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Bee_0124

@bee-0124

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

always remember gay men are the reason we dont have to pay for public bathrooms in canada

WAIT HUH??? IM CANADIAN????? WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARS ABOUT THIS UNTIL NOW??????

two gay men got arrested for fucking in a public bathroom but they argued since you had to pay for it it was a hotel and it was fine. their defence worked and we dont have to pay for bathrooms anymore

Ok guys I know we want to celebrate victories in queer history but

1. Googling "Canada gay sex pay toilets" just brings up a bunch of reblogs of this post

2. There does not seem to have been any sort of norm of public toilets in Canada charging money to use in the 20th century

3. I am neither Canadian nor a lawyer but I find it extremely hard to believe that there is any jurisdiction on earth where charging money to use a public toilet makes it legally constitute a hotel room and therefore OK to have sex in.

thats because i lied about this

If yes or used to please say in the tags whats it's name,what animal it is and how old it is"

important poll !!!

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I legit have a whole bed full but Im currently sleeping with the big Baby Yoda plush that Target sells.

YOU GUYS IT’S DECEMBER 10TH YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS HAS BEEN IN MY QUEUE SINCE FEBRUARY

you have the rest of the day to reblog this

“You are worth finding. Worth knowing. Worth loving. You and all your one million layers. Always hold that close.”

Danielle Doby

shaking you by the shoulders and telling you that change is a natural byproduct of growth and that you shouldn’t blame/judge/be disappointed with your past self for making choices that you made because you didn’t know any better. telling you that you were genuinely just trying your best. imploring you to practice compassionate self-awareness so that you don’t only forgive your past self for the mistakes you made, but thank your past self for getting you where you are today in your journey

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

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Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

I am in love with you /p

What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time

The ‘Wizard’ one is the ‘A meaningful death’ link!

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I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

  • We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
  • We know they had remarkable vision.
  • We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
  • We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
  • We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

@lusus–naturae​

did i ever tell you guys about that time i gave my sister 2000 nickels for her birthday

special ordered them from the bank

nice to know that in a world full of change, tumblr still has no idea how numbers work

thats…thats $100, right? 

@ you weebs

2,000/10=200

Two hundred dollar power move

Y'all. 2,000 nickels is $400. 2,000÷5. It equals $400.

i’m crying. no, no it doesn’t

the answers keep getting worse better

Guys it’s 50$.

what the hell.

This post is getting progressively worse and I love it with a passion 

this is why US coins should just have NUMBERS on them rather than whatever the fuck a “dime” or “nickel” is

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a nickel doesn’t say nickel anywhere on it

it says five cents

none of y'all make any damn cents

Sorry I had to do this I felt like I was losing it

it took 3 blithering years of suffering for someone to add that screenshot

Since there's been a lot of fandom history on my dash tonight, I want to tell you about something I've referenced before, and which always gets funny notes in my inbox whenever I do:

The day fandom collectively lost its shit after logging into Delicious and finding it was like, a horrible mix between MySpace and Reddit.

Like AO3, it's a story of fandom using a space that wasn't intended for fandom, and then being utterly destroyed when that space decided to adopt hostile policies.

Delicious was a social bookmarking site, which was basically a way for users to save content from around the web. This was during a time when browsers were notoriously awful, and saving bookmarks locally was guaranteed to end in you losing everything because Firefox updated and did something weird, or Internet Explorer just randomly shat the bed and reinstalled itself when you weren't looking. And it was superior to browser bookmarks, because it had tags and organisational structures that were set by each, individual user.

And it happened to be perfect for fandom, because at the time we were primarily using LiveJournal, another site that didn't want us, and was actively trying to push us out. Delicious was used in two primary ways:

  1. Readers of fic would use it to save the ones they liked, often using their account to curate reclists.
  2. Community owners would use it to organise posts to the community.

Free LJ accounts only allowed so many tags, and even paid accounts often didn't have enough for large communities. Roleplay was huge on LJ, and users would often want tags for all their characters so they could find old threads. Some megafandoms with huge ensemble casts would very quickly run out of tags on their communities, especially if they tagged for content creators, tropes, kinks, etc. With Delicious' tag system, it was a perfect site for both of these purposes.

