Avatar

Gift23

@gift23

she/her, icon credited to @frogbruise
A mash up of everything I love: DC Comics, Marvel Universe, Movies, Fandoms, Books, TV Shows, Quotes, Music, etc My side blog is @pretty-things-and-golden-rings

we used to dye our tongues on purpose using kool-aid and i stood in the sprinklers with the grass already so muddy it was starting to do that thing where your lawn is now quicksand

i think i want to kiss you because you remind me of smoothing out the chalk drawing with gentle fingers. of anthills and feeding birds our leftover lettuce. of getting covered in briars while we picked blueberries from the backyard bush. i think i want to kiss you because it's a bad idea, and i think i want to kiss you because of how water grips the side of a pitcher of iced tea.

you said your life was a toddler's art piece, with paint splatted on your floor, in your mouth, in your hair. i was delighted by that.

i loved the idea of leaving color everywhere.

I wish people would stop saying “It’s July. Well done for wasting half a year.” Did you make someone smile in the past six months? Did you stroke a cat or throw a stick for a dog? Did you learn a new fact or teach someone a new joke? Did you laugh, cry, scream or sing in the past six months? Because if so, congratulations for not wasting your time at all.

“did you stroke a cat” made me tear up because yes…..I did…..a lot of cats 🥲

hating tiktok is not a "back in my day" type thing. tiktok is objectively affecting other social media platforms in detrimental ways. ux elements are being stripped and everything has to have a fucking short video clips function. it's rampant homogenization and it's a problem

. yeah

Avatar

Over the past 24 hours

  • Affirmative action is now illegal
  • There is a constitutionally protected right for small business owners to refuse service to minority groups as long as they can shoehorn the words "religion" and "free speech" into their justification
  • No student loan forgiveness

Redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted

I love that I have this little creature in my house and all she does is walk around looking for a new place to take a nap and stare out the window and throw up on my floor and I’m like I would Die for this creature. she is perfect. and I tell her I love her and in return she has no thoughts whatsoever

I love her so much look at her she’s so cute okay

thank you everyone for loving my beautiful baby girl I told her she was famous on the internet and she just stared at me as her single brain cell bounced around her peanut brain

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

Avatar

Time to drop some links again.

https://searchmysite.net/ Search engine for the indie web, personal websites, digital gardens. You can also find them in websites like Neocities, Indieweb, Blogarama, and write.as. There is also a big list of personal websites.

https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.

https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)

https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines A list of academic databases and search engines.

https://tineye.com/ Reverse image search alternative to Google’s. Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)

Avatar

That Google and Meta can get away with this during an era of intense misinformation and disinformation signals that we cannot rely on large tech companies to provide reliable access to information and news:

We are the Pride Knights, and this is our battle cry No enemy can shake us, as hard as they can try There’s a fire in our eyes that no hatred can kill A passion in our hearts that’s as strong as our will To our fellow queers who fight their battles on their own We promise to fight with you, you are never alone To our fellow queers who have fallen with the pain We thank you for your courage, your fight is not in vain We are defenders of the right to be proud of who you are To love who you love and to accept every scar We are your knights, protectors of our pride Together we stand, together we ride

LIMITED EDITION: The Pride Knights Playing Cards are now officially available for pre-order in our store until June 30, 2023!

prideknights.com ⚔️🌈

I JUST ORDERED THEM IM SO EXCITED

Only 2 days left!

"I cannot tell you the complete, fundamental shift that I have felt in the year since having surgery. I knew that I wanted top surgery for a decade; it's the longest I've ever thought about doing anything. The place where I went, I had that clinic's website open on my laptop for five years. It was this impossible mountain: I want that, but I'm never gonna get it. No one's gonna let me, blah, blah, blah. To have that be in the past now... I stand differently, I walk differently, I carry myself differently. It feels different in my body than it ever has. I have just never been happier. I've never been more centered. I've never felt more stable and present and alive. It's the best thing I've ever done for myself. It’s taught me a lot. The recovery process taught me about rest, accepting help, and caring for my body as something connected to me rather than separate from me, that I’m in opposition to: This is mine and I want to take care of it. I feel good in it and good about it. Part of cis people's fear around gender-affirming surgery is the fear of surgery at all — 'Oh, my God, but that's painful and scary!' My reaction to that is, 'No, no, you misunderstood. It was painful before. Your worry has kicked in at the wrong time. The right time to be concerned was about the pain I was in before this. I'm great now.' Everybody else's concern for me has been on a delay. There's no need to be concerned anymore. That's so freeing."

@lgbtqcreators creator meme: [7/8] lgbtq+ celebs LIV HEWSON

jk rowling's new reputation will never not be funny to me. when you see her name now you dont think "oh yeah thats the chick who wrote harry potter" you think "oh lord, this TERF bitch again" like bro how do you fuck up so bad that your fuck ups overshadow writing the third most read piece of literature in existence

this bitch empty, TWEET

Have any of you heard of the Harvard MIT Pigeon Prank?

An MIT student dressed in a black-and-white striped shirt went to the Harvard football stadium every day of one summer, blowing a whistle while scattering breadcrumbs or birdseed to coax neighborhood pigeons down onto the field. At Harvard’s opening game of the season, upon the referee’s first whistle, it’s said that hundreds of pigeons descended onto the field, causing a half-hour delay. 

Ah yes, classical conditioning put to good use

I still can't fucking get over how cetaceans adapted to spend their entire lives in the water and just never bothered to redevelop water-breathing. there's motherfuckers who spend an hour or more diving and the evolutionary solution is just "breathe a lot on the surface and then lower your heart rate to a near-hibernation level while actively cruising the seafloor for stuff to eat". totally insane solution to one of the oldest solved problems in biology

This Restaurant Offers Food For Free If You Can’t Afford It

Just adding: that’s an Islam flag there and when I worked for a semester at a Mosque as part of a cultural exchange, the Imam told me that if there are hungry people within walking distance, then they are failing their duties.

I carry that with me always. Feed your neighbours.

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)