Potential for the funniest thing ever to happen
There was a group of angels at the bar tonight. Super intense vibe, but they kept to themselves and didn't disturb the other patrons, except for one point when they all suddenly burst into cheers and ordered a round for the bar. I asked what they were celebrating. They told me that for a split second all of the air molecules bounced petfectly into one corner of the room. It's like their version of the dvd screensaver.
1898
Real summer 1998
My summer 1998 was spent playing an N64 and eating Domino's Pizza. Though to be fair, my mom did bake a lot so I had some homemade candies too... but she just likes to bake.
let's laugh together and let's cum together
and then die together
praying mantis ass post
Babe come to the kitchen I made your favourite meal (oil fire)
I just went on a rant about plungers, how’s your day going?
“go off bestie”? Okay, I will.
This is a plunger.
Classic red cup with a wooden stick. We all know it, love it, and have seen a cartoon character using it to unclog a toilet. Right?
WRONG.
The image above is actually a drain plunger, used on sinks, showers, and baths. Not on toilets.
These are a toilet plungers.
Take note of the variations. Each of them have a flange of sorts at the bottom, either connected via a cup or more accordion-like tube. These are designed to actually get down into the toilet bowl where it flushes down, giving it more space and leverage to unclog blockages. See the example below:
Notice how the flange allows it to go deeper into the toilet to provide more power to the plunge. Sink/drain plungers are far less efficient and effective at the task.
Sink plungers can also have an accordion shape to help with power in plunging, but crucially do not have or need the flange that toilet plungers do.
To recap: cup plungers are for sinks, showers, bathtubs, and other drains. Flange and accordion plungers are for toilets. Notably, accordion plungers are slightly harder to use, but are more powerful when used correctly than their flange counterparts.
So the next time you see a cartoon, video game, or stock art depicting a cup plunger being used on a toilet, you can feel the same levels of anger and emotion that I do!
why does this have nearly 100 notes
Because with this level of passion, containment is futile 
The real question is why does this not have a million notes? This is information that will very likely, at some point, be incredibly useful to anyone who has indoor plumbing. Which is, you know, probably, 99.99% of this website's user base. (I'm sure there's someone out there using Tumblr who lives in a house built in 1850 which never got upgraded and they still have an outhouse rather than toilet.)
current note count: 4,970
Seriously, a toilet plunger will save you so much money. Get one.
that third flange plunger in the pic above? AMAZING!
My friend forgot to secure the latch on his magic card briefcase and all his commander decks are now mixed together. Now he’s playing 1200 card pickup and has to reorganize everything.
you are not a bad person because of your memory loss. you are not less intelligent because of your memory loss. you are not less caring because of your memory loss.
memory loss isn’t your fault and you don’t deserve to feel ashamed.
[ID: tags reading, "#ok but. i am genuinely less intelligent because of my memory loss. #i have lost multiple skills i had in the past and am still losing more because i cannot remember how to do them #i am losing my intelligence. i am genuinely becoming less and less able to understand language even #it shouldn't be 'youre not less intelligent' it should be 'your intelligence doesn't define your worth'". End ID]
true and correct addition
Love that the first thing in the Taylor swift tag is bitty being disgusted at the assumption hes a swifty lol
It begins.
A few people took exception to calling my car's CD player useless.
I actually think it is great there are a few holdouts still using CDs.
CDs are truly one of the most perfect media ever created.
And I can prove that mathematically.
Some will say vinyl is superior. And as much as I love records, the audio quality is preferred, not better. People have a *preference* for how vinyl sounds, but it still leaves out audio information and has noise and artifacts caused by the mechanics of the turntable and an imperfect manufacturing process.
In fact, the lesser audio quality is exactly what people enjoy. It has a warmth and comfortably compressed dynamic range that is not fatiguing over long listening sessions. It's like choosing a nice fire over a 100% efficient space heater.
But if you want perfect audio quality that does not exceed the limits of human hearing, compact discs are where it's at.
It all has to do with Dr. Harry Nyquist and his Nyquist-Shannon Theorem. (Sometimes Shannon gets left out and it is just called the Nyquist Theorem.)
The simple version is he figured out how much something needs to be sampled in order to not lose any information. As long as you sample something at a frequency greater than or equal to twice per cycle, you will have a lossless... whatever.
In this case, a lossless audio recording.
So the range of human hearing is about 20 Hz to 20 kHz. That's the lowest and highest frequencies we can perceive. The scientists creating CD audio figured they'd do 22 kHz for some overhead and then you double that to get 44 kHz. (Technically it was 44.1 kHz.)
You can imagine the smooth curvy line as an analog recording. No gaps. No information loss.
The black squares are digital samples recorded over a period of time. You can see there are gaps between those black squares. A tiny bit of time passes between the squares where nothing is sampled. INFORMATION LOSS! NOOOOO!
Clearly the vinyl nerds are correct and digital is inferior, right? You are going to get the dreaded... STAIR STEPS!
Not so fast, bucko!
