to the random person i just accidentally followed and immediately unfollowed. i am so sorry.
Do Bug Zappers Work? Yeah—About As Well As Any Other Indiscriminate Wildlife Slaughter.
Bug zappers kill bugs by the thousands. But there’s a problem: They kill the wrong bugs. They are ineffective against mosquitoes and other biting flies, and their otherwise indiscriminate killing can disrupt pollination and generally throw the environment out of balance. Plus, the force of their electrocution can spew a mist of disease-ridden bug parts out into the air. All of the mosquito experts we spoke with and every relevant university extension office we could find unanimously condemned bug zappers. To keep an area free of bugs or to prevent yourself from getting bitten, there are much better alternatives.
Read more:
Never look at reviews for these things if you want to keep your faith in humanity. The very first one on the best selling Amazon bug zapper is delighted that “even bees” get zapped and that they have fun looking through all the dead things with their kids. Naturally this person uses words like “invading my home” and “infiltrating my space” to describe animals going wherever those animals naturally go.
Captions shouldn't be censored. If the video says fuck or cum or cunt the captions should say the fucking word.
Unless it's a slur! No one needs to see that.
If they say a slur in the video, the captions should reflect it. The disabled are not little babies who have to have life sanitized for them.
okay but I feel like ur forgetting that slurs don't just apply to the disabled... children don't need to be seeing the n-word or other racial slurs??
but children DO need to be hearing it? are you actually reading the post here?
Here's how it works when subtitles are done properly:
Audio: Let's BEEP go! Subtitle: Let's (censor tone) go!
Audio: Let's fucking go! Subtitle: Let's fucking go!
Removing swears and slurs from the subtitles without removing it from the audio is implying that deaf/HoH people need babying, unlike their hearing friends and family sitting right next to them. Which is frustrating.
The point of subtitles is to give the same experience to everyone watching, regardless of ability—not to be a more palatable version of what's being said.
It’s 4am and I’m having emotions about calling Mesopotamia “the cradle of civilization” so y’all are just going to have to bear with me.
Like okay, there are technically six so-called cradles of civilization: Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient India, and two civilizations in south and Central America called the Olmec (Mexico) and Caral-Supe (Peru). But the one we all learn about in school is Mesopotamia, bleeding into Egypt.
But.
The oldest of those is the Fertile Crescent (Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia), clocking in around 12,000 BCE. That’s the 121st century BCE, if you’re wondering. “Behavioral modernity,” I.e. the thing that separates Homo sapiens from Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, began 160,000 to 60,000 years ago. Homo sapiens was found in most of Africa before ever beginning the migration to other continents—by over 80,000 years, in some cases.
And we all know how Africa got treated in the post-Roman era.
How do we know there was no cradle of civilization in Africa? Like. It’s generally taken that “cradle of civilization” means cities, agriculture, and usually-but-not-always a writing system. We also know that if all humans on earth disappeared right now, in 15,000 years the only sign we were ever here would be a millimeters-thin line of plastic in the geologic record. And that’s in a world where we have stainless steel, concrete, the ability to carve in stone…
What I’m saying is, the oldest piece of string in the world is 50,000 years old and it was found in a cave. Huge swathes of Africa used to be green and lush. If some group ten thousand years ago decided to build a settlement out of mud bricks and tied-up pieces of wood in the African jungle, we’d never know today. The entire thing would have washed out and rotted away centuries ago. “Okay but agriculture—” one, not all agriculture is white people agriculture, and some of it is so different we wouldn’t recognize it at all (consider the terraforming east coast Native tribes did in North America that was so different from European farming methods it was taken as divine intervention in primeval forest). And two, I forget how many years it’s estimated to take before our fancy modern crops return to their wild roots once we’re gone, but I’m pretty sure it’s less than a hundred. We literally would have no way to tell anything was ever there.
And let’s say something did, by some miracle of preservation, survive to the “modern cradles of civilization.” Would it have survived subsequent wars and colonization? How about the changing climate as continents broke apart and ice ages came and went? Would we even have found it, given how gigantic it is and how little regard it’s received through the years?
