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@thetroublewithtimelords

movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….

girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.

if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:

I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–” “Ten,” I said. “What?” “J. J is ten,” I said again. He stared at me. “I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him. Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.” He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room. I looked at the wall for a while. He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time. So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is. “It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were” “Sit down,” he said. I sat. Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted

ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.

This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.

It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.

i would legit listen to a whole album of ambient music made like this

And the album has to include the purring and “mow!” Sounds

I could listen to this for hours!

this cat purring and mrah-ing at this board is the only meditation music I need until the end of time

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…omg. YOU CAN BUY THE TRACK. XD The kitty’s person is selling it on bandcamp. AMAZING. *drops some money in the tip jar, runs off with a sweet meditation track*

alright go support your local ambientkitty 🐱https://t.co/AhDHrOJ79i
— 🪙 QRTR 🪙 (@qrtrmusic) September 30, 2019

Apparently the guy who owns and made this submarine is literally against safety precautions.

https://www.insider.com/titan-submarine-ceo-complained-about-obscenely-safe-regulations-2023-6

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What do you mean your naval vessel doesn't have an emergency beacon!?!?!?!?!

“You know, there’s a limit,” he told the broadcaster. “At some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean if you don’t just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Sir I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of life

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Holy fuck.

From the director of the union’s railroad department:

Of course, “working quietly with union leadership to find a solution that gets the workers everything they want without requiring them to strike” isn’t an ideal solution for people who value the act of striking itself over achieving the goals of a strike, but social media’s obsession with Performance Politics and their preference for an Exciting Nothing over a Boring But Good Something is nothing new

you’re assuming that a strike wouldn’t have had a good outcome, which is not a reasonable assumption when the threat of a strike was enough to force these concessions

  1. According to the union itself, it was not in fact the threat of a strike which forced this outcome, but was, in fact, largely the dedicated work of the Biden administration.
  2. It kinda doesn’t matter whether or not a strike would’ve had a good outcome, because the good outcome was achievable without a strike. If you can get what you want without a fight, what kind of moron would you have to be to choose to have the fight anyway? Does it matter that you’re prepared to fight if you have to, if it turns out you don’t have to? Does it matter that fighting would’ve got the job done, if the job could’ve gotten done without a fight?

This is what I mean about how people “value the act of striking itself over the goals of a strike.” To the people who say shit like the above, the idea of workers wanting to avoid a strike doesn’t even occur to them, even though for most workers, “we get what we want without needing to strike to get it” is what one might consider “the ideal outcome.”

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UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to equip its iconic brown delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time for new units.

The agreement, announced by UPS on Tuesday, comes as the delivery giant and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiate the terms of a new contract for more than 330,000 U.S. employees. (source)

Unions work, unionize.

They only just now got air conditioners?!?!?!

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Yeah it’s a huge win. Those trucks are death traps on a good day. A bunch of drivers died and more got severely ill last year from heat stroke. The temperature in the back of those vans is usually 10 degrees hotter than outside. It’s terrible, and I’m so proud of my union for how harshly they’re negotiating right now. We’ve got a bunch of smaller consessions already but this one was big.

This round of negotiations is difficult. The UPS Overlords are trying very hard to keep their billions of dollars in three pockets instead of spreading the wealth we (the workers) earned for them during the pandemic’s influx of home delivery. They’re trying to give us as little as possible and spinning the news articles to make it look like they’re super generous. Meanwhile almost everyone in my warehouse is on food stamps cuz we aren’t paid shit.

The UPS Teamsters Union are currently voting on whether or not to go on strike in August, so prepare for that. Stock up on essential supplies, just in case. We’ll let everyone know how to support us when the time comes.

This job is my first time being part of a union and I never wanna go back to not having one. It’s amazing to have so much fighting power.

I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion in Judaism, and being kind. In that light, I would like everyone to know that my current favorite Jewish supernatural headcanon is that, instead of driving vampires away with crosses or stakes through the heart, we say the Mourner’s Kaddish for them. I mean, that’s just so adorable. You see this threatening undead creature, and instead of yelling murder, you feel bad for them, and you mourn for them. Imagine being a vampire at the receiving end of that, having been chased away for years and years and told you’re a monster when you come across someone who sees you and your existence and accepts that you’re in a pretty bad place and offers help in the best way they can. I’m actually tearing up about this a little. If someone adds to this post I’ll love them forever.

It doesn’t work for zombies.

This is one of the hardest things she learns, in the business.  Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish will slow a vampire, to stare at you with wide shocked eyes (and once, memorably, to weep blood-tinged tears), unable or unwilling to lift a hand against you.  It will calm a dybbuk, enough to make it stop whatever destruction it’s begun, and almost always enough to start a conversation about why it clings so desperately to the world of the living, what it’s left undone, how it can be freed to move on.  You have died, the Kaddish says, and we mourn you as we would mourn our own dead, because someone must.

But there is no soul and no mind left in a zombie, no vestige of the self it once was, nothing left for the Kaddish to speak to.

She says it anyway, with every head-shot, with every flung grenade.

