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Y'all means all

@hallaer

Made this account a while (10+ years) ago, used it intermittently since, and will be more active now that Reddit is dead. Sprucing up my homepage for the first time since I made it. Will change my bio more than once as I figure things out and get settled. Born in the late 90s, bisexual, bilingual, and bi myself. Cisgender male, he/him pronouns, proud trans ally. Chronically academic (physics grad student). Recovering "um, actually" kid- please forgive me if I should lapse again. I reblog a mess of things I like, and I don't always do a great job of tagging things. Always into Tolkien, memes, and D&D. Recently back into Animorphs. Christian (mostly), but a fan of Judaism (and other faiths), so I'll reblog neat stuff about it sometimes. Also, any kind of social justice or other PSAs that I see and think ought to be spread. Or anything that makes me laugh or smile. Don't be afraid to drop a message or an ask! Especially if I know you irl, even if it's been a while since we've chatted. I like talking to people. Nazis, bots*, and terfs do not interact. Or any other kind of bigot. I won't debate you; I'll just block you. Minors also shouldn't interact. *The haiku bot can stay- just none of the porn/spam bots, please. I was never subscribed to r/196 on reddit (rip), but I like y'all that came here from there. Let's be friends? Used to be "hallaer", with a Dr. Horrible profile picture.

Pasteups in NYC denouncing Facebook for collaboration with Nebraska police to sentence a teenage girl to 90 days in jail for using using the abortion pill to terminate her pregnancy.

Facebook gave the cops ALL THE DATA of the teen and her mother, based on a hunch by some random fucking cop. This included years worth of photos, videos, 'private' chats and THEIR FUCKING LOCATION DATA.

DON'T TRUST SOCIAL MEDIAS WITH ANYTHING

never let kids get into stories about shapeshifting first theyre pretending to be wolves on the playground then theyre getting radicalized by animorphs then theyre realizing the human body is an impermanent and malleable thing then theyre discovering you can take a potion to change your gender in real life

Darn shame if this circulated…

So you mean to tell me that just by reblogging this I’m ruining an organizations plan, wasting them money, and uncovering some shitbag humans awful behaviour?

T R I P L E K I L L

DEFINITELY don’t Lt. John Pike by the nickname “Sargeant Pepper”; I know he HATES that.

hello 🐙

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This is not anthropomorphization but genuinely something theyre known to do. I've heard divers say octopuses and cuttlefish get fascinated by hand gestures and will sometimes respond to them like. We probably do look like we have little cephalopods on the ends of our arms, to them. Like we're always putting on a puppet show.

I've seen this! My favorite and only Octopus story: when I visited a (weirdly small) aquarium near Portland, they had an octopus, and on a whim i put my wrists together, fingers down, to make a "hand octopus" and curled and uncurled my fingers like tentacles. The octopus immediately and shockingly precisely mimicked me; it's one of my favorite things I've ever done.

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I hate the trope of "I refuse to hit women!! [Gets decked]" cause it's boring but I do like the trope of someone in an RPG going "hey I don't wanna hit a kid that's kinda fucked up" and the kid just obliterates them

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"i refuse to hit a woman!" = Sexist, overdone, does nothing to actually empower the woman or make the guy seem nice

"I refuse to hit a kid" = valid, even funnier when the kid whips absolutely ass in one go

The ONLY exception to this is Mob Psycho where it's a kid vs woman fight, in which the kid doesn't want to hit a woman because he has been told that only scumbags hit women. And then the lady pauses the fight to explain this is a different situation and he's not bad for defending himself.

Then he proceeds to whip ass in one go.

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Coolest thing about lord of the rings? The king of horses shows up. It appears he is no different from all other horses

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

  • Intel i5 (no older than 10th Gen)
  • Ryzen 7

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

  • 8GB absolute minimum

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

  • 256GB SSD

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.

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Hey, stop scrolling.

Everyone who is reading this: I’m so glad you’re alive. I’m so proud of you. You are loved. I’m here. Don’t give up, we’re almost there.

Pass it on.

But you are literally vaporised and disintegrated by the wrath of the ocean in a millisecond.

There isn’t a real way to get out of that.

Unless you star in The Meg 2.

In which case you are apparently fine. Because Jason Statham is around and the ocean won’t mess with him.

take some time to notice your vision. see how easily you detect motion. focus on something in your peripheral (without moving your eyes to it). see how it works. look at your hands. pick something up with your fingers. appreciate how ridiculously specialized they are in fine motor skills (even if your personal motor skills are lackluster). think about how you have a body built to be an apex predator through use of tools. think about how the brain of your kind has created a digital hivemind uniting the whole world. now look back at the screen.  look at the tab where you are in an argument about cartoons on tumblr. close the tab. open a new tab. google “tribute to anomalocaris”. watch the video that comes up. leave a like. subscribe even though the channel has been inactive for 8 years. you will need it in the coming times