And then one day, without warning, we all logged in to do our thing, and it was a completely different site. Tale as old as time, Yahoo! bought it, decided it wasn't profitable enough, and decided to rebuild it from the ground up without any warning. They got rid of the tag system entirely, and I don't think anyone ever truly figured out how the new site was meant to be used.

But fandom was utterly and truly in a mass panic, because this backbone of how so many things were run just evaporated. Ever wonder why AO3 has the tag system it does? It was built by the same people who used Delicious. Before AO3, fandom had collectively decided that the information AO3 displays on fic headers was what should always be displayed. People would have to build their own headers, but they always included the same general gist of fandom, characters, pairing, rating, word count, warnings, kinks, and summary. You could browse a stranger's Delicious account, and would have a reasonable certainty of seeing these same, or very similar prefixes in their tag system.

So. Fandom is panicking. Entire communities are un-searchable, reclists are broken, people have lost years of bookmarked fic, and we were all scrambling to find something that worked like Delicious, or build something like it, but it had happened so abruptly that there wans't time to really coordinate.

Then, from the shadows came Maciej Cegłowski, aka Pinboard Guy. (Not to be confused with Pinterest.) Pinboard Guy had heard that Delicious had shat the bed, because fandom wasn't the only group that used the site, and weren't the only people who lost their bookmarks, but we were certainly being very loud and obnoxious about it. Pinboard Guy reached out to fandom on the whole, with a glorious gift. He had his own Delicious clone, that he built from the ground up and maintained for better privacy and security, and he sold accounts. At the time, it was around a $5 one-time fee, with a structure that increased the fee by a fractional amount for each new account. Basically, as server load increased, so did server costs, and this is how he managed to keep up with that.

He also understood that by its nature, fandom is very social, where his site was very asocial.

So he asked, what does fandom need? And someone opened up a Gdoc, and a lot of people put together a very well-written and organised (and enormous) list of ways in which fandom used social bookmarking. How we needed prefixes, and bundles, and a way to discover other accounts, along with detailled explanations of why. A lot of work was put into this, which was basically a fandom manifesto explaining to an outsider everything he would need to know to rebuild Delicious. For a lot of us, we didn't expect anything, but just being humoured was validating.

And then this man implemented these features for us. When you go into your account, you can tick a box that says you're part of fandom, and it will open up an entirely separate part of the site, that he built, just for us. He didn't have to do this. But he did it anyway. He's changed the pricing model since then, and it's now a yearly fee instead of one-time, because Pinboard is still run by Pinboard Guy, and no one else. No ads, no sponsors. Just Maciej Cegłowski and his ancient-ass code that still looks like the internet did in 2009.

And then, a few years down the line, like the fucking baller he is, Cegłowski bought Delicious and shut it down. Just killed it dead.

Not a lot of people within use Pinboard anymore, because AO3 also serves the first reason people used it: bookmarking fic. Allowing for external bookmarks meant that the reclist people didn't need to rely on a service that might not always be friendly to us. And then, well. LiveJournal kicked fandom out through a series of hostile policy changes, and Dreamwidth failed to take off, so we no longer really needed that community archive aspect.

But 2009 was a rough year for fandom, because it was the year fandom pretty much everything changed. While we gained a huge, centralised archive that wasn't the Pit of Voles that FFN is, we lost that centralisation when fandom fled LiveJournal for this fucking hellsite. Some of us vainly tried to make Dreamwidth happen, and clung to it in the desperate hope that Tumblr would fail and people would miss journals and communities, but it never happened.

And I'm telling you. When this Post+ thing finally drives fandom off this site, I'm gonna be torn between sitting back and laughing because it's the same shit all over again, and collapsing into utter despair because I am too goddamn old to learn how to use another site that isn't built for the way fandom likes to shove square pegs into round holes to make sites suit our needs.

In my foolishness I asked, "Could you make me a list of those features? I'll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement."

