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Welcome to my face

@silvercrimsonthorn

BoF still on hiatus while I work on personal stuff and, let's face it, this is really just a personal blog now. Wanna know about my personal work? Just ask! I would love to share.

jesus fucking christ

"i wish i could do something 😔 / i wish the wga had a kickstarter or a gofundme, i would throw money at it" good news! it's amazing how you can literally go onto the wga strike website or the wgawest linktree from their twitter and find links to support writers and other workers affected by the strike

Source: deadline.com

So.

Who wants the rant about “broken windows”?

There’s a thing called “broken windows policing” which is the cops cracking down on minor crimes and generally shaking down a neighborhood. The point of it is to prevent bigger crimes etc.

It is actually a horrible misunderstanding of what’s actually happening and incredibly counterproductive.

“Broken windows” theory has to do with criminals feeling bolder in areas that don’t look cared for. The ACTUAL problem is that predators look for easy prey, and criminals look for easy targets. Broken windows are a symptom of an area with absentee landlords, and an area with no one looking out for the residents. The people who live there are probably too busy or wrapped up in merely surviving to care of somebody is stealing a bike, or breaking into someplace. It’s a poverty of money, time, and also attention.

Adding cops to stop and frisk isn’t helping anyone. That isn’t what the neighborhood NEEDS.

It needs the goddamn windows fixed. It needs people who live there to have enough time and attention to help their neighbors. It needs the buildings to be locally owned with people living there who are keeping up the maintenance!

Predators look for easy prey and thieves want an easy job. A neighbor watching from their porch means fewer porch pirates. Parents and aunties looking out their kitchen windows at the kid’s playground mean the parents and older siblings there have backup if something happens. Neighborhoods that look cared for and have more residents around with time and attention to spare are safer.

THIS is what the broken windows theory is actually about. It’s not cops. It’s networks of neighbors caring for each other. It happens more easily when people have resources and time, so poverty makes an area vulnerable.

But, middle class suburban areas can be vulnerable too. If there’s no one home, if people don’t know each other, if they spend all their time on the freeway commuting or at work or elsewhere, then the area becomes an easy target. Which is why all the houses have Ring doorbells and video cameras.

The way to make a neighborhood safer is to build connections, care for one another, and lift each other up. The broken windows are a symptom of a larger care gap. The care and connections are what is missing and adding care and connections will make the area more resilient and safer over time.

concept

a beaded curtain, but instead of beads they’re worms on strings

you know… these guys

Hi op I hope this satisfies your needs.

Needs more worms

I wanna make one of these that is like a literal curtain of worms

No clear strings available to get caught and tangle, I want them nose to ass like some kind of horrible human centipede of worms, covering my doorway

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@fanotastic more worms

Aw fuck. Nothing makes you assholes happy.

Fuck you guys.

My fellow fuckers, I present you-

384

Happy Pride Month

The worm curtain is GAY

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The flute glass full of worms…

Anybody else got that Evergiven sized writers block

“Where’s the next chapter?!” Well buddy you’re never gonna guess

What’s the comic sans trick?

wingdings' true purpose as a font

Wingdings holy shit some of y'all are on a whole different level of galaxy wizard brain batshittery and I am in awe.

Exciting. When I don't want to see what I'm writing I just make the font color almost indistinguishable from the background color. (Do not do this.)

(I don't think the secret to the comic sans hack is comic sans itself; I think it's any deflation of being intimidated by your canvas.)

Hold on I need to go look something up immediately.

autistic self diagnosis is valid

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a person: i’m autistic. i don’t have a professional diagnosis.
a neurotypical: you can’t! self diagnose! autism!!! onLy a dOctor can do that!!!
most doctors: don’t know what autism looks like in people other than nonverbal white cis boys
most doctors: recommend abusive therapies for autistic kids and teens
most doctors who specialize in diagnosing autism: refuse to evaluate adults
an autism evaluation for a minor teen who wants one: requires having supportive parents who understand that autism is not a tragedy and looks different for every autistic person, and that many autistic people can talk, have friends, do okay in school, and otherwise fake looking neurotypical
an autism evaluation for an adult: very expensive and often not covered by insurance in the U.S., also extremely difficult to get in France
an on-record autism diagnosis: can be used to deny you custody of children, to have your kids taken away, to forcibly institutionalize you
autism advocacy orgs that actually help autistic ppl like ASAN, AWN, AANE: Here are some resources for figuring out if you could be autistic. Professional diagnosis is a very personal decision and is not required for knowing that you’re one of us. We support you as an autistic person even if you don’t have a paper diagnosis.
a sincere autism self diagnosis: harms no one even if it’s incorrect, enables the person to feel part of a community of people with similar issues and learn more about autism, a gateway to learning about autism acceptance movements, often the first step toward self acceptance and self esteem

Okay, this post actually helped me a lot a while back. Idk if I’m ADHD or autistic, but either way, super helpful

This post is really helpful!

