Dorkzilla

The version of me from 5 years ago was a quiet high school junior who was just joining crew and learning to be confident in my own body. I read books, had like 2 friends, and was terrified of the concept of college because I had no clue what I wanted to do. The boldest thing I did with my hair was dye the tips burgundy in support of a family friend with Multiple Myeloma, otherwise the only thing I could do was put it in a ponytail, I had two piercings in each ear that were always empty, and I could never wear shorts that were higher than my knees. I had no social skills, no social life, no life skills, and thought I was going to live in my parents house forever with no future.

The version of me today is a nurse supervisor for the peds office I’ve been working at since I graduated nursing school 3 years ago. 3 out of the 4 days I work next week, I will be there open to close as the only nurse. That means in office triage, answering the phone, giving shots, taking care of documents, for 10 hours, all alone. And I know I can do it. Because I’ve done it before. I did it last week. And the week before. And the week before that. I like having another nurse to work with and help balance, but I know I have the skills and knowledge to do it by myself. I have to remember to order some vaccines on Monday. Because I can do that, it’s part of my supervisor duties.

In the summer I also am a coxswain for the local adult crew league. I don’t race because I prefer crew for fun, so I usually Cox novice or intermediate boats, which are new rowers, and returning rowers looking to improve their skills to advance to the racing teams, respectively, but I have coxed, and won races. I’m primarily a coxswain, but when I first started crew I was a rower. I can row both sides. I can scull. I can bow Cox. I’m certified to drive a launch. I can do pretty much anything but coach, but only because I have no desire to coach.

Every month I take a kitchen stool and sit on the deck so my mom can trim down my undercut. Every few months we cut the rest of my hair short again. As short as I can, as long as I can still put it in a ponytail and a French braid. Do I still have a ponytail almost daily? Yes, but I don’t like the feeling of my hair on the back of my neck, so I don’t leave it down often. But when I do, I like to part it a certain way so it’s very wavy and pretty. I can’t dye it anymore because if work, but I would if I could. I have a huge box of earrings, an accumulation of a few years. I have three piercings on each side now, and wear full sets of earrings almost every single day. I plan to get more. Do I still wear mostly cargo shorts? Yes, they’re comfy and have pockets galore. Do I have a pair of rather short shorts that I feel fantastic in and wear when I’m in the mood? Also yes. I can wear leggings and athletic shorts without feeling self-conscious. I’m short and solid and not skinny. But there’s muscle. I know this because my novice year of high school crew, we did a plank test, and I outlasted all the girls and all but two of the boys. Because I am strong, even if it doesn’t show.

I bought my first car last year. A good car, completely new, with my own money. Tomorrow I plan to spend the day hanging out with my brother and knitting. My mom, who had just learned to knit herself, taught me the basics of knitting on New Years Day 2021. It’s April, and I can make a pair of fingerless gloves in a day. I’m currently working on a headband my coworker asked me to make. I have friends that I texted when I went to get yarn, saying I was probably going to leave with way more yarn than I went to get, friends who texted back to laugh with me when I did exactly that. I’m bi and ace, and fuckin proud of it.

The version of me from 5 years ago wouldn’t just be proud of me.

She would be in fucking awe of the person I am now.

And I sure as shit don’t plan on stopping now.

tumblr isn’t a social media it’s a farmers market and the people you follow are the vendors and your mutuals are regulars and sometimes a person I buy pumpkins from will start selling realistic models of sailboats and damn i’m not gonna buy any but I will come by and compliment you on your sailboats

Sometimes the bakery stall that's been selling top tier muffins and bread for years all of a sudden has an entire table dedicated to moss balls wearing little hats. and the correct response to that is "okay! happy for you!"

This makes sense. I like to go to the farmers market and say hi to all the vendors sometimes.

We rollin

You fucking seahorse.

I made this at the crack of midnight

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7

Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.

To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.

Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:

These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.

