusted for keyboard and mouse, or controller

Your player character, the titular Lamb, is a cute and cuddly eldritch a-baa-mination… and is very much undead, so even though defeat may mean the end of a particular crusade, your unholy sponsor, The One Who Waits, will bring you back from death as many times as it takes.

Fear not, for you are my chosen vessel and death cannot halt you. I shall not allow it, for I still have need of you. Take what you have gathered. Build and strengthen the Cult. This is how power is gained. Continue on, undaunted. Each time you are brought down, you rise again stronger.

I have an over-active flinch reaction and terrible reflexes, so being able to adjust several elements of the game settings and difficulty helped me complete it - and the learning curve was gentle enough that my confidence built over time, and encouraged me to venture out into more difficult games! I’m pleased to say the skills I learnt playing Cult of the Lamb soon had me playing Hades!

Inclusivity, accessibility and adaptability are excellent features for games to strive for, and Cult of the Lamb holds a special place in my evil little heart for them ♥️

the best thing about the moon and the sky and the stars is that while you can't ever take a picture of them that does them justice......you don't need to. they're gonna be there tomorrow

Prof says he'll grade students on a curve, so they organize a boycott of the exams and all get As

Johns Hopkins Computer Science prof Professor Peter Fröhlich grades his students on a curve: the highest score on the final gets an A and everyone else is graded accordingly.

Clever students in Fröhlich’s “Intermediate Programming”, “Computer System Fundamentals,” and “Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers” figured out that this meant that if they all boycotted the exam, they’d all get As.

So they organized a boycott, milling around the hall outside the class where the exams were being sat, sternly reminding each other that if no one sat the exam they’d all get straight As, ignoring Fröhlich’s pleas to come and sit the exam.

Fröhlich praised his students’ solidarity: “The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done. At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn’t expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”

Who will ride or die with me this hard

I love that even the professor was like, “YES! They did good!”

He told a bunch of PROGRAMMING students that he was going to grade on a curve.

PROGRAMING.

Like half of programming is looking at sorting algorithms and asking “what could break this?” They looked at the grading algorithm (curve grading) and noticed “if every grade is the same, everything is at the top of the list” and “the easiest way to get all the grades to be the same is to set them all to zero.”

Of course the professor praised them. He may have taught them the exact type of logic that had them organize the boycott in the first place. They found a bug in his grading system and loudly exploited it.

women should lift weights because it prevents osteoporosis in old age and makes you a more capable person in everyday life please shut up about butts and waists and hourglasses i'm going to fucking kill

;___;♡♡♡♡

Avatar

genuine question from someone who would rather chew their arm off than go to a public gym, and also doesnt have a lot of money: how do you safely get into strength training? are there youtube channels, apps (android), etc anyone recommends that makes it approachable and don't lean into diet culture / body shaming?

also the biggest thing that keeps me from working out is that I already have joint and spinal issues and moving the wrong way can fuck up a knee or a shoulder or my spine for days. I really don't want to injure myself, and have unwittingly done so before. resources that are extremely clear on exactly how to move and offer gentler / alternative ways to move for people with limited range are vital.

Okay, so this may not technically be strength training, but muscles are dumber than bricks and cannot tell the difference between your own bodyweight and actual weights.

So, may I recommend:

He runs a YouTube channel where he goes over how to work your way up to more complex exercises (for instance, his pull-ups videos start with using a door jamb and moving your weight back and forth) so it's good for easing yourself into things.

Avatar

You also don't have to fork out for expensive weights and such if you don't want to/can't. Substitute with stuff you either already have at home or can get from the supermarket and build up the weight you can exercise with. 500 gram cans of butter beans then 750 gram bottles of pasta sauce. 1 litre drink bottle then your 1.5 litre milk bottle. 3 litre bulk-buy bottle of laundry detergent. Etc. One of my dogs weighs 13 kilos and I pick her up on the regular (to her delight). One weighs 16 kg and I pick him up too (to his consternation and mild disapproval). You don't have to fit out some fancy home gym before you can start strength training.