Anyone know of any of those self diagnosis resources they talked about-?

artist tips

don’t save as jpeg

as a former yearbook editor and designer, let me explain this further

if youre only planning on posting your art online, them please save it as .png ;this is also better for transparencies as well

BUT

please, if youre planning of printing your art, NEVER use png. it makes the quality of the image pretty shitty. use jpeg or pdf instead. and always set your work at 300dpi to get a better printing quality - this means, the images are crisper and sharper and theres no slight blurriness. i had a talk with my friend who is currently taking design, and pdf is much better to use when youre working with a bigger publishing company because it still has the layers intact, but if youre only planning on printing your stuff at staples or at some small publishing store, the jpeg is the way to go.

this has been a public service announcement

I’ve replied to this once before but I see it’s doing the rounds again.

This is all utter bullshit.

I’m sorry but if your qualification is working on the school yearbook, you have no qualifications. Do not pretend otherwise. As a former professional photo manipulator for advertising brochures, I can say that you’re not comparing apples to oranges here - if anything, you’re comparing fruit to farmyard machinery:

  • JPEG is a lossy format. It is suitable for web imagery because it sacrifices detail for reduced file sizes, but in doing so it introduces artifacts that weren’t in the original; if you load a JPEG for editing, then save it as a different JPEG, then you’re adding more artifacts formed from those first artifacts. Do this often enough and you end up with a horrid glitchy mess that looks like a puddle’s reflection after a stone’s been thrown in. You’ve seen those memes that have 3 or 4 different “found at” tags along the bottom, that look like fingerpainted copies of the original? That’s why.
  • PNG is a lossless format that comes in two primary flavours, PNG-8 and PNG-24, which use 8 and 24 bit colour respectively. 8-bit colour is what you have in GIFs, a limit of just 256 different colours in a predetermined palette, usually automatically chosen by your software when saving. These files will look the same as GIFs, potentially with large patches of solid colour instead of the usual gradual shading seen in 24-bit imagery. This is usually better for small banners or pixel art, as it can yield smaller filesizes than GIF format. (There is an animated version called MNG but it has very little web support, hence the continued use of GIFs.)
  • PNG-24 is great for larger images where detail is as important as colour depth, as well as printable RGB images and (if supported by the client) full colour images with gradient transparencies. It most certainly does not make “the quality of the image pretty shitty,” as it preserves every nuance. File sizes can be smaller than JPEG for small images, or significantly larger for large images.
  • PDF is a container file, whatever you put into it will be pretty much preserved as it was, so you gain nothing but lose nothing.
  • TIFF is what you need to be using for archival or print-quality imagery. It has support for multiple layers, multiple colour channels (RGB as well as CMYK, which is essential for accurate print rendering), and everything is preserved exactly as it was seen on-screen when being composed. There are compressed versions available, they use similar methods to PNG in order to maintain detail without sacrifice; next to whatever your graphics program uses natively, this is the most interchangeable format available for professional use.
  • DPI is important only when used in combination with image dimensions; in and of itself it serves no purpose. If you make a brilliantly detailed 640x480 image & set it to 300dpi, you’ll receive a brilliantly detailed 2 inch x 1.6 inch print. This is great if you want to make a postage stamp, but not if you’re creating an A4 flyer! Determine the image’s dimension then set the DPI accordingly; 72dpi isn’t hideous especially for text-heavy work (it’s ~3 pixels per millimeter), and 150dpi can be suitable for many images. Unless you’re interested in photo realism, 300dpi is usually overkill - for our hypothetical A4 flyer, you’d need a file of 2490x3510 pixels for edge to edge printing, with a correspondingly high memory requirement and filesize even if using a compressed format.
  • Keeping the layers intact is utterly unimportant for print work unless you want to use a separated colour print method that requires multiple passes to lay down each ink. If you send a file with all the layers, masks, etc. off for printing you’re liable to get it sent back unactioned, as they won’t want to take responsibility for choosing the wrong elements for printing. Save your work with everything intact, then save a flattened copy especially for printing purposes - this is one of the reasons Save Copy As… is a common option in graphics manipulation software.

This has been a Public Service Rebuttal.