Familiar 🌸 chapter 4

New queer rights around the world : 2023 edition 🏳️‍🌈✨️🏳️‍⚧️

Finland : adopted a law to facilitate transition, no longer requiring sterilization or psychological evaluations

Hong Kong : ruled in favor of the change of one's gender identity without requiring surgery

Spain :

South Korea : ruled in favor of a gay couple demanding equal health insurance rights with heterosexual couples, recognizing the legal status of gay couples for the first time in the country

Slovakia : no longer requires a chirurgical procedure to transition

Cook islands : decriminalized homosexuality

Portugal : passed a law banning conversion therapies and reinforcing gender identity self-determination in schools

France : HIV positive people can now enlist in the army

Taiwan : opened adoption to same-sex couples

Mexico : issued its first non-binary passport

Cyprus : banned conversion therapies

Namibia : supreme court ruling recognizes same-sex mariages contracted in other countries

Estonia : legalized same-sex marriage

Nepal : legalized same-sex marriage

Cyerce Elegans, also known as Butterfly Nudibranch is a species of sacoglossan sea slug, a shell-less marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusk in the family Caliphyllidae.

🎥 source

@pillowspace hopefully it lets me tag you this time but look at these guys :3 i can understand why you love sea slugs so much

(sorry if you’ve been tagged in this before (and if i accidentally double-tagged you since it didn’t work the first time), i just thought they were pretty and that you’d wanna see them)

What. What. What. What. What? What? What. What? Whay. Wha. Wh. Wjat?. What?.. wh. I had no idea these existed, what the....... these are? The? Thes? What. <- POSITIVE

These remind me of fairy wings????? This EXISTS? I swear, every cyerce sea slug I've seen is so pretty. This, cyerce nigricans, cyerce nigra... Do all cyerce sea slugs make the brain light up like a Christmas tree? Is that it? Is that it huh?

This is a very delighted way of saying I love this dearly, thank you

if you tell your kids you love them they WILL use pronouns

not to be joyless but I’m honestly reeling from how mask-off this comment is

“if i show my kid unconditional love they might do shit like be trans, better emotionally abuse them instead”

good tags only

Honestly it’s like the parents who don’t vaccinate because they’d rather have a dead kid than one with autism.

X

What pisses me off sometimes is that many of the people in this fandom already understand attachment but just choose to not use that understanding for the Jedi.

Like. If you weren’t completely confused by Shuri’s arc in the new Black Panther you understand attachment.

If you understood why elenore let chidi leave in the finale of the good place, you understand attachment.

In fact I can think of like eight super hero movies where attachment (and learning to let go of it) is the KEY conflict.

Attachment is not a hard concept to grasp at all. “Letting go” is NEVER portrayed as a bad thing in media. Like. Never. Especially when it’s about letting go of a loved one who died instead of getting revenge.

When people watch a super hero movie and the super hero starts acting like a villain and a side character goes “you’ve got to let her go” I never find paragraphs on tumblr about how the hero should have kept acting like a villain and that side character was the real bad guy.

It’s just that the Jedi don’t struggle with it. The Jedi already practice attachment. They’re already at peace. And since Anakin has been a Jedi for so long and has given no real indication of struggling (I mean they don’t know about his secret wife), they just tell him to practice attachment and think that’s enough. Bc he should already know.

And when people say they shouldn’t have expected this of Anakin bc he wasn’t raised a Jedi… the Jedi are not the only ones who don’t act on attachment. The first person to explain attachment in the movies is Shimi Skywalker. She lets Anakin go and live a better life bc she is not attached to him. She tells him to not look back. This is the woman who raised Anakin. He was raised in a no-attachment household. He has no excuse. He was always taught about attachment. He knew what he was doing was wrong. He did it anyway.

Anakin was not confused by attachment. And neither is the audience really. There are so many stories about how attachment is bad, Lucas just calls it by its name. People choose not to like the Jedi bc they don’t find them interesting. Which is fine I suppose, but if you don’t like the Jedi bc the sith aesthetic is more your speed, just say that. Stop pretending you don’t understand a very common moral conflict.

I think most people are uncomfortable with the fact that the Jedi are not struggling with letting go. The notion that the degree of pain you feel over someone no longer being part of your life shows the degree of how much you love them is deeply embedded into most people. For them, letting go means clenching your teeth and brace yourself for the impact of torment, sucking it up and continue on living until the anguish wears off and you gather your courage to find someone else who will do the same to you, because that's life and the good parts are good enough to worth playing a game you cannot win.

