Reblogging again because I got an anon last week whining cause they did this to one of my unfinished series and the bot killed Y/N so now they want ME to give them a happy ending. Like. No. Suffer, bitch.

AI is the death of creativity. Anyone who does this to my stories and is stupid enough to brag about it will be blocked from ever reading my work again, AND I'll let everyone on tumblr know that you do this. We'll see how much fic you get to enjoy when every author blocks you forever.

Fic is a gift. I've said it before. Don't shit all over your lovingly handcrafted gifts, m'kay? This should be fucking obvious, but apparently for some of you it's not.

based on @lilnasxvevo 's post here because I COULD NOT RESIST. where is the subgenre of 3zun reconciliation fics where xiyao have to fuck nmj back to health???? where is it???? wen qing is here because reasons. don't question it.

doubly hilarious if this is an AU where jgy has already begun to try and use Music Makes You Lose Control - nmj has to go to his sworn brothers and explain that his doctor thinks bottoming might fix him better than music, and whilst lxc is smiling politely and doing worldslongestyeahboi.mp4 in his head, jgy is sitting there frantically trying to figure out how he could poison nmj with his dick instead.

(he doesn't kill nmj because jgy is so fucking touch-starved that after one midweek sex break with da-ge and er-ge he's full of so much serotonin and so de-stressed that he goes back to Koi Tower like :) :) not giving this up :) :) patricide time :) :) ......also the alternative is to try and explain to his dad why he's not playing Evil Music anymore and what he's doing instead, and there is a non-zero chance his dad will respond to this by trying to make him a fulltime sex assassin. so yeah! :) PROMOTION TIME ZIXUAN-GE :) )

and obviously, when the new "treatment" clearly begins to work...

Lightlark & Nightbane sound like fucking Warrior Cat names

Tiktok sensation LightLark is the final boss of bad fantasy YA— a failure built on aesthetic boards and tropes, unable to pretend it has a heart

Tiktok sensation LightLark is the final boss of bad fantasy YA— a failure built on aesthetic boards and tropes, unable to pretend it has a heart

View On WordPress (Includes audio version)

A full summary with spoilers, analysis, quotes- and so much more on the subject of a book you should never read. This is a long piece. Like ‘Youtube Video Essay’ long.

Lightlark is joyless, a husk beyond parody, a checklist of every Island of Blood and Bone and Glass and Hearts that has come out in the last five years, built and sold on tropes and aesthetic boards. This is a book written by an author who is not a writer. It would fit in on the dregs of an amateur writing site with eerie perfection.

But Lightlark is more than that. You see, Lightlark is… a TikTok book.

EDIT:

Thanks :')

There's now a video version. I heard Tumblr likes video essay long watches on obscure very specific content... may I introduce you to:

I'm not making a dime on this, I have no horses, only like 70 hours of work looking at this mess of a book and I just want to make sure everyone knows how bad it is. Let's be bitter at this multimillionaires flop together.

good omens is Like That bc terry pratchett wrote everything w incredible warmth and belief in humanity but had never heard of gay people whereas neil gaiman had but never wrote anything else that didn’t feature like, sexually explicit vore. bad combination

padme's handmaidens are such an underrated concept. i mean, yeah you can call it women supporting women and leave it at that but like. its so much more intense than that. they basically created the persona of queen amidala together. they assigned her specific mannerisms and tone of voice and breathing patterns and all of them studied that well enough to play the role perfectly. they put all of the derangedness teenage girls put into discovering their own identity into perfecting mimicry instead & they did all that knowing that their role will always be to die in padme's place if it comes to that. idk what insane levels of devotion does it take to be like 14 and you've become so intimately familiar with your friend that you can quite literally become her. there's friendship & traumabonding and then theres "my entire life is dedicated to dying for this woman" and then there's that but with added identity fuckery and thats what the handmaidens have going on with the bonus point of being 14

ok yk what tho. thought on this more. theres something about padme growing up with her closest relationships being ride or die devoted and the way that colours her later relationships. shes a lot more isolated as a senator, with most of her friendships at the time being professional & ofc aside from that, her standards for the intensity of your average relationship arent normal so there could be some genuine failure to connect there. and thats the stage of her life where she begins her extremely intense ride or die relationship with anakin. the fandom acknowledges his attachment, loyalty & murder complexes but i think maybe we should consider that padme might have genuinely liked that about him. im straying fully into my personal interpretation here but i love the idea that on some level, the girl who grew up knowing shed have to send her closest friends off to die in her place and then carry on and do her duty would be attracted to someone who gets to lash out and take revenge and who refuses to accept loss

Oh, wow. I love this addition, especially given the context of Attack of the Clones. The movie starts with her handmaiden getting murdered while protecting her. Padme is upset and grieving literally the entire film, but trying to hold it in. The first thing she does after Anakin goes ape shit is to rush off to the planet where she knows her handmaiden's killer is to start some shit. He's, like, her inspiration.

A gorgeous, talented Black girl on TikTok independently released a single with a music video for it that's probably one of the few songs I could describe as Goth Pop, both by the sound itself and by her being clearly versed in the goth subculture, and she's getting so many mean comments. The song is good, she dances gothly and beautifully, her voice is very soft and sweet. Pay her a listen!