FUCKING THANK YOU

As a designer who’s worked a few years for a newspaper, I cannot begin to tell you how much OP’s post (edit: response, technically) made me cringe. I would have killed to get a photo as a TIFF for once instead of having to tear apart PDFs only to find a 50x100px 72dpi shitty JPEG inside for the 5 millionth time…

JPEG and PNG are best suited for web formats (and it is perfectly fine to save your web version as JPEG, that’s what it’s goddamn for). You will make a designer cry if you send a web-safe JPEG for print, however. And if you have a vectorized logo saved as EPS (or even better, AI), you will make that designer’s year.

As someone who has worked in design for print, web, and engraving and has likely done so longer than Former Yearbook Editor up there has been alive: the very best thing you can do is ASK WHOEVER YOU’RE SUBMITTING ARTWORK TO WHAT FORMAT AND RESOLUTION THEY NEED AND THEN, CRUCIALLY, SEND! WHAT! THEY! ASK! FOR!

I know I’ve reblogged this before, with this very addition, but every time I see this post That One Response makes my eye twitch.

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Tumblr Code.

If I ever see any of you in public, the code is “I like your shoelaces”
that way we know we’re from tumblr without revealing anything
I’m just going to say this to strangers until i find a tumblr person
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must keep reblogering!! Im going to be so suspicious if any one tells me this now!
Remember the answer is: I stole them from the president.
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always reblog tumblr identification

This is an absolute tumblr relic. I feel like an archaeologist right now. This is incredible that this is on my dash.

date of origin: 2nd of july, 2012.

Bro what it’s the second of July 2020. Happy 8th anniversary of this classic tumblr post!!!!

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And now its 10th. Yay!

Oh, just in time for all the twitter and reddit refugees!

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my friend liz downloaded some free audio software a few months ago to do something and now every time she joins a call a female voice says “trial. trial.” and liz doesn’t remember the name of the software or know how to stop it and she doesn’t want to

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my friend liz had her spotify account hacked and literally didn’t realize for a year until I was talking about my decade in review playlist and she looked at hers and it was all brazilian music and she was like oh this explains why I would go to sleep listening to classical music and wake up and it’s playing trap. and also why there are like 30 playlists on my account that I didn’t make. she just thought spotify was like that

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hand to god at some point my friend liz managed to fuck up her install of Portal so bad that it was displaying minecraft textures

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like she’s bringing me dead mice

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typewriter!

I love the orchestra trying and failing to maintain a straight face throughout

Exactly. These people had to rehearse at least a few times all at once yet when it's nkt their turn to play they still look at that guy with the typewriter as if he was the most fascinating thing they have ever seen.

My husband's wind ensemble played this song when he was in high school! you can do it with normal auxillery percussion, but it's so much more fun if you do it with a real typewriter

now that is a writing mood

they were really like, the only reasonable approach to this piece is to insert a clown at the center of the orchestra

Herschel Has Discovered Tool Use. Again.

In january of 2021, deep in the throes of pandemic psychosis, we acquired a Corgi Puppy.

I would like to go on the record that we did not get a Corgi because they're cute. We got a Corgi because they're criminally brilliant and enthusiastic working dogs that were bred to bully cattle, which is the exact temperment a dog living in a house with three ADHD adults should have. Herschel does commit a lot of crime, but he also does his appinted service-dog job of "make everyone wake up, eat meals and go to bed at a reasonable and consistent time" extremely well, as well as his bonus jobs of "Keep the squirrels the hell out of the garden" and "Yell every time the cat does something". I didn't actually ask him to do that last job but it has helped in the "teach the cat to stay the hell off the stove" area.

But even with having a whole pack of humans another dog, and a cat to manage, this pales in comparison to his genetic capacity to manage several hundred sheep or cattle across the fields of Wales, and thus, Herschel has decided on further intellectual pursuits to occupy himself, namely, speedrunning the early phases of human tool use and terraforming.

I realized he has the brains of an entire hunter-gatherer tribe shortly after he got fixed, and within 24 hours and still dpey from anesthesia, he'd figured out that his plastic cone could be used to monopolize the water bowl and his favorite chew toys, and within a week, had learned how to carry three toys at once while leaving his mouth open by tucking the toys behind his enormous ears and under his chin. He also figured out that he could wiggle the cone to rest against his shoulders, and started using it as a shovel by literally running the bottom edge into the ground. But that wasn't making holes effeicently enough, apparently, and I ended up watching him figure out how to rotate the cone around so the two pieces of overlapping plastic were under his chin, then use his chin and the stairs to the deck to pinch both ends into a much more efficient V-Shape that let him gouge huge strips of dirt up in seconds. The anthropologists and animal behaviorists in the audience may recognize this as Tool Creation, a behavior normally only seen in higher primates, crows, and some parrots. Once a hole of suitable length, depth and temperature had been achieved, he very carefully rolled the cone around so the digging side was over his head and the smooth side under his chin, and splooted into his hole to cool his little tummy and stitches off. It was at that point that I realized that I was going to have to teach him how to garden, or he was going to teach himself.

