titanium elemental

Daryl and Marlin, our ship cats! It's Marlin's second season sailing (though he's been with us three years- got locked at the seaport last season for crimes) and Daryl's first! What sweet babies 💖

The people have spoken: What Crimes Has Locked This Poor Soul Away

You are Marlin, ship's cat and mascot of the tallship Lady Washington. It is the summer of 2021, you are about a year old, and full of Mischief.

Lady is docked in the Port of Everett, and no one is paying attention to you- never mind the fact that they're doing their jobs and getting money so they can keep pampering you. No, they're not paying attention to you Right This Instant, so you decide you want to take a little jaunt off the ship and explore on your own.

In addition to the marina, the waterfront, and all manner of other delights, the Port of Everett also has a Naval base, so you decide to check it out! See what all the fuss is about.

Of course, wandering kitties without the proper credentials aren't allowed on high security Naval bases, so when the Marines inevitably capture you and ask you where your people are and what you're doing here and how you got here, you just curl up cutely and bat your eyes and meow the most pitiful meow because these new people are paying attention to you but not the Right attention, no one's even petting you!

They call the number on your collar, which goes to the captain of Lady at the time, who... is on leave. In Florida.

"Ma'am? Is this your cat?"

"Oh god yeah where was he?"

"A high security government facility. Can you come pick him up?"

"Considering I'm on the other side of the country, no. Let me get in contact with the crew to send someone."

"Thank you. Also he's very cute."

"I know."

So the captain does just that, playing telephone while trying to find someone to go pick you up. Except by the time a viable crewmember is chosen and calls back to confirm, you've gotten bored and decided you want to leave.

So you clawed the Marine holding you and escaped.

You get a smidgen more exploring time before you're captured again and taken to your crew and back to the boat, but at this point no one is happy including you, because no one pet you the Whole Time you were off adventuring and that's a damn travesty.

And not only that, when you get back to the ship, you're locked up tight in the aft cabin because no one trusts you anymore not to wander off and break into government facilities when they're not looking, and then when the boat gets back to her homework in Aberdeen, they do you just the WORST injustice and lock you inside there! For the whole winter! And then the following summer, because you are now a Criminal and Criminals don't sail.

Except this season, you made Big Pouty Eyes at everyone, and they caved and let you back on, so you are a very happy kitty now.

With a tracker in your collar so this doesn't happen again.

i can't find sources on this anywhere any more, but i distinctly remember reading a blurb about Gene Ray's Time Cube that mentioned how one guy somewhere else in the US read Gene's ramblings and actually parsed enough meaning out of them that he became the world's first and only convert to Time Cube Thought other than Gene himself. this guy then flew down to Florida to meet his visionary prophet face-to-face, whereupon they promptly got into an argument over the fundamentals of Time Cube so bad that they never spoke again. i guess it was always possible to create a religious schism with the theoretical minimum of two people but it's funny to see in practice

cosigned - friendly community, simple and highly extensible base, highly recommended

I also agree Obsidian is very good, and I do use it for organizing digital thoughts/content.

The one issue is that if you want to handwrite stuff with a stylus, it doesn’t support that at all. In fact, there is a serious and surprising hole re: cross-platform stylus-aware apps. There’s OneNote, which IMO is actually better than any Microsoft Office app has any right to be, but it still has major drawbacks and I don’t like it. And there’s just… nothing else, afaik, that’s not tied to a single platform.

Which is part of why I’ve gone back to handwriting for notetaking and journaling purposes, as much of a bummer as it is that this is a blow to searchability and accessibility. But it has advantages as well.

as always, there's a plugin for that! For use on ipad I recommend adding the scribble helper script (tap the gear icon in the upper right on an excalidraw drawing.)

I want to note that Obsidian is closed-source, not FOSS, though pretty aligned with open-source values imo.

Oh hell yes. I'd been looking for an easy way to share notes between my iphone and my Windows laptop, and Obsidian seems to interface smoothly with iCloud drive without bugging me to subscribe to anything.

American Robin baby timeline from our front porch :) 

click through the pics to see which day is which - they grow up SO fast!

I love that second to last photo!

Multiple years when I was a kid we had robins nest on our electrical box.

God, I can't tell you how much the "there's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "Your head gets screwey when you're apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit? The tiger? I've gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.

I had a lot of this when I was trying to finish grad school while cooped up in my studio apartment at the peak of the pandemic. It kept being like:

“My PhD candidate isn’t doing any thesis-writing, what do you think is wrong?”

“Well, are you feeding them enough? Are you feeding them a wide variety of foods? Mango yogurt is great as a treat but should not comprise a large portion of a grad student’s diet.”

Remember when Dipper went to The Club to split up Gideon and Mabel’s unhealthy relationship?

Youve got to be fucking kidding me

People need a coherent idea of what a chaser means cause if you view it as a wholly negative term and then apply it to people who are a tad too enthusiastic about being attracted to fat people then what you’re dealing with isn’t a person who calls out chasers, what you’re dealing with is a person who thinks attraction to fatness is abnormal and not to be expressed publicly.