By getting enough samples over a period of time, you can use math to infer that smooth sloping line connecting those individual samples. So the digital recording also has no information lost once it is converted back to analog and played through your speakers.
This connecting of dots is called "interpolation."
You could take the curvy analog, convert it to digital, get the same black squares, and then interpolate the black squares back into analog and get the same curvy line. It goes back and forth perfectly. And this is all verifiable with an oscilloscope.
NEAT!
Then of course you need a good dynamic range--the spectrum of quiet to loud. Anything above 85 decibels will damage your hearing, so they went with a 16-bit depth which covers roughly 100 dB. Again, giving them a little overhead for death metal and overzealous trumpet players.
And the final component is data bandwidth or "bitrate" usually measured in kilobits per second. This is how much data is read every second. The 1s and 0s of it all. The bitrate of a CD is calculated by multiplying 44,100 samples per second per channel by 16 bits per sample and then multiplying by 2 channels. After all that mathing is math'd, you get a perfectly uncompressed 1,411 kbps.
So you've got all the frequencies you could ever hear combined with as much volume as your ears can stand with a bit rate that will give you no loss of data.
The *perfect* audio quality all encoded into little microscopic pits.
Now you may be asking, "Why do I see "24/96" or "24/192" advertised on fancy audio equipment and high quality streaming platforms like Tidal? Aren't 24 bits better? Isn't 96 kHz MORE than 44.1 kHz?"
Dr. Nyquist might say... this is some bullshit.
This confusion comes from the fact that recording quality and playback quality are two different animals. This misunderstanding happens with video and photo quality as well. Recording in 6K will give you a sharper picture even if your final playback quality is 4K. You can get bad pixels and noise and stray photons that do not contribute to the detail in the video. By giving yourself overhead you can ensure you hit the desired quality target.
And recording at 24 bits and 96 or 192 kHz, you get a higher resolution to edit and master with, but it is only advantageous to the computer software... not the human ear.
From a photographer's perspective, I relate to it like this...
If I have more megapixels and more colors and more dynamic range I have more leeway when editing my photos. If you try to push a low quality photo in the edit, it has this tendency to fall apart. You can get ugly color banding and harsh contrast and sharpening artifacts. By capturing more quality than you need in the finished product, you can process the photo much more dramatically before it deteriorates and loses integrity.
Audio and video are the same way.
So let's say you have a metal singer that screams at the microphone as loud as possible from 2 inches away.
At 16 bits they may surpass that 100 decibel dynamic range and distort the recording. But if you record in 24 bits, you get 144 dB to play with. Or you can even do 32 bits and get 1500 dB--a volume that no human voice could ever surpass. It guarantees a clean, distortion free recording, but 32 bits would be pointless for human listening.
The same is true with the sample rate. Having a higher resolution allows you to zoom into waveforms and adjust things to an extremely granular level. You can do precise timings, tiny pitch adjustments, apply loads of digital effects, and just have more room for audio activities without degrading the sound quality.
But outputting 192,000 of those black squares is going to interpolate the exact same smooth curvy line as 44,100 when it is played through speakers.
The oscilloscope knows what I'm talking about.
Now I am about to reveal a secret that no audiophile who has invested in a $115,000 high resolution 32 bit/3,072 kHz DAC wants to acknowledge...
The master recording is always more important than the playback quality.
If you have a high quality source it will sound great even in a highly compressed MP3. Just like the 6K video is sharper on the 4K TV. And the high megapixel photo looks better in an Instagram post.
If the source is good, the media will be good.
And since high resolution audio services often seek out the best masters available before encoding their playback files, it gives many people the illusion they are getting better sound quality due to the boosted specs.
When in reality, it was just a better copy of the original recording.
According to Nyquist, your human ears are not computers and all you need is double the frequency to hear perfect sound with no loss of information. So anything above 16 bit/44.1 kHz/1411 kbps and you are just wasting bandwidth on a server.
And I don't want to hear anything about "stair stepping."
IT'S MATH.
Your ears aren't better than math, okay?
If you don't believe in math, then you and Jack White can sit in the naughty math corner with his bespoke overpriced vinyl pressings.
I will say, there is a gap between your standard music streaming service like Spotify and your bullshit audiophile service like Tidal.
Free Spotify uses heavily compressed files. Which means the bitrate is quite low and there can be information loss. Or "lossy" compression. Modern compression is actually pretty amazing, but I'm afraid anything below 320 kbps may cause some songs to not sound as intended.
Depending on the content, some songs are more suited to compression than others. And even with premium Spotify, they cap songs at 320 kbps which still may not be enough for busier, harder-to-compress songs.
Also, I don't know if Spotify cares about getting the best quality master for a given song. Which, again, is the most important aspect of sound quality.
But services like Tidal waste bandwidth with their super specs and that isn't great for the environment. What I'd love to see is a company that makes their best effort to seek out high quality masters, and encodes their files at 16 bit/44 kHz with a lossless variable bit rate compression. Variable bit rate or "VBR" will do more compression during simpler parts of the audio and less compression during more complex parts. It's smart compression, basically. And as long as you use a high enough bitrate to achieve lossless compression, the sound quality will be the same as if there is no compression at all. So you still get smaller file sizes that use less bandwidth and have a smaller environmental impact.