Maciej himself talked about this experience and how unique of a community fandom was. You can see his transcript of it here:

In my foolishness I asked, "Could you make me a list of those features? I'll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement."
Oh yes, they could make make a list.
I had summoned a very friendly Balrog.
For three days, I watched this collaborative Google doc grow and grow before my eyes. It ended up being fifty-two pages long. I want to show you some of the highlights.
At times, there were so many people editing the document at that it tucked its tail between its legs and went into a panicked ‘read only’ mode. Even the mighty engineers at Google couldn’t cope with the sustained attention of fandom.

-

Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I could not believe what I was seeing.
It was like a mirror world to YouTube comments, where several dozen anonymous people had come together in love and harmony to write a complex, logically coherent document, based on a single tweet.
All I could think was–who ARE these people?

My favorite part about Pinboard Guy is that he describes his acquisition of Delicious in terms of nemeses.

“The big story this year was last month's surprise acquisition of Pinboard's long-time nemesis Delicious. This illustrates the importance of always having a backup nemesis, an area where Pinboard leads the industry.”

There’s a video of the talk up, and it is hilarious. His delivery is on point.

The energy he describes--the cooperative DIY spirit and desire to build things--is very typical of older fandom. You still see it on here on tumblr in some quarters.

But don’t be complacent: Liking fic is not what made us who we were back then. Merely resting on our AO3 laurels and collectively reading fic is not enough reason to pat ourselves on the back for the kind of thing described above. What defined us was rolling up our sleeves.

It doesn’t have to be as big as AO3, and you don’t need to find as many like-minded fans as fled Delicious together. It could be an AO3 collection of external bookmarks linking to Wayback Machine copies of fic on a dead archive. It could be editing Fanlore to cover sectors of fandom it’s missing, from the history of AMVs to non-English language fandom. It could be moderating a Discord server so your fandom has a friendly, moderated place to hang out.

You too can roll up your sleeves.

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Yesterday I overheard someone talking about how he was taking classes at the University of Maryland because they offer free tuition if you’re over 60. 

My brain IMMEDIATELY began scripting a screwball comedy in which a broke millennial who desperately want to finish his long-abandoned degree but is drowning in student debt pretends to be a senior citizen in order to attend college for free.

I’m picturing someone Channing Tatumesque, applying age makeup every morning before he heads off to class. It’s sort of a cross between 21 Jump Street and Mrs. Doubtfire. He keeps forgetting which hip is supposed to be his bad one. His classmates laugh every time he uses slang. There’s definitely a scene where he attends a college party and busts it up on the dance floor.

He catches the eye of a fellow returning student, a woman in her 50s, but she thinks he’s like 70 and she’s already buried one husband, you know? She’s not interested in doing that again. When his charade unravels (hilariously) at the end of the movie, though, she finds out he’s actually like 30 and has abs you could bounce a quarter off. And he’s still super into her. And really, maybe it’s time she gave May-December romance a chance.

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Okay so to refine this concept a little:

Our Hero is stuck in a job where he keep seeing people get promoted past him because they have a 4-year degree and he doesn’t. He can’t afford to go back to school until he finishes paying off his student loans for the degree he’s one semester from completing. If he got the promotion he wants he could pay them off a lot quicker. But he can’t get the promotion without the degree.

Along comes a clerical error in his almost-alma mater’s records which lists his birth year as 1948 instead of 1984. He gets a call from them about their “free tuition for seniors” program. “Wow, that sounds amazing!” he says. “I’ll be sure to tell my, uh, grandpa, as soon as he gets home.”

It’s one semester. If he can keep up the charade, he’ll have the degree, get the promotion, pay off the student loans. Hell, if they figure it out after the fact and come after him for the tuition, he’ll be able to afford it by then. He just needs to pass as a 70-year-old until graduation. How hard could it be?

(also, someone in the notes suggested “Senior Year” for a title, which is PERFECT.)

Holy shitballs.

do you ever sabotage your own free time? like wtf is that about? i want to play this game or read or do something specific but instead i will just stare out the window or scroll mindlessly???