Allow me to assure you, as a librarian, that if you as a concerned citizen present us with a list of Books that are Bad and should Not Be In Our Collection and which you Require us to Remove At Once, we will scan it for titles that we don’t have yet to add to our purchase list.

Ah, the “limiting access to information is okay if they’re takes I object to” squad has begun to appear.

This is your helpful reminder that:

a) There are legitimate information access needs even to bad information (one cannot, for example, study and deconstruct erroneous information about climate change if you don’t know what people are saying) and it is actually part of my vocation to provide ACCESS to even books I vehemently disagree with. Sometimes I even get to bond with the person checking it out over how appalling it is! Sometimes the reason they’re checking it out is because they need to read it but don’t want to buy it.

b) The presence of a text in a library collection does not imply agreement with or endorsement by the library as an entity; it just means for one reason or another it fits in our collection management policy. Often it’s based on patron requests from community members.

c) The absolute last thing you EVER want is your librarian to be empowered to decide whether your information need is Good Enough to be “allowed” access to the text. You, personally, even you reading this who knows you share the same values as me, do not want your access to be subject to my judgement as to whether or not your information need is “valid”; to be subject to my assessment whether you can be trusted to have access to a text.

I’m not your mom. I’m not even your teacher. I’m your librarian; it’s my job to help you access information YOU need, and YOU decide what that need is. If you ask for my help then sure it’s also my job to help you assess it based on my training and experience, but it is not my job to ARBITRATE your access to information based on my decisions about the legitimacy of your reason to seek it out.

So yes even when that list of books has books on it I think are full of lies I’m probably checking to see if it’s something someone in my community might need access to without having to buy it or expose themselves to the malware risks of pirating.

Because while I kinda hate him Jordan Peterson’s bullshit is RELEVANT to understanding a lot of shit going on today. And you do NOT want to live in a world where it’s my job to test and see if you have a good and pure enough reason for wanting to check his book out.

I’m ages late but:

Excuse me a coworker caught me making a warding sign at fuckin’ Ted Cruz’s piece of shit book the other day, I feel very called out right now.

remember that post that was like “white men become atheists because of logic and intellect (gross and bad) women and people of color become atheists because of trauma and oppression (sympathetic and valid)”

good god it’s got almost 200,000 notes

it’s like: new hot take! oppressed people incapable of coming to philosophical conclusions independent of their personal traumas! disbelief in god justified only when it forms in reaction to being affected by societal injustice! only evil white men engage in wicked pastimes like “questioning doctrine”.

So there was this early 10's Batman cartoon called Beware the Batman that was a huge flop, mostly because Cartoon Network jerked it around, but also because it was a very "different for the sake of being different" adaptation due to the well of Batman cartoons being quite dry by then: it was CGI, Alfred is buff and intimidating, Katana is the sidekick instead of any of the Robins, they tried to focus on Batman villains who hadn't shown up outside comics before. Well intentioned, but you can see why that's an uphill battle.

So I decided to look it up on Max, and. And.

Ok, pretty drab picture to represent the show, demonstrates why it's better to have some yellow or purple or blue in Batman's design to make it pop against the dark setting, but...

The thumbnails are just. Batman's face. Over and over.

And every one is so dark and drab and.

Oh look one (1) of them has another character in it and another has a red sci-fi gun.

And then back to dark Batman face in darkness.

I can't imagine why nobody watched this show.

I realized that the nonbinary flag and the Maryland flag are both 4 colors, in fact almost the same 4 colors, and they're both regarded as tacky/gaudy/bad to look at and.... well I had to.

THE FLAG OF THE NONBINARY MARYLANDER

@anthropwashere

Non-binaryland, is this anything?

Hmm, my Zune HD is close to giving up the ghost I think. A lot more lag and random crashes. I held out longer, but in the end I am doomed to join @femmenietzsche in the ranks of "people who used to define themselves by having a Zune beyond the point where it was a normal thing to do, but no longer have one." I would have replaced the thing ages ago but the market niche for "plays mp3s and radio, has a good UI, is not a phone or other multifunction device" basically disappeared with the iphone. on the upside, a device that was not made in 2009 will probably have bluetooth

Should I wear my collar to the pride month Critical Mass bike ride? Y/N

I kinda want to find out if this whole radical queer, some of them anarchist, “fuck cops and fuck corporations”, “this ride is an act of resistance” crowd will be chill with me being a weird sex freak, or if it will turn into You’re Exposing People To This Without Their Consent and Just Remember That Being Kinky Doesn’t Make You Queer.

Wore it, I looked good, no issues.

Some guy did pull up next to me and was like “dude, how old are you?” And I said I’m 30 and he says “cause you look like 12.” Aw, come on! I know I have the babyface, but it’s not that bad.

Meme news: The Brazilian actress Renata Sorrah came out as bisexual at the age of 76

That's her, btw

She's an icon and also very talented. We Stan.

her figuring out she's bisexual

loudly going "YOU'RE GOOD YOU'RE GOOD" to myself to ward off the memory of every embarrassing thing i've ever done

chris is literally nonbinary

ppl really do just say "cisgender" for anyone who isnt "trans enough" huh

this is literally just how ppl treat nonbinary amabs