I second Hybrid Calisthenics, that's the program I use. It's run by one guy who's taken it upon himself to make exercising more accessible and it's completely free! Each exercise has different variations based on your ability and each variation is further divided into different levels of difficulty so you can work up to where you want to be. If you can't do a single push up for example then this program will help you work up to the point where you can, and if you're a master of push ups then there are more advanced body weight exercises you can tackle so you can keep moving forward in your training without stagnating. The routine offers a full body workout with absolutely no equipment required for the beginning levels. The only reason you would need to buy anything is if you want to work up to a full pull up, at which point you would need actual pull up rings

Here's his actual website which I feel is easier to navigate than the YouTube channel on its own and organizes things in a way that's easy to understand. He explains everything you need to know about the routine and each individual exercise has both a text description and a video tutorial

I'm going to need y'all to preemptively chill out because the actor's strike is going to mean a lot of things including shows and movies we've been anticipating being pushed way back, and absolutely minimal press tours for the next however long this lasts.

The effects of the writer's strike are months down the road which made it a whole lot easier to support because as third parties we weren't really being affected (yet), the effect of the actor's strike is going to be immediate and we're going to get a lot more propaganda of "these people are overpaid to begin with."

Remember our desire for content does not supersede these people's rights to live.

Support unions, support the strikes.

Once again, I am BEGGING people to realize that tumblr tags are a filing system and not a visibility metric.

One does not come to tumblr to tag-spam for notes and get popular. There is no algorithm here. There is no monetization here. There are no influencers here.

This is where every other social media system comes to die. And we cackle and roast marshmallows on the pyre like the gremlins we are.

If you tag-spam to get your post seen by as many people as possible you are actually getting blocked by a bunch of people pissed off that you shoved an unrelated post into a tag they were looking through for relevant content. You also are going to be reported by people for spam. Because you are spamming.

Avatar

I have definitely reported multiple people for spamming tags with non-relevant content. If I tag search a topic, I expect to see posts on that topic.

Avatar

I like stories where a normal human child is being raised by a sinister supernatural being who is totally malevolent except when it comes to their kid. Those are so much better than the “kids are scary” changeling type horror movies.

Avatar

Like a perfectly well-adjusted well-mannered friendly child that is like “This is my dad, Surazal. He comes out of the mirrors in dark rooms. He makes really good blood pudding but he’s bad at playing catch. Most people can’t see his corporal form but I can because he says I have special eyes.”

Avatar

“Mom says that you can stay over but you have to promise not to leave my room between midnight and 1 am. You can play Mario Cart with me! But you have to knock on every closed door in the house before entering just because dad might be in there and if you look upon his visage without drinking the holy fruit juice, you might go crazy or something. Also dad is really excited I have a new friend and he’s going to to make hardtack and mystery stew for us! You’ll love it!”

Avatar

In high school the kid gets a friend that is an amateur demonologist who initially befriends them in hopes of exorcizing their house but ends up becoming buddies with Surazal too because they crave parental affection.

Avatar

Surazal stands at the end of the vast dark hallway and says “You Too Have Special Eyes, Little One. You Can See Me Without Being Taken By The Madness. Within You, I Sense Great Turmoil And Sadness. In My Younger Years, I Would Have Exploited The Sadness As Weakness In Your Very Soul. I Would Have Worn Your Skin Like A Mask And Run Through The Village Streets, Supping Blood From Every Man I Encountered. But Now I Have No Use For Woe. Perhaps You Would Like To Watch Beetlejuice In The Family Room With My Daughter While I Prepare Cupcakes. I Am Sensing You Have A Fondness for Red Velvet.”

Monsterfucking is out. Monsterparenting is in.

Why would you hide this in the tags

oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now

That’s not the quiet part.

There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.

It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.

Avatar

When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments -- on purpose -- I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.

The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.

I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all -- they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.

Scratch a prolifer, and you'll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don't even have to scratch.

Avatar

can we finally acknowledge the immense power religion wields over politics as a problem and stop treating atheism/secularism as a cringe reddit thing but a prerequisite for a functioning democracy

Avatar

and like. i'm sorry but religious minorities can only have rights if the state is religiously neutral. so that's a shit argument against atheism and secularism. please can we identify religion as the problem at this point. finally.

Avatar

religion sucks, all religions suck, literally every single one of them is used to exacerbate and justify structural oppression, removing it from public life and govt is NOT a bad fucking thing. we need to make it an important political point, something we actively fight for!