So You Need To Buy A Computer But You Don't Know What Specs Are Good These Days

Hi.

This is literally my job.

Lots of people are buying computers for school right now or are replacing computers as their five-year-old college laptop craps out so here's the standard specs you should be looking for in a (windows) computer purchase in August 2023.

PROCESSOR

You can get away with a Ryzen 5 but an intel i3 should be an absolute last resort. You want at least an intel i5 or a Ryzen 7 processor. The current generation of intel processors is 13, but anything 10 or newer is perfectly fine. DO NOT get a higher performance line with an older generation; a 13th gen i5 is better than an 8th gen i7. (Unfortunately I don't know enough about ryzens to tell you which generation is the earliest you should get, but staying within 3 generations is a good rule of thumb)

RAM

If you don't have at least 8GB RAM on a modern computer it's going to be very, very slow. Ideally you want a computer with at least 16GB, and it's a good idea to get a computer that will let you add or swap RAM down the line (nearly all desktops will let you do this, for laptops you need to check the specs for Memory and see how many slots there are and how many slots are available; laptops with soldered RAM cannot have the memory upgraded - this is common in very slim laptops)

STORAGE

Computers mostly come with SSDs these days; SSDs are faster than HDDs but typically have lower storage for the same price. That being said: SSDs are coming down in price and if you're installing your own drive you can easily upgrade the size for a low cost. Unfortunately that doesn't do anything for you for the initial purchase.

A lot of cheaper laptops will have a 128GB SSD and, because a lot of stuff is stored in the cloud these days, that can be functional. I still recommend getting a bit more storage than that because it's nice if you can store your music and documents and photos on your device instead of on the cloud. You want to be able to access your files even if you don't have internet access.

But don't get a computer with a big HDD instead of getting a computer with a small SSD. The difference in speed is noticeable.

SCREEN (laptop specific)

Personally I find that touchscreens have a negative impact on battery life and are easier to fuck up than standard screens. They are also harder to replace if they get broken. I do not recommend getting a touch screen unless you absolutely have to.

A lot of college students especially tend to look for the biggest laptop screen possible; don't do that. It's a pain in the ass to carry a 17" laptop around campus and with the way that everything is so thin these days it's easier to damage a 17" screen than a 14" screen.

On the other end of that: laptops with 13" screens tend to be very slim devices that are glued shut and impossible to work on or upgrade.

Your best bet (for both functionality and price) is either a 14" or a 15.6" screen. If you absolutely positively need to have a 10-key keyboard on your laptop, get the 15.6". If you need something portable more than you need 10-key, get a 14"

FORM FACTOR (desktop specific)

If you purchase an all-in-one desktop computer I will begin manifesting in your house physically. All-in-ones take away every advantage desktops have in terms of upgradeability and maintenance; they are expensive and difficult to repair and usually not worth the cost of disassembling to upgrade.

There are about four standard sizes of desktop PC: All-in-One (the size of a monitor with no other footprint), Tower (Big! probably at least two feet long in two directions), Small Form Factor Tower (Very moderate - about the size of a large shoebox), and Mini/Micro/Tiny (Small! about the size of a small hardcover book).

If you are concerned about space you are much better off getting a MicroPC and a bracket to put it on your monitor than you are getting an all-in-one. This will be about a million percent easier to work on than an all-in-one and this way if your monitor dies your computer is still functional.

Small form factor towers and towers are the easiest to work on and upgrade; if you need a burly graphics card you need to get a full size tower, but for everything else a small form factor tower will be fine. Most of our business sales are SFF towers and MicroPCs, the only time we get something larger is if we have to put a $700 graphics card in it. SFF towers will accept small graphics cards and can handle upgrades to the power supply; MicroPCs can only have the RAM and SSD upgraded and don't have room for any other components or their own internal power supply.

WARRANTY

Most desktops come with either a 1 or 3 year warranty; either of these is fine and if you want to upgrade a 1 year to a 3 year that is also fine. I've generally found that if something is going to do a warranty failure on desktop it's going to do it the first year, so you don't get a hell of a lot of added mileage out of an extended warranty but it doesn't hurt and sometimes pays off to do a 3-year.

Laptops are a different story. Laptops mostly come with a 1-year warranty and what I recommend everyone does for every laptop that will allow it is to upgrade that to the longest warranty you can get with added drop/damage protection. The most common question our customers have about laptops is if we can replace a screen and the answer is usually "yes, but it's going to be expensive." If you're purchasing a low-end laptop, the parts and labor for replacing a screen can easily cost more than half the price of a new laptop. HOWEVER, the way that most screens get broken is by getting dropped. So if you have a warranty with drop protection, you just send that sucker back to the factory and they fix it for you.

So, if it is at all possible, check if the manufacturer of a laptop you're looking at has a warranty option with drop protection. Then, within 30 days (though ideally on the first day you get it) of owning your laptop, go to the manufacturer site, register your serial number, and upgrade the warranty. If you can't afford a 3-year upgrade at once set a reminder for yourself to annually renew. But get that drop protection, especially if you are a college student or if you've got kids.