The Jedi are all about realizing that the pain of loss is coming from you don't want to let go, which is entirely about you loving yourself - you want impermanent things to be permanent, so they can make you happy. The Jedi way is to enjoy people while they are in your life, but make peace with the fact that eventually they must leave and learn to find your happiness in wanting others to be happy, which is unconditional love. And so, you can let go without struggle.

Sadly, some people are, plainly and simply, afraid of making peace with impermanence and really letting go, because they believe, they can't love someone genuinely if they're not loving them in a way that is characterized by "I would be miserable without you."

A doctor saying "Good news! Your labs look great" is like if you were watching a cop show and the chief walked in like "Great news, everybody! The best news! The killer is still at large and we have no leads."

One time I was like pretty sure I had finally figured out that I had Symptoms Disease due to all the Symptoms and my doctor did some tests and she was like. Good news! You don't have Symptoms Disease!

And I started crying and she was like, is there something in your eye? And I said no I'm crying? And she was like, oh? Why? And I said, because we can't fix my Symptoms because we still don't know what's wrong with me? And she was like. Nothing's wrong with you! :)

Actually something similar had happened to me multiple times (and in some of those cases I did in fact get diagnosed with the relevant Symptoms Disease years later) but the one where the doctor asked if I had something in my eye because she couldn't comprehend that not having answers would be upsetting, that was definitely one of the most situations ever.

the hotel has an on demand section called “mood” & these are the moods

pls unmute whatever you’re expecting it’s not it

I don’t normally do this, but I’m adding a description because this is gold. I highly encourage you to unmute anyway if you can.

Cameraperson: Okay, we’re checking out “moods” in the hotel. You can select from a list. We’re picking Flowers. Here’s the Flower mood.

TV displays pink carnations, accompanied by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Cameraperson (laughing): Okay, let’s check out something else. Let’s check out Pyramids.

TV displays an Egyptian mural, also accompanied by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Both people begin laughing out loud.

Cameraperson: That sure suites the pyramids. Let’s check out Cities.

TV displays a city nightscape, also accompanied by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

Cameraperson: Okay, let’s check out Wildlife. It’s gonna be a forest, or a – Aaah, okay!

TV displays a clearly photoshopped image of a duckling half in and half out of an eggshell, wearing it like a barrel in a slapstick comedy cartoon, accompanied by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)

I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?

Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?

Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.

Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage. 

If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.

Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.

My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.

If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.

Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.

Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.

High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)

This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.

I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.

I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.

Thermal runaway can happen to hay as well. Hay stored indoors under a roof will last well as usable animal fodder for a long time, but only if it is VERY dry when put in, and a leak in the barn roof can cause a fire by this method– if the hay gets wet and starts to decompose, then it’ll catch itself on fire. This is still a problem in the modern day, and causes barn fires to this day.

But yes the importance of the potato cannot be overstated. Potatoes can become dangerous in storage too but this is much rarer.

Do we (and by we I mean the broader Westernized Historical Academy) know much about how the development of potatoes affected the Andean societies they come from? Like, the pre-Colombian Inca had a whole empire’s worth of social stratification off the back of the potato. Did it mean that Incan peasants had better quality of life than their medieval European counterparts? Or did Incan emperors also levy taxes in grain?

Hate when people post these videos with "ethnic" tag and leave out who these people are, what their culture is or even what they're singing in.

Anyway, this is probably one of the best bands of this decade and they're Otyken!

I can't recommend My Wing enough. Their songs are so much fun - Genesis is also a blast. Go listen to them!!!!

when u come up with a tiny change for your story that not only makes the writing flow better but also hammers in the character motivations and story theme

Harlan County, U.S.A., 1976

#us coal mining is a fun bit of cultural connection with us over in wales#ultimately we both got fucked#and had to fight tooth and nail for unions#ironically thanks to tectonic plates we were essentially mining the same mountain range#thousands of miles apart#what you call blue ridge mountains#we call Yr wyddfa#west viginia and all the coal towns are siblings as far as im concerned#we were raised on the same stone#that makes us kin Via: @scottish-valkyrie

@ruffboijuliaburnsides yeah

this looks .... 👀👀👀