A guide to designing wheelchair using characters!
I hope this helps anyone who's trying to design their oc using a wheelchair, it's not a complete guide but I tried my best! deffo do more research if you're writing them as a character
They’re about to break so many laws it’s not even funny, I can feel it in my bones
It’s about PayPal. This is all about fucking PayPal
He’s still pissed they fired him. He’s still pissed they didn’t like his idea of calling PayPal X
20 years and he has not learned a single thing. He’s still throwing a tantrum about people not liking his bad name suggestion decades ago
Holy shit it’s cyclical. Except this time he’s burned the guard rails.
That or he figures the last place his name has brand value is the crypto space.
I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:
- Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
- The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
- The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
- The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
- Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
- The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
- Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
- He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.
This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.
Edit to add further developments:
- Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
- Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
- The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
- The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
- The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
- TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
- This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
- This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
- X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
- Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
- The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
- One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
- Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.
I love the mining-armor sm
Which is why it’s important to not be mean.
Their cult teaches them that the world is full of scary monster people who hate them for being so good and loved by god. If you swear at them and call them names or get in their face you’re just doing the cults work for it.
I’m not saying you have to listen to their presentation or try to debate them (and really getting into a debate without thoroughly understanding what they’re being taught will just make things worse)… I am just saying to be polite and say no thank you like if they were trying to hand you a flyer for something you don’t care about.
It’s easier for them to see the world outside their bubble as less scary if they see everyday people just going about their business and being as nice to them as you are to everyone else. This goes doubly for anyone who happens to dress modestly, not swear, and not drink or smoke because whatever you believe, they’ll see you as a “good” person who happens to strangely have no interest in their “message”, and that might be enough to get some curious about the possibility of themselves living in the real world.
It’s sometimes hard to be nice to people who seem to represent something you dislike. Just remember these “elders” are sheltered young men, some of which are getting their first real contact with people of other/no faiths.
They are not your enemy. They are victims.
They aren't being sent out to actually convert people, they are being sent out hoping that they will be harassed and treated poorly so they view those outside the cult as dangerous and evil and stick to the safety of the familiar group.
You being mean to some teenager isn't sticking it to anyone, you're doing exactly what their church elders want to happen.
PLEASE READ THIS.
Please read this.
Don't do the church's work for them.
If you're kind to enough of them, they put you on a block list.
They were such sweet kids, they'd turn up at my door with the thatch of raspberries out front and try to share their word with me, and I'm me, so, I fed them.
Then it was one of the wee 'elder's' birthday, so I made him a cake, and all the little lads came, and they asked about my books and board games and CCGs, I was just a nice frumpy middle aged Jewish lady, I was no threat, so I fed them and made them cakes and took them to the local gaming store and listened when they talked.
One loved yu-gi-oh cards, and it turns out, one of the other wee lads, we'll he loved him back, so I got them in touch with some resources so they had support and a different way to pay for college, they're still together 15 years later, they have dogs, they send me ecards on their birthday. No-one figured out I'd.helped them, I was just the nice lady who made them tea and listened when people were slamming doors.
The next one really wanted to be an artist, so I left out art books and resources, my eldest shared their coptic markers, they draw comic books now, no idea why his folks were insisting he needed to be a dentist, but, he's not a Mormon anymore, (not a Jew either before anyone makes any counter conversion claims).
The first 2 lads were the only dramatic ones, the rest went back into the network but, like Hugh of Borg, they spread the word, sometimes I'd get Mormons from other cities come and make the journey to break bread at my Sabbath table and be seen.
I still think very fondly of that time.
Many of those boys still email me now and then.
Most of them aren't Mormons anymore.
Someone higher up spotted the pattern and suddenly no more Mormons at my door.
I was blacklisted, for kindness.
So there you go, if you don't want Mormons at your door, just love those kids for a couple of years, feed them, help them, and eventually, no more will be allowed to visit
Ah yes tumblr’s ability to expose your heart fully in a series of reblogs
friendly reminder for the new twitter refugees:
- change your icon/pfp and put something coherent in your blog description or you're going to get blocked bcs people think you're a bot
- this site is built around reblogs, so please actually reblog posts(especially art and fics!!)
