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Bear With Me

@thecraftybear

i'm the Bear. 39, he/him i guess, not straight enough for this bullshit | twitch and ko-fi: thecraftybear | warnings: coarse language, cultural dissonances, depression, anxiety and general awkwardness | treasure trove of useless info | vocally proud dad | @loirgris's husband | omnivore, birophile, caffeinist, depressed ADHD dumbass | bg by me, ink on grey paper

The last star of the silent film era died yesterday at 101.  Diana Serra Cary started in films when she was 19 months old, as “Baby Peggy.” Like a lot of other child stars she was exploited, overworked, supported her entire family with her earnings, was considered “washed up” before she was 10 and was left with nothing as an adult. At 17 she ran away from home, knowing that her parents wanted her to work in films forever and she needed a way out. 

She eventually married an artist, opened a bookstore, and became an author and historian. Her 1978 nonfiction book Hollywood’s Children traced the exploitation of child actors from the 1800s onward. She also released Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? a memoir of her child star years, pulling no punches on the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents, directors and studios, who put her to work eight hours a day, six days a week and had her doing her own stunts before she was five. This scene here, from The Darling of New York? Not special effects. They actually put this small child in a burning room and she almost didn’t get out because they accidentally fired all the doors and windows. In 2011 a documentary about her, The Elephant in the Room, was released. She released her last book, a novel, at the age of 100.  She never got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She’s not remembered much in film histories. But she was one of the pioneers, and with her, the last of the silent era stars is gone. 

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tmmyhug

I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day

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tmmyhug
Image

I take it all back everyone on this site is toxic

"The common bat (Bat bat) is a small bat microbat"

this bat is the most bat of any bat ever

absolute maximum quantity of bat in this guy

"In 1999, the common pipistrelle was split into two species on the basis of different-frequency echolocation calls. The common pipistrelle uses a call of 45 kHz, while the soprano pipistrelle echolocates at 55 kHz. "

If youre a soprano youre a different species thats the rules

I eagerly await the day that science discovers the Bass Pipistrelle

I might have to replace my upcoming bard character with a bunch of bats in a trenchcoat, now. They're all pipistrelli with different registers.

you coul. youcould call that a.

batbershop quartet

Choiroptera

ID: 2 tweets.

Tweet 1, by Zach Seward, @/zseward, says: Doritos removed 5 chips from each bag, Bounty trimmed its rolls by 3 sheets, and Wheat Thins determined that family size is now 2 oz smaller - all for the same price as before. Great look at how inflation often hides in the air pockets of emptier packaging.

Tweet 2, by Timothy Burke, @/bubbaprog, says: The company that makes Doritos made $42 billion in profit last year. The company that makes Bounty toilet paper made $39 billion in profit last year. The company that makes Wheat Thins made $11 billion in profit last year. This isn't inflation, it's corporations ripping you off. /End ID.

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maocin

edible microchip????

No it is not

It is not

Do not the microchips

They mean non-toxic, in case you swallow it by mistake. It's in the rind, the part you're not supposed to eat.

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truebeasty

What if I eat it anyway?

Then you can go to the cheese factory and get falsely identified as cheese until it dissolves in your stomach I guess

As the saying goes, you are what you eat

Hey folks, if you want to fight back against the twitterfication of tumblr USE IT LIKE IT'S TUMBLR!!!!!! REBLOG THINGS!!!!!! USE THE TAGS TO SCREAM AT YOUR FRIENDS!!!!!!!

Woke up to this having more reblogs than likes! Keep it going! Do it on every post! REBLOG THINGS ON THE REBLOGGING THINGS SITE!

I'm a survivor of the terror attacks who lived 4 blocks east of the World Trade Center. I lost my home that day, spent years homeless and destitute, and I carry a Zadroga Act diagnosis of 9/11-connected PTSD. If anyone who's doing this RP needs character coaching or if you need help with authentic scenarios, I'm available for consulting services at reasonable rates. DM me here or leave your number on the men's room wall at any leather bar and it'll get to me in 24 hours. Happy 9/11 y'all, and remember fireworks are unsafe and illegal in most jurisdictions.

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wlw-wukong

“Look what I have, mummy,” the three year old said solemnly. “It’s a dead fly.”

“Oh, that’s very nice.”

“I’m just keeping it in here forever for my memories,” they said, indicating the black plastic witch’s cauldron (originally purchased to hand out Halloween candy, and now doing permanent duty whenever someone needs a bucket.)

“We don’t really keep dead things forever,” I said, “we normally have a funeral; what if we- ”

“What’s a funeral?”

“Oh, it’s a bit like the opposite of a wedding. When someone dies, everyone gets dressed in black, and -”

“Look! This one’s wearing black already!”

Meanwhile the older child was carefully constructing a pretend bakery with a donation point

I love it when pre Original Trilogy era shows how much effort went into making the Death Star. It took decades, literal decades, and it took so much money and so many people and it was such a secretive thing and it’s staffed by millions because it’s the size of a small moon.

I cannot express how much all of the added information makes it so much funnier that Luke blew it up.

Luke destroys literally everything Palpatine built. He blows up the Death Star, which was referenced in universe as early as the second movie. He blew up the weapon of mass destruction twenty years in the making. And he blew it up pretty much directly after it’s first and only successful attack. It was operational for fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes that Palpatine had the thing he’d been building for longer than Luke has been alive, and Luke blows it up. First day retirement, but first hour retirement.