He no longer has the cone (He was beginning to experiment with it as a battering ram), but his morning ritual is now "Wake everyone up at 8AM by screaming, locate everyone in house and jam my nose up theirs to make sure they're alive, go outside and scream at the squirrels. Now that Yard is Secure, go get Fun Parent who has hopefully taken their meds by now, and supervise them while they rifle through the plants (this is apparently KEY to their mental health), eating any pest animals Fun Parent points out, chase squirrel AGAIN, go inside and get Breakfast cookie." and BY GOD if we deviate from it there will be much screaming and destruction. If I am not home, it has been reported that he walks round the garden beds and sniffs the plants in the order I usually check them in before he will agree to come in. He doesn't quite know what the deal with the melons is, just that they need to be checked.

But we're out of the labor-intensive parts of gardening and now into Harvesting Season, and this is a bit boring except when I give him snap peas right off the vine, and he has decided to work on the complex physics problem that is Doorknobs.

And last week, he had a breakthrough.

Sometime in 2020, my mom sort-of taught her horrible crime herding dog Arwen how to open the back door so she could let herself out as she pleased during the day and stop interrupting Mom's Zoom calls. Arwen is a Kelpie, which means she's about 60lbs with full-length legs and horrible monkey paws that are one joint away from being hands, so when Arwen wants to open the back door, she sits up, leans on the door for purchase/to push it, and uses her terrible crime hands to *push* on the knob until it turns. She can pull the knob open by pawing and catching it on her toes, but she's 11-13 years old now and has mild arthritis, so she prefers to catch it on her central pad instead. She taught Charlie, the other equally brilliant but less criminally inclined dog, to do this but he doesn't like to go outside alone, so he rarely does this.

Herschel, ever the observant student, immediately tried copying them, but even though he is actually tall enough to reach the knob, his toes are just too stubby to get a decent grip on the knob, pushing or pulling, and the first few times, gave up and sat down to scream until one of the fullsize dogs or humans came to open the door for him.

Last week, we were up at my parent's again, and I watched him hunt around the living room until he found his slightly-sticky orange rubber ball (It's clean, it's just a kind of rubber that's always a bit tacky), carry it across the house, stand up on his hind legs at the back door, put the rubber ball on top of the gap between the knob and the wall, and then push down on the ball, which caught the doorknob and turned it for him, thus opening the door. He let himself out, had a merry time yelling at the squirrels, came back in, stopped a few feet inside the door, went back out, grabbed his ball, and brought it back into his kennel, a place he can leave toys if he doesn't want the other dogs playing with them.

This means he somehow worked out how doorknobs work, how fucking levers work, and that his orange rubber ball specifically was the one that would work (none of his other toys are the correct size/texture), that he'd need that ball specifically to open the door again, and yesterday he did the same trick with the bedroom door, so he knows that the rubber ball/skeleton key can be used on all doorknobs, not just that one.

I wonder if I can teach him to sweep.

___

If you want to fund Herschel's research into Tool Use and/or get me therapy for the ensuing chaos, please feel free to donate to my Ko-Fi, or get further Dog Content by subscribing to my Patreon.

I can't believe I wrote this and then forgot to include a picture of the little man for a solid 24 hours:

Behold, my Crime Tube.

It's two and a half in the morning and I have no words or brain capacity to process the joy I feel right now, so I'm going to reblog it and look at it again later.

Thanks for reminding me about this post because The Crime Tube has bullied me into doing a garden this year, with the kind of patient positive re-enforcement and blatant emotional manipulation that would make a dog trainer or Hannibal Lecter would admire.

I wasn't planning on doing a garden this year because we just moved house, had an extremely expensive plumbing event and I got spayed this spring, so I had neither time, money, nor core muscle fortitude for starting a garden this march, which is usually when the beds have to go in if you're trying to establish a garden out here. But we have had an extremely wet spring so everything's running a bit late and I was on the fence about starting a little one, and put some of the plastic bins from the Pandemic Patio Garden out to see what kind of sun exposure they'd get.

Once sighted, Herschel realized that A Garden was a possibility and started on a campagin of psychological manipulation.

Herschel loves the garden, because he likes green beans off the vine but more than that, the garden attracts squirrels to the yard and his bloodlust has been left wanting of late. He also loves activities and I think was maybe a little sad that he wasn't getting to do his morning patrol of the yard with me this year.