- you can set your likes and follows to private
- checkmarks here are a meme and mean nothing
- follower counts are private and we like it that way, so get used to not judging people by that metric
- drama and discourse is boring, use your blacklist and block button liberally
- DON'T CENSOR YOURSELF!! we can swear and say kill and make fun of corporations all we want, and if you tiktok-ify your tags people who have things blacklisted for whatever reason will still see them, and people who want to see that content won't be able to find it!! spell words out normally, you won't get in trouble!!
- tumblr live is sketchy as hell and full of fake accounts, if you decide to use it anyway may god have mercy on your soul o7
- be nice to the reddit refugees, they're our friends <3
The Tumblr folks adopted us Redditors. Now it’s time for us to return the favor
Stepan Feodorovich Kolesnikov - Night in Ukraine (n.d.)
Aliens had visited Earth, but they didn't do any fighting or stuff. They studied us, found out that we apparently eat an absurd amount of sodium compared to them and started viciously mocking us for it and left.
Nobody:
Aliens during a brief visit to Earth:
i imagine this scenario would be a lot more concerning in real life
Can I offer you an egg in this trying time
If you have seen Ted Lasso you may have noticed these unusual microphones used by the football commentators.
Despite being a microphone nerd, I had never seen anything like them before. So I decided to go into research mode and discovered these microphones are quite fascinating.
They are called "Lip-Ribbon" or "Commentator's" microphones.
They were specially designed by the BBC in the 1950s for extremely noisy environments. Soccer Football stadiums have peaked at 130 decibels so they needed something that would not get overwhelmed in that circumstance.
They use several very clever techniques to make sure only the voice is picked up and everything else is rejected.
First, they use a bidirectional polar pattern.
That means it will accept sound from two directions, but reject any sound coming in from the sides. And since the diaphragm is only exposed on one side, that helps reject sound coming from the other direction.
Next, the microphone is not very sensitive so you literally have to hold it up to your lips (hence "lip-ribbon") in order for your voice to have enough sound energy to vibrate the diaphragm.
That top part rests directly on your lip and there is a little pop filter to keep your plosives in check.
There is a built-in high pass filter so it rejects any sound below the frequencies typically used by the human voice.
But my favorite trick... a labyrinthian internal baffle system.
(I found a diagram of this when researching but then I lost the tab and I cannot find it again. So you'll just have to accept this crude photoshop I did in 30 seconds to help you understand.)
Sound is energy. And that energy is diminished the farther it travels. The inverse square law for sound states that the intensity of sound decreases by approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance from the sound source. Sound also diminishes when it reflects off a surface.
That is a very sciency way of saying... make sounds go through a tiny maze and only sounds with the most energy will prevail.
So if you have your lip pressed up against the front of the mic, your voice's energy will make it through the labyrinth of baffles without issue. But every other sound in the stadium will have a much harder time getting through.
These mics may even be vuvuzela-proof.
And even more amazing... this microphone was designed in the 1950s and they have yet to create anything better for incredibly noisy environments.
Isn't that neat?
I think it is neat.
Oh, and there is a "nostril grille" on top so you can exhale through your nose!
SO NEAT.
...I've always wondered what the story was with these things. :)
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday that he wants to bring an end to a user-led protest that has made large parts of the influential website inaccessible this week. Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
Deep in the article, there’s this nugget:
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
When people say “fuck u/spez,” this is Spez. I do not have the sort of imagination that can readily convert the way Reddit communities currently work to “businesses.”
I can’t believe it. Some CEO looked at Twitter and thought “yeah that looks like it’s going well. I want to imitate that business model”
Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees
Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:
- Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
- Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
- Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
- Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
- Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
Basic Features of the Site:
- Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.
- The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
- You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.
- Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up
- You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
- You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.
- Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:
- Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
- Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
- If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
- You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
- Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
- Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
- We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
- Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.
General Etiquette:
- Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
- Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
- Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
- You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.
- Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
- Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit
- You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.
- Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
- Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.
- If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
- Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Tips:
- Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
- In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
- You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
- Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
- Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!
Since I’m not the only newbie