Like. I could be totally wrong. But I also don’t see why it’s impossible for a civilization to have popped up in Africa like thirty thousand years ago for a century or two and then everyone went “ah, fuck this” and went back to being nomads. It happened at Cahokia. The city was abandoned and we don’t know why, but we do know there’s no evidence the mound-builders ever tried to rebuild somewhere else. And right here in my proverbial backyard, in Arizona, we had the Sinagua tribe, and in like the 1500s or so they just…dipped. There was a whole city built into the side of a cliff (two of them, actually, a few miles apart) and for unknown reasons they were abandoned. Archaeological evidence suggests the Sinagua moved northeast to join the Yavapai and Hopi tribes, but we have no idea why they left the Verde Valley. Water was still plentiful and even if Beaver Creek had started to dry up in summer—which is what it does today—only five miles away was a second city built around a sinkhole that’s still full of water today year-round (although it’s not potable by modern standards due to arsenic content in the water). Both were abandoned sometime in the 1400s for unknown reasons, and before you say “white people,” I will remind you white people didn’t come to America until 1492 and the site wasn’t discovered until over 100 years after it was abandoned.
So yeah. Maybe ancient civilizations in Africa so long ago, or so thoroughly erased by racist Europeans, that we’ll never know.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again
To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.
They are literally cutting off library access to minors.
here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)
The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"
This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."
Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.
Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.
Nobody my age is voting republican. Let's be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We're all afraid of dying of thirst because there's no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they're trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.
This liberalism and party affiliation doesn't preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is... Well
No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic but they're still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn't have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can't avoid it you're a sex addict. That's a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist
If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can't understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it's because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent's nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don't know how to organize because we're raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.
They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than "young people vote republican and watch Fox news"
I've never seen anybody explain it so well
I’m a cis man sure but i also wanna opt out of the gender binary. None of that shit is my fault or my responsibility and i don’t want any part of it
Believing the gender binary is stupid horseshit doesn’t require me to change my gender actually
Yeaheyah you get it. Not trans but i believe in their beliefs. Sometimes i remember people form gender complexes around what alcoholic beverages or colors they like and i just wonder how they’re not fucking exhausted from keeping up this stupid fucking horseshit. Just do whatever you want forever
@nimagine i know u reblogged this from me but ur so correct 🙏 get peer reviewed
no Male Author Moment has ever made me cringe quite as viscerally as the ending of Grapes of Wrath and that was a full decade before I found out about this
Sanora Babb’s own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was buried by the publisher after Grapes was published. It was eventually released in 2004, a year before her death.
You can buy the book from BetterWorldBooks (with free shipping) here.
Not so brave when they can't take helicopters through uncontested airspace to go sit on mountain peaks and laser designate poor dirt farmers from miles away
I already made this addition but my internet was spotty so it disappeared. Let’s try again.
I went and found the article to see if maybe it was taken out of context, since that’s generally a god idea on the internet. Here it is:
Full paragraph of the cut-off quote:
I thought there might’ve more to it, but it genuinely is, “this is nothing like Iraq or Afghanistan because the enemy is armed.”
^ another quote regarding the difference between Ukraine and Iraq/Afghanistan. anerican military was “always in control of the situation” in Iraq & Afghanistan
Finally, murdering civilians is evil and also a war crime, which is why the american military would never do that
(content warning: the american military has done exactly that on multiple occasions)
I am chasing Bush with a Machete
I guess that's it, right. I've said this before but a skill that I greatly value is diplomacy, being able to say things the right way to get people to calm down and listen and come to compromises and whatever. And this is often antithetical to radical honesty, to "say everything you think exactly how you think it all the time and never conceal your true self." I don't even believe people have a "true self", you know, it's all a series of masks. That's not a bad thing!
(If you do practice radical honesty that's also not a bad thing; we need people of both persuasions!)
Anyway, if you understand diplomacy, it's pretty straightforward to understand antidiplomacy: saying things in the most radical, provocative, shocking way that you can. And it's pretty straightforward to understand what the benefits of this might be in certain situations.
Anyway, people are being diplomatic a lot of the time, and they're also being antidiplomatic a lot of the time, and they're almost never telling you exact what they really think in their heart of hearts. Some people don't even know what they really think, they only know what they say.
