TLDR: Please, reblog. It not only helps artists and creatives, it helps ensure the continuation of the user-controlled, non-algorithmic dashboard feed feature.

So, there is a recent post going around about how the poll feature really highlights the view/engagement/reblog disparity. And the OP makes a great point that on OTHER platforms, even 1/4 engagement per view would be extraordinarily high.

What that leaves out, though, and something I don’t see talked about as much in the reblog/like discussions, is that those other platforms rely completely on algorithms. Our beloved, only-show-what-others-reblog dashboard (arguably the best feature of this site) is reliant on reblogs to remain a viable feature. If people only like/vote on posts, “my dash is dead” phenomenon will increase and eventually result in no more Tumblr, only-show-what-others-reblog dash (you already see this in the increasing amount of “suggested”/algorithmic options on mobile).

So please, please, if you care about this last bastion of sequential feeds (and, of course(!) want to support artists, REBLOG POSTS.

i <3 whining i <3 complaining i <3 grouching i <3 grousing i <3 groaning and YES i love moaning. annoying girls forever and forever and ever 🙏🙌👍☝️☝️👊👏👏👐🤘🤘🤘🤘🥱🥱🥱🥱🥱🥱🥱😍

Phyllis Shafer’s landscapes make me fucking insane

How is bnha anime of the decade...... they aren’t even anime of the hour of the minute of the second

The notes on this post were so toxic that staff just axed em

1969.........

Yes, when the original post is deleted from the server (not just the blog, but the Tumblr servers), there is no root post for notes to be added onto, and also no root post for time to be counted from, so it starts from zero. Most computer operating systems use Unix, which was launched in 1971 with t.he epoch date of midnight on January 1, 1970 as 1. Therefore zero is one second behind that date: December 31, 1969. Also, very unfortunately, this also means nobody except you and anyone you reblog it to will see this explanation, as you cannot open the notes to see comments when there are no notes.

PSA for Switch owners

The latest 11.0 update means that Google Analytics is a thing on the switch and turned on. What that means is that Nintendo has a deal with Google to share with them your data for advertisement purposes.

To turn it off

Please spread the word. Really shitty of Nintendo to just quietly start allowing Google to spy on users for advertising.

Solarpunk stuff for really broke people

Hey! I’m excited about sustainability, but I’m really poor! So here are some tips if you are also poor. 

Some starter tips

There are some things you can take that, while not stealing, people won’t expect you to take. This includes seed collecting from untended gardens, portions of plants that grow in the wild, and soil from parks. This kind of stuff can cut down on expenses.

Seeds can be sold in expensive stores, but can also be taken from produce you buy. Stuff like garlic, onions, green onions, tomatoes, and potatoes are all really easy to reproduce by themselves. Care enough to want organic, heirloom, ect? Go to a farmers market, take the seeds.

Some places also do seed libraries or seed swaps. Keep an eye out for these, especially if you live in or near a big town. Dollar tree also sells seeds in the spring.

A lot of this might involve bending rules. Be sneaky and be careful.

Plants

Ideally, land to plant on in a garden is how food is produced. However if you’re like me you live in a cramped, overpriced studio on the second floor or something.

Yeah containers work. But you need soil for that, and you can’t grab all of it from potting soil bags ripped open at your local garden store. Maybe if you’re patient. But I’m not.

Hydroponic setups work better. One like this requires a plastic bottle, some kind of mesh, and fertilizer. 

Fertilizer is, in a lot of places, seen as a bright blue powder sold in gardening stores. You could buy that. I wouldn’t personally. You could steal it from a chain store. But more likely, you could make your own. This article talks about fertilizer from food and food waste. And you can learn about nutritional needs of plants here.

This method could grow herbs, leafy greens, and some vine plants like pole beans, with support. this is not recommended for root plants like potatoes, for a lot of reasons.

Of course if you have access to dirt (not necessarily potting soil) you’re in a better place. Do a few tests, like drainage and composition. PH shouldn’t be a huge deal if you’re digging it up, just find dirt that shit is already growing in. Find a container that can hold a lot of dirt, poke a few good sized holes for water drainage, and plant that shit!

If you manage to bring some of your shit past usable to seed, congrats! Maybe learning about seed collection would help you spread the love to your other friends.

Oh and since there are no bees in your apartment (I hope) you’re gonna need to hand pollinate fruiting plants.

Recycling and reusing

Perhaps the most efficient way of doing this is having friends who also reuse things. You’re not gonna be able to save every candy wrapper most days, and I’m in no position to give up simple luxuries like candy. If you got the money, finding local producers who use compostable/recyclable materials for your little luxuries is nice though. But some of us ain’t got that kinda money. And that’s ok.

As I said before, bottles can be used to make hydroponic gardens. Maybe if you want you can help your friends set up some gardens if you got one too many two liters from Little Caesars.

Plastic bags can be turned into plarn (plastic yarn) and used to knit or crochet. If you feel so inclined you can learn to make cool shit, like reusable shopping bags or something. You could also make a bunch of plarn and outsource this to your friend who likes to knit in exchange for something you wanna do, or are good at.