That would be a streaming service I would consider paying for. Especially if they put great effort into getting high quality original recordings for their content.
In conclusion... if you are still using CDs you don't need to worry about audio quality. You're all set. There is a sort of beauty in what the audio scientists who created compact discs did. They figured out the limits of human audio perception and created a format that just slightly exceeded that. No "bigger number is better" marketing. No audiophile bullshit.
They said, "Here is what you need and nothing more."
They made a perfect thing and they should be proud of that.
I hope my tribute to CD quality wasn't too long. I miss my CD collection even though I would never give up the convenience of modern streaming.
In high school my brother got a job at Jiffy Lube and started making his own money. He invested in a crazy sound system and even built his own speakers from scratch. Well, he designed the cabinets around the speakers... but it was still impressive for a teenager. They were as tall as I was and sounded amazing. I guess that's why he is a fancy engineer now.
One of my favorite purchases he made with his Lube money was a Sony 100 disc changer. It had a little window so you could see the CDs rotate around.
It took FOREVER to fill this thing up. And adding/removing CDs was a huge pain. But if you put this bad boy on shuffle, you had over 1000 songs before you heard the same thing twice. The only downside is it could take a while to change songs and it made some very loud whirring sounds. My brother could sleep to it, but it would always wake me up--even in the next room.
Thankfully I was able to digitize our entire CD collection. It's fun to go back and listen to those tunes and reminisce. Though I had everything Chris Cornell, Scott Weiland, Kurt Cobain, and Layne Staley ever recorded and sometimes that reminiscing brings sadness.
Ending on a bummer! I'M A GOOD WRITER!
There's an excellent YouTuber who did a bunch of videos explaining this if reading long blocks of text isn't your thing.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFWBEyCKt4tKHIk8ez_pZS_P
As a rape survivor, I understand the need for safe space together – free from sexist harassment and potential violence. But fear of gender variance also can't be allowed to deceptively cloak itself as a women's safety issue. I can't think of a better example than my own, and my butch friends', first-hand experiences in public women's toilets. Of course women need to feel safe in a public restroom; that's a serious issue. So when a man walks in, women immediately examine the situation to see if the man looks flustered and embarrassed, or if he seems threatening; they draw on the skills they learned as young girls in this society to read body language for safety or danger.
Now, what happens when butches walk into the women's bathroom? Women nudge each other with elbows, or roll their eyes, and say mockingly, "Do you know which bathroom you're in?" Thats not how women behave when they really believe there's a man in the bathroom. This scenario is not about women's safety – its an example of gender-phobia.
And ask yourself, if you were in the women's bathroom, and there were two teenage drag queens putting on lipstick in front of the mirror, would you be in danger? If you called security or the cops, or forced those drag queens to use the men's room, would they be safe?
If the segregation of bathrooms is really about more than just genitals, then maybe the signs ought to read "Men" and "Sexually and Gender Oppressed," because we all need a safe place to go to the bathroom. Or even better, let's fight for clean individual bathrooms with signs on the doors that read "Restroom."
And defending the inclusion of transsexual sisters in women's space does not threaten the safety of any woman. The AIDS movement, for example, battled against the right-wing characterization of gay men as a "high-risk group." We won an understanding that there is no high-risk group – there are high-risk behaviors. Therefore, creating safety in women's space means we have to define unsafe behavior – like racist behavior by white women towards women of color, or dangerous insensitivity to disabilities.
Transsexual sisters are not a Trojan horse trying to infiltrate women's space. There have always been transsexual women helping to build the women's movement – they are part of virtually every large gathering of women. They want to be welcomed into women's space for the same reason every woman does – to feel safe.
Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond
Once the harsh winter is gone, when come the good and easier days, we often encounter bears swimming by the ice edge. Polar bears are extremely capable of having fun alone with whatever they find 🐻❄️ !.
another striking example of why must the most lethal of beasts be such a silly lil goober??
drafts are where posts are edged until they're hot and heavy and dripping and begging to be released on the dash
the post thats been in your drafts for four months
just opened threads. it's basically a fake app from a tv show that a teenage girl uses right before being murdered by cyberbullies. not doing that again
i had a dream that you sent me an ask on tumblr that just contained the lyrics to an annoying orange song except all the nouns were replaced with peanus
are u sure that was just a dream?
no fucking way
it's real ....
A thing that really saddens me to see is how many young trans people lose faith in feminism, from believing it obsolete to actively thinking that feminism is harmful to them. I don't want to throw words "chronically online" around, but in its core, that belief is directly caused by the (very loud) presence of terfs and radfems in online spaces, misappropriating the term to fuel their hatefulness.
Go outside, talk to some real people, and don't let the bigoted bioessentialism of a few conservative women colour your opinion of an entire (still very important) social movement. Feminism is your ally, not your enemy.