If you are going to comment on politics, you must internalize the severe degree of allism which characterizes normie society. It is something to behold.
Also while we’re here I want everyone to appreciate that This
This wild, wonderful, beautifully animated and heartfelt queer story started here
Here, on tumblr, by an art student who was wrestling with his identity, mental health, and religious trauma
Tell your stories, kids, you never know how many people will thank you for it
Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.
Word for today: wisdom of repugnance
The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad
this is probably the funniest example of a tumblr user simply not reading the post theyre reblogging at all
really pissing on the poor with those tags
gonna add a take, android is better then ios because ios was created by Apple to maintain a complete monopoly over every single part of the phone so that it is absolutely impossible to get it fixed anywhere but at one of their official stores or licensed repair stores where they can slap you with ridiculously high repair bills for simple fixes. Android isn't a type of phone, it's an operating system. it's the same shit with apple always using a weird ass charging cable when everyone else has been using USB for decades. uniqueness not for improving the quality of the product, but for increasing its price artificially through after purchase repairs upgrades and replacements.
i’ve been saying it for years:
government considers you able to work if you can give anything more than 0%
employers consider you unhireable if you give anything less than 100%
The submersible’s disappearance has arguably been the biggest news story of the last 24 hours. That’s understandable in some ways. For one thing, it’s a mystery: No one knows where it is or what state its passengers are in. There is, moreover, a race against time, as the sub has enough oxygen to make it until early Thursday, according to the Coast Guard—if, that is, the passengers are even still alive. There is both the possibility of an improbably happy ending or of unspeakable tragedy—another element of a compelling news story. And then there’s everything about the janky sub and its rich passengers, who have risked their lives on what is essentially a novelty expedition. Without knowing their fate, it has the feeling of something out of a Ruben Östlund film: These people are so wealthy they can take dangerous chances in a vessel the size of a Honda Odyssey, just for thrills. Coverage of the missing submersible unintentionally illustrates something even more tragic, however. On June 14, what was likely the second-deadliest refugee and migrant shipwreck on record occurred when a boat carrying as many as 800 migrants sank off the Greek coast. Greek authorities had tracked the vessel and early signs suggest the country’s coast guard was slow to act despite numerous warning signs. This is a huge news story, one that hits at both Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis and the callousness with which many European nations treat migrants who are desperately trying to reach their shores. Yet it has received scant attention in the American media—and the missing submersible story has dwarfed what coverage there has been.
Source: newrepublic.com
This still blows my mind
I will happily delete this if I’m derailing or taking away from the original message (initially I put this in the tags, but a friend asked me to reblog as text)
If you don't want to pursue an autism or adhd diagnosis and you have access to a doctor or therapist you can get them to write you a note attesting to a symptom of your neurodivergence (rather than naming the condition itself) and stating the need for accommodation.
It's something my therapist told me about when we were still working in offices. I have sensory processing issues and on multiple occasions the noise in my office was so bad I broke the skin on my hand clenching my fist.
This work-around of course won't fix structural ableism and relies on you having access to a doctor/therapist who actually gives a crap, so still might only help a couple of folks.
khaleesi--daenerys-targaryen-de
Thats a good add on
I think everyone needs to start posting about how many people have been coming out in solidarity with trans people everywhere in the US especially in vulnerable states, because I’m really touched by what happened at the University of Iowa. These kids shut it down because it’s not just a youtube bigot on their campus it’s so much bigger than that! This is huge
People ARE coming out and packing courthouses and protesting on campuses and in the middle of your town and city in defense of trans people in great numbers. Very few people attended this loser’s speech and were publicly shamed for it. There are literally more of us than there are of them and I think we need to keep saying that
Platforming good things is crucial right now.
Bombarding people will every possible variation of horrible that's going on right now reaches a threshold where it's no longer useful and only fosters despair. It makes people think there's no point, no hope for anything.
But there is! The hateful minority IS that, hateful and a minority. And every time people come in and show support, it's important to put it out. It's important to let ourselves be validated. We're not alone, we're not ignored, we're not facing this fight isolated and without hope.
Be informed, absolutely, but make sure you're not poisoning yourself, letting those who hate you paint a world where you're alone and no one cares. Solidarity matters, and it's out there, if you look for it. Platform it.