So he stopped going out in the mornings.

He clearly wanted to. Charlie, who very much likes having his little helper dog around, wanted herschel to come out too. but instead, Herschel would run to the far end of the house where he can still see the back door, and watch me.

...he wants something. I try offering a treat. Nope. I try calling Charlie over and heaping attention on him, something that usually makes Herschel's jealous little ass hustle on over. Nope. Still waiting for something. I put my shoes on. ZOOM. Ah. My presence is wanted outside. I step out with them. I step back in. Herschel stops MID-PEE to turn around and come back in, and stands at the far end of the house. I go back out. Morning yard activities resume as normal.

He continues this nonsense of running away from the back door until I put on my shoes and go outside with them, and immediately stopping what he's doing if I go back inside before some internal metric of his is met for the better part of a week.

Then it's herding me outside, and jumping on me for attention, running nine feet away, stopping, and looking over his shoulder at me, which has previously been established as his "Are You Following Me? Please Follow Me." I follow. He has shown me carrion instead of just eating it before and I gave him a whole piece of turkey about it because that was VERY good behavior and I am eager to re-enforce it. Instead, he patrols around the plastic bins, doing a "Follow Me?" check every few feet.

Yesterday I returned from the nursery with 70% off annual plants for a mini-garden and not only were there extreme yard zoomies of excitement, I got three toys piled on my foot as a reward for the desired gardening Behavior.

Now, This is the kind of behavior I got and trained Herschel for- Herding dogs are good at remembering load-bearing rituals like "Take your meds" and "It's time for food!" and other stuff my ADHD Brain struggles with. So I'm very proud of him.

...I just didn't realized this memory and enforcement behavior extended all the way to "IT'S TIME FOR THIS ANNUAL BEHAVIOR I'VE ONLY SEEN TWICE BUT IS APPARENTLY CRUCIAL AND I WILL BE A LITTLE ASSHOLE AND ALSO FLAGRANTLY DOG-TRAIN YOU TO DO IT, BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU TEACH ME THINGS".

Great job, little Crime Tube. I got extra green bean plants for you.

i am LOSING IT over these photographs…… this is what cameras are for

[video description: a series of short process videos showing a photographer setting up little creatures made of acorns and sticks in various natural environments, designed to interact with the animals in the landscape either by placing them in areas animals frequent or placing birdseed or other lures that draw animals to sit on or near the creatures. each process video is followed by a photograph of the little acorn creature interacting with birds, butterflies, and chipmunks. each acorn creature has a joyful or surprised expression on its face. in the bottom right corner of the screen is a watermark reading “www.davidmbird.com” /end description]

I love this so much

[Image IDs: the first tweet is from Lila Byock (@/Lbyock) from June 15th, 2023 and it reads:

Sarandos: Netflix is investing billions in Korean content to undermine American writers.

Korean writers: Fuck you, pay us.

That first tweet quote tweets the second image, a tweet from Tim Shorrock (@/TimothyS) from June 15th, 2023 that reads:

Korean writers picket in solidarity with Writers Guild of America. ✊

That tweet has a link to an article that I posted after it. /End ID.]

So, for those of you unaware: The Korean entertainment industry is an absolute nightmare. Actors have gone years never being paid for work they're owed pay on. The idol industry is terrible in all the ways. And it's honestly no surprise the industry is shit for writers as well. Glad to see the Korean writers are standing up for themselves too!

!!!!!

Truth is, it reads more like "she can do everything" and "him, it's just Ken"

And ken is a slang used in French that means "to fuck"

So "Him, it's just fucking"

Which I think is even more hilarious

there is no greater proof that no one cares about ken than the fact that in french a ken doll is literally a fuck toy and none of us knew about it

Had to explain it to some friends this morning so I'm copying it here

friend 1: [shares the tweet]

friend 2: johannes please confirm

me: I can confirm

you can read it like "She can do anything. He's just Ken." and that's clearly the intent but there's a type of slang called verlan where you basically reverse words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan

"verlan" is verlan of "l'envers" (reversed) like if you want to say idk "policeman" there's the correct word "policier" but there's also among other words the more familiar "flic" and if you say it in verlan it's "keuf". COUREZ YA LES KEUFS (that would be one of the local equivalents of RUN, THE PIGS ARE COMING)

SO

one of the words to say "to fuck" is "niquer". And the verlan of that one is "ken". HAHAHA TU T'ES FAIT KEN (HAHAHA GET FUCKED) SO tldr you can also read that tagline like "She can do anything. He can just fuck."

I hope this answers your question

friend 1: That absolutely rules

Thank you Johannes that's made my morning

me: you're welcome