Not because she still hopes one might hear her, but because they are dead, and the dead should be mourned.

Well, I love you forever now.

Sewing Machines & Planned Obsolescence

I've got these two sewing machines, made about 100 years apart. An old treadle machine from around 1920-1930, that I pulled out of the trash on a rainy day, and a new Brother sewing machine from around 2020.

I've always known planned obsolescence was a thing, but I never knew just how insidious it was till I started looking at these two side by side.

I wasn't feeling hopeful at first that I'd actually be able to fix the old one, I found it in the trash at 2 am in a thunderstorm. It was rusty, dusty, soggy, squeaky, missing parts, and 100 years old.

How do you even find specialized parts 100 years later? Well, easily, it turns out. The manufacturers at the time didn't just make parts backwards compatible to be consistent across the years, but also interchangeable across brands! Imagine that today, being able to grab a part from an old iPhone to fix your Android.

Anyway, 6 months into having them both, I can confidently say that my busted up trash machine is far better than my new one, or any consumer-grade sewing machine on the market.

Old Machine Guts

The old machine? Can sew through a pile of leather thicker than my fingers like it's nothing. (it's actually terrifying and I treat it like a power tool - I'll never sew drunk on that thing because I'm genuinely afraid it'd sew through a finger!) At high speeds, it's well balanced and doesn't shake. The parts are all metal, attached by standard flathead screws, designed to be simple and strong, and easily reachable behind large access doors. The tools I need to work on it? A screwdriver and oil. Lost my screwdriver? That's OK, a knife works too.

New Machine Guts

The new machine's skipping stitches now that the plastic parts are starting to wear out. It's always throwing software errors, and it damn near shakes itself apart at top speed. Look at it's innards - I could barely fit a boriscope camera that's about as thick as spaghetti in there let alone my fingers. Very little is attached with standard screws.

And it's infuriating. I'm an engineer - there's no damn reason to make high-wear parts out of plastic. Or put them in places they can't be reached to replace. There's no reason to make your mechanism so unbalanced it's reaching the point of failure before reaching it's own design speed. (Oh yeah there is, it's corporate greed)

100 years, and your standard home sewing machine has gone from a beast of a machine that can be pulled out of the literal waterlogged trash and repaired - to a machine that eats itself if you sew anything but delicate fast-fashion fabrics that are also designed to fall apart in a few years.

Looking for something modern built to the standard that was set 100 years ago? I'd be looking at industrial machines that are going for thousands of dollars... Used on craigslist. I don't even want to know what they'd cost new.

We have the technology and knowledge to manufacture "old" sewing machines still. Hell, even better, sewing machines with the mechanical design quality of the old ones, but with more modern features. It would be so easy - at a technical level to start building things well again. Hell, it's easier to fabricate something sturdy than engineer something to fail at just the right time. (I have half a mind to see if any of my meche friends with machine shops want to help me fabricate an actually good modern machine lol)

We need to push for right-to-repair laws, and legislation against planned obsolescence. Because it's honestly shocking how corporate greed has downright sabotaged good design. They're selling us utter shit, and expecting us to come back for more every financial quarter? I'm over it.

Part of the problem is the corporate perception that it's more effective to create a reputation for quality through merchandising than through making quality products.

Just an FYI for those in the US with insurance issues

Important information! Insurance coverage decisions are made by medically ignorant bean-counters. Until we can dismantle the whole shitty system, know how to scare them into submission.

This is like that procedure Mr. Incredible told that old lady

Reblogging for visibility

[Image Description: Text: Medical Hack: So, your doctor ordered a test or treatment and your insurance company denied it. That is a typical cost saving method. Okay, here is what you do:

  1. Call the insurance company and tell them you want to speak with the “HIPPA Compliance/Privacy Officer” (By federal law, they have to have one)
  2. Then ask them for Names as well as Credentials of every person Accessing Your Record to make that decision of denial. By law you have a Right to that informantion.
  3. They will almost always Reverse the Decision very shortly rather than admit that the committee is made of low paid H.S. Graduates, looking at all “criteria words,” making the decision to deny your care. Even in the rare case it is made by medical personel, it is unlikely that it is made by a board cerified doctor in that specialty and they Do Not Want You to Know This!
  4. Any refusal should be reported to the U.S. Office of Civil Rights (OCR.gov) as a HIPPA violation. Description ends]

Reblogging for visibility!

I wonder if anyone has made a list like this regarding Medicare (federal run health insurance) and Medicaid (state run health insurance) because the process for challenging denials is absolutely different, but I’ve never known how to do it myself nor found a guide on how to.

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I can't find the post but it said something like "biphobia will have bi women believe that society wants them to be lesbians, and lesbophobia will have lesbians believe that society wants them to be bi, but the truth is society doesn't want you to be bi or lesbian. they want you to be straight" or something like that. I saw it for the first time years ago and it's stuck with me because this mindset will genuinely resolve so much of queer infighting.

Allosexual queer people will believe that society wants them to be ace and aces will believe that society wants them to be allosexual queers, and the truth is society wants you to be allosexual but only sexually attracted to the right gender in the right way.