And never, ever put pens or pencils on your laptop keyboard. I've seen people ruin thousand dollar, brand-new laptops that they can't afford to fix because they closed the screen on a ten cent pencil. Keep liquids away from them too.

LIFESPAN

There's a reasonable chance that any computer you buy today will still be able to turn on and run a program or two in ten years. That does not mean that it is "functional."

At my office we estimate that the functional lifespan of desktops is 5-7 years and the functional lifespan of laptops is 3-5 years. Laptops get more wear and tear than desktops and desktops are easier to upgrade to keep them running. At 5 years for desktops and 3 years for laptops you should look at upgrading the RAM in the device and possibly consider replacing the SSD with a new (possibly larger) model, because SSDs and HDDs don't last forever.

COST

This means that you should think of your computers as an annual investment rather than as a one-time purchase. It is more worthwhile to pay $700 for a laptop that will work well for five years than it is to pay $300 for a laptop that will be outdated and slow in one year (which is what will happen if you get an 8th gen i3 with 8GB RAM). If you are going to get a $300 laptop try to get specs as close as possible to the minimums I've laid out here.

If you have to compromise on these specs, the one that is least fixable is the processor. If you get a laptop with an i3 processor you aren't going to be able to upgrade it even if you can add more RAM or a bigger SSD. If you have to get lower specs in order to afford the device put your money into the processor and make sure that the computer has available slots for upgrade and that neither the RAM nor the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. (one easy way to check this is to search "[computer model] RAM upgrade" on youtube and see if anyone has made a video showing what the inside of the laptop looks like and how much effort it takes to replace parts)

Computers are expensive right now. This is frustrating, because historically consumer computer prices have been on a downward trend but since 2020 that trend has been all over the place. Desktop computers are quite expensive at the moment (August 2023) and decent laptops are extremely variably priced.

If you are looking for a decent, upgradeable laptop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:

If you are looking for a decent, affordable desktop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:

If I were going to buy any of these I'd probably get the HP laptop or the Dell Tower. The HP Laptop is actually a really good price for what it is.

Anyway happy computering.

another important point about ssd versus hdd:

hdd is not only slower, but it can be damaged and lose all your data permanently if you jostle it wrong (like by dropping your backpack too hard or knocking them off a table). ssds do not have this issue, so they are safer.

if you literally never move your computer, or you're getting an external drive you will basically never move, an hdd is safe enough. but dropping them can corrupt your files so just be aware of that when weighing pros and cons!

So the counter to this is that SSDs are static sensitive in a way that HDDs are not, and data lost on an SSD is *lost* lost, not recoverable like data on an HDD.

This means that no matter what kind of drive you have in your device you should have an external backup drive that you use to make regular backups of your hard drive. I recommend making both image and file backups.

An image backup is a snapshot of your computer from a particular moment in time and can be used to restore your device if the drive is damaged and needs to be replaced. A file backup saves all the files on your computer but doesn't save any programs or changes to the operating system. Again, you should to BOTH.

External Hard drives are pretty cheap these days; I recommend getting a drive that is at least 4 times the size of the storage drive in your device so you can do regular file backups AND save at least one full image backup on the same drive. A 5TB backup drive should cost you about $100 and has a reliable lifespan of about five years. Drives don't last forever, so please plan on replacing your backup drives on about the same timeline that you should plan on replacing your computer.

ALSO JUST GENERAL GOOD ADVICE FOR COMPUTERS:

[All the Pringle ladies: Neural and behavioral responses to high-calorie food rewards in young adult women]

Banica, Allison, Racine, Foti & Weinberg, 2022

Submitter comment: “I can’t believe they got away with this title.”

Important to note that ALL trans people are targeted by this ruling. Trans men will be stripped of all chess titles won, which can only be returned to them by “changing the gender back to a woman” (a direct quote from the ICF’s ruling). ALL transgender chess players will be marked as trans in their files.

Not trying to deflect from the blatant and virulent transmisogyny present here. Just giving a bit more info.

Erin Reed did a good breakdown of the ruling here:

actually you know what, valid

Aliens: [finally contacts with NASA and wants to know more about the human race]

none pizza with left beef

It should be a rule of Tumblr to always reblog none pizza with left beef

ive missed you

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

I know this is about capitalism but it's also about my knees

[Image ID: Tweet from Kelsey D. Atherton (@/ AthertonKD) on 4/22/19 edited to read: Oh, you're experiencing a structural problem? Have you ever considered trying different personal choices instead? /End ID]

(via @some-loser-called-jab )

worlds most compressed jpeg vs worlds crustiest pdf scan uploaded by an elderly professor. fight

they will have beautiful children

real actual PDF scan from an undergrad class:

it's the warping on the text that really makes this

tumblr is a free website compilation

This user diligently collected and neatly edited ALL the catboy voice acting, I looked for something like this for months. The title made it impossible to find on demand, however youtube recommended this to me yesterday. Sharing for all the thirst purposes. You’re welcome.

Also trust voice lines!

Loki #3 - "The Liar III" (2023)