Luke convinces Darth Vader to turn back to the light side, a feat thought literally impossible by literally everybody. Sidious clearly doesn’t see Vader’s betrayal coming. Vader’s betrayal was not in his plans, nor was it something he was prepared for. Sidious is a powerful Force user with all four limbs while Vader is a man in the tin can Palpatine put him in. If Palpatine had seen Vader turning coming, he would not have allowed it to happen.

Luke literally should not even be alive. Palpatine almost definitely got Padme out of the way on purpose, and he almost certainly was trying for her unborn child as well (there was way too big of a risk that a cute liddol bebe would bring some humanity back to Anakin, and Palpatine did not want Anakin to have any humanity) Luke living is literally the first step in Palpatine’s ultimate downfall, especially once Vader finds out that Luke is his son. His very alive son. His son that is not dead, despite Palpatine claiming Anakin killed Padme. Implying that Anakin killed Padme and she posthumously gave birth. But, she didn’t give birth on Mustafar, which was the last place Anakin interacted with her. And once the mother dies, you have to get those fuckers out fast or they die too.

I imagine Darth Vader piecing all of this together is that meme with all the math floating around his head, because how could Padme have died by his hand and then given birth like two hours later?

Luke killing Palpatine is what ultimately leads to the dissolution of the Empire as an omnipotent entity. Luke killed the Empire. Luke spends a good amount of his adult life killing Empire remnants. We see that in the Mandalorian, since he’s so recognizable that Gideon immediately knows he’s fucked just by seeing an X-wing. We read it in Legends’ continuity, where Luke terrifies Imperials because he can walk into their changing room and stand in their for a minute and they don’t even notice.

Luke destroyed Palpatine’s life’s work. Everything Palpatine spent his whole life working towards, and Luke kills all of it. He blows up not one, but two Death Stars (he may not have pulled the trigger on the second Death Star, but without him, it never would have been destroyed). He convinces not one, but multiple Sith and Dark Jedi to return from the Dark Side. He is the only reason that Obi-Wan Kenobi, the biggest pain in Palpatine’s ass ever born, lives long enough to make it to the Death Star.

Palpatine went through so much effort. And just when he had finally won, when he finally had a weapon capable of destroying entire planets with a single blast, making it impossible for any planets or peoples to go against him, Luke shows up nineteen years late to the Jedi party with space Starbucks and a droid twice his age and almost singlehandedly destroys everything Palpatine ever had a hand in creating.

Luke manages to become even worse than Obi-Wan Kenobi, the ultimate thorn in the side of politicians, and Luke doesn’t even understand any politics. He wasn’t trained in diplomacy like Obi-Wan and Leia, no, he’s a farmboy who left home for the first time in his entire life, just this morning. And he is the one to destroy the Empire.

If they rewrote Star Wars and had it entirely from Palpatine’s perspective, Luke Skywalker would be his greatest foe. Luke Skywalker would be the final boss. Luke Skywalker is the antithesis of everything Palpatine believes in and he is the one character that Palpatine cannot predict. He isn’t as moldable as Anakin, he doesn’t respond to threats very well, he’s apparently impossible to kill via Force lightning (still the funniest scene of all times, the progression of Palpatine’s face falling and him looking like “what the fuck??? Is this kid rubber??? I’ve electrocuted him eight times???”), his unwavering faith in his father’s goodness makes Darth Vader want to be a better person, Luke Skywalker is the big bad of Palpatine’s story and—

There is nothing in this world that is funnier than someone’s biggest antagonist being Luke fucking Skywalker. Luke Skywalker, who saved the galaxy with the power of love and who shouldn’t exist, by Jedi rules and by Palpatine’s own attempts, and whose best friends are literally droids, which Palpatine canonically hates!

Everything about this is hilarious, this is the funniest thing in all of media, Palpatine loses absolutely everything to some backwater farmboy who fucking likes droids.

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meckamecha

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.

For anyone who'd like to follow along, I'm gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they're more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I'll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.

For the Device Setup

"OOBE" stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that'll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don't have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here's how you get to it:

  1. Hold Shift + F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.
  2. Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO
  3. I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f

Now when you're brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don't have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.

Group Policies

You don't have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can't do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.

I'm gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this

It'll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c

Start Recommendations

In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the "Turn off" ones bumped to the top.

Here's what you should set:

  • Turn off user tracking: enabled
  • Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled
  • Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled
  • Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled
  • Do not search Internet: enabled

Windows Spotlight

Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content

  • Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled
  • Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled

Cortana

In the side menu, this one's back at the top under Computer Configuration. You're gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

  • Allow Cortana: disabled
  • Don't search the web or display web results in Search: enabled

News and Interests

In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.

  • Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled

Microsoft Account Login Nudges

When you don't use a Microsoft account they'll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can "get the most out of your experience" *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let's just open up the regular settings.

Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ノ u are done.

Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity's sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol

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meckamecha

This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!

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hippotime

Very useful advice on saving yourself from unbearable irritation

At this point i really am pondering switching to Linux, despite having genuine fear of it since my first failed attempt over 20 years ago. My only hangup is that most games will not run under it, and i'm not a console person (especially when a game has a good modding scene).