Trans men will believe that society wants them to be nonbinary, and nonbinary people will believe that society wants them to be binary trans, and the truth is society wants you to be cis.

And the thing is, there's some truth to "I would be more accepted if I was [this queer identity] instead of [that queer identity]," because there are groups of people who will want you to be a different queer identity. There are people who want their lesbian daughters to be bi because then they have a chance of marrying a man. There are allosexual gays who want to be ace because at least then they wouldn't be sexually attracted to their own gender, which is dirty and gross and wrong. There are people who want their trans male friends to be nonbinary because they think men are all evil.

Except there are also people who would rather bi women be lesbians because dating men makes them a traitor to the queer community, or aces who want to be allosexual and gay because if they can't be attracted to the opposite gender at least they'll be attracted to someone, and people who want their nonbinary friends to be binary trans because nonbinary people are made up and stealing resources.

Society at large doesn't want you to be any queer identity. They have a very narrow idea of what you should be, and so many ideas and rules telling you what you shouldn't be. And sometimes, people unlearn some of those rules but not others, depending on who they're around while forming these opinions. Some people will unlearn exorsexism but still drink the "men are evil" juice. Some people will unlearn homophobia but not amatonormativity.

So, sometimes queer people say things like "People would accept me more if I was [different queer identity]." And sure, some people would accept you more if you were that other identity. Except some people would accept you less. Maybe your parents would accept you more if you were bi instead of lesbian, but your friends would say being bi makes you a traitor.

And in the end, it doesn't matter, because there's way to win. "More accepted" is a very relative term. More accepted by some people, sure, but you won't be really be accepted unless you're not queer.

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This is really really true. I’m saving this and keeping it to read for all the times *I* catch myself feeling this way, and sharing it because it’s something pretty much every LGTBQIA+ person could do with internalising.

This a Moonmelon, scientifically knows as asidus. This fruit grows in some parts of Japan, and is known for its vibrant blue color. What you probably don’t know about this fruit is that it can switch flavors after you eat it. Everything sour will taste sweet, everything salty will taste bitter, and it gives water a strong orange-like taste. It’s also very expensive…costing about ¥16000 JPY (which is about 200 dollars).

or you know this could be photoshopped

but idk

you tell me

this is alexandrias melon (wow)

it never grows seeds but it can still produce other melons (its magic)

it is grown deep in the jungles of peru and can prevent you from aging well into the hundreds

it is known by the natives there as k’uhul ajaw cacao shi-jiiy.

its really strange how all of these pictures look exactly the same because everything on the internet is true

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This is the Peppermeloni. (seriously gosh just look at that sexy mother fucker) Its scientific name is Tumblrous Pepperonus.

The only known specimen is in a pot in David Karps treasure dungeon. It is a tradition that a single slice is given to every tumblr blog that reaches 500,000 followers.

It has the remarkable property of being as healthy as watermelon but tasting like cheesy pepperoni pizza.

This planet is really just so amazing guys wow.

Patrickmelon

The taste of this melon will always surprise you.

I’m fucking done with this site

This is the evermelon.

If you cut this watermelon a certain way you will find that it has seemingly regenerated. You can do this an infinite number of times and will have a neverending supply of melon.

OH GOD I haven’t seen this post in YEARS and THAT is the fucking additon to it!?

ALRIGHT THATS IT ITS TIME TO STOP

Hi my name is Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Ravenmelon and I’m ebony black  (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips, and a lot of people tell me I look like watermelons (AN: if u don’t know what dat is get da hell out of here!).

Nothing will ever be better than the last one

HASHBFJGJDHRJFKFKRJ

That last one took me out at the god damn kneecaps-

Anonymous asked:

oh I wasn’t aware it was feeding the ai. I’ve inserted hundreds of fics into chatgpt for their continuation or for a different plot within the same context just for fun and out of curiosity… but I’ve never posted any of them…

Indeed, anything that is given to AI it can use later to draw from. That's why it doesn't matter if you post them or not as it has now access to those writers' texts without their permission.

~Mod L

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for the love of everything that is good and nice DON'T DO THIS

Please do not do this! I'm happy to talk about 'what ifs' or 'what happens next' even if I can't write a whole fic but PLEASE don't put any fics into AI!

Today I introduced my sister to “the problem of Susan” and I had to explain to her that Susan was left out of Narnia cuz she liked boys and lipstick now and without missing a beat she said but what about Peter? Does Peter not like girls? And I knew she was pointing out the inherent misogyny at the center of the “the problem of Susan” but the implications of that question are a source of much hilarity to meeee LMFAO like Does Peter not like girls? Does he like boys? Is he Gay? Is Narnia really just a homo-utopia where Lucy is also a lesbian and Edmund is a bisexual disaster and Susan was kicked out cuz she was too straight??? Can I make CS Lewis turn over in his grave with this new reading?

…I mean they literally were in the closet…

THEY WERE LITERALLY IN THE CLOSET!!!

Reblog to make C.S. Lewis turn over in his grave

TBH, once the nuances were explained to him, I think he’d find it quite funny. 

BRB setting up permanent reservations in their cafe