Egg cartons can be used as seed starters. If you use the cardboard kind, they’ll dissolve into the soil if you break em down a little before planting them.

Aluminum foil can be used to keep algae out of your hydroponic garden, or as an alternative to steel wool. 

There’s a lot that I could say, but reuse stuff is popular right now. Ideally, it should be reused into something that has a good use. And remember, sharing your talents and outsourcing things you can’t do is good and pure.

Green Power

This is gonna be a little more expensive. If you got a little money laying around, this could help reduce your power bill or something. But this isn’t gonna be free or next to free.

Phone chargers are an easy one to power. They charge up and don’t vary in their power needs.

This tutorial is, quite frankly, brilliant, and takes away a lot of the barriers to making solar powered stuff (like soldering). They tear apart a garden light to do this. That light could be used for some plants or something.

Wind and hydro are kinda unrealistic for an apartment, but it’s something people do.

Local resources

Food banks, community gardens, borrowing land, pooling resources. Buy an empty plot with your friends and start a community garden. 

tape casette recorders are compatible with literally every. single. thing. im out here living in 2095.

things you can record (audio only), simply by lying to your computer, telling it that the tape recorder is actually a set of headphones:

and with a VCR you could do all of this AND have the visuals as well… but an audio cassette recorder is a good place to start, since they’re small and simple. I would not recommend a boombox, because those are large and nowadays all very, very bad quality.

Now you may be saying “how is any of this helpful, I want a digital file…” here’s the fucking magic. You go into Audacity (free program), and lie to it that the tape recorder is really a microphone. Then you hit record on Audacity, and hit play on the tape, and let it play at regular speed. Trim and export the digital file, and you’re doing gangbusters. You’re cooking with gas. You’re thinking with portals. You’ve won the internet.

Congratulations, you can “pirate”* anything you want, and literally no one can catch you, because you’re not downloading in the traditional sense. You’re streaming to an external device, and that device is recording what it receives. It’s exactly like taping a live tv show to a VHS. This is a very low-key and non-strenuous task for the computer, since your tape recorder does all the work.

*Is this piracy? No. Well- it’s time shifting. Sort of. Tell it to my Steely Dan albums. Tell it to my The Sims: Hot Date VG Soundtrack album.

Esplorando i fondali ©Tiziana Loiacono

Deuterium.

Vlisco, spring 2019, “Ramadan Kareem”. Designer: Hudayya Fadoul Abacha, Hudayya Couture (Abuja, Nigeria)

On this day, 15 July 1954, the right-wing dictatorship of general Francisco Franco amended the 1933 vagrancy law to criminalise homosexuality. The amendment also authorised the detention of all those convicted under the law in labour and concentration camps (content note: sexual violence). Over the next 25 years, around 5,000 LGBT+ people would be imprisoned – mostly gay and bisexual men and trans women. They were housed in specialist prisons in Huelva and Badajoz, and in a camp in Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, and many were subjected to brutal sexual violence, and medical abuse like electric shock treatment. Most of those prosecuted for breaching the law were working class, and historian Pablo Fuentes told the Guardian that it was “not uncommon to hear homosexuals from the upper classes and the aristocracy speak about the Franco period as a great time.” After Franco’s death in 1975 and the subsequent fall of the dictatorship, political prisoners were released, but LGBT+ prisoners were not. The homophobic law was eventually overturned in 1979, although those imprisoned because of it were not recognised as victims of Francoism and awarded compensation until 2009. We are currently working on a podcast episode about lives of LGBT+ people under Franco. To learn more about how Franco came to power, check out our latest podcast on the civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/ Pictured: Silvia Reyes, a trans woman who was imprisoned over 50 times. Image from lacuna.org.uk https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1475631362622009/?type=3

Ocean Fun 💙

Ancient Amber - baby snake - 50 million years old / Mineral Friends

Informative Ancient Egypt Comics: BROS

Our 1st place contest winner requested a Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep comic as their prize.

I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were. Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together. And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.

On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.

They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.

The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.

Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.

(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)

There’s a lot of bigoted historian dragging on my dash these days and it makes me happy.

Once again, more proof that we queers have ALWAYS been here, and it’s a CHOSEN narrative to erase them.

Reblog because ancient gay power

ALWAYS. REBLOG. THIS.

And also ancient gay power.

Ancient Gay Power

also ancient trans power

I can’t uderstand how at one point in time in my life I was working at a grocery store, surrounded by food, but starving and unable to afford half of it. It was only for a few months, but I still can’t make peace with it. I would see thousands of dollars pass through my till in an eight hour shift and yet I would walk away with so little I couldn’t afford meat or fresh fruits.

So anyways death to mega-corps and billionaires

just me and an old buddy :]

i thought this was an oil painting

catgirls... but sphynx catgirls... just SO so wrinkly

So... there’s ball jointed dolls that are designed to be sphynx catgirls. 

They are made by Triffony Artwork and most are available for purchase from what I’ve seen

they are not NEARLY wrinkly enough for me

I want them stout and just rippling with skin

A speedpaint video of this will be available at my Patreon on august 1st!