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bamboomboo

@bamboomboo

My account is still blocked from searching/tags/etc on my business blog @foundfamilyadventurecrafts so I'm posting this here. There's something very bad happening with Small Business, Tech, and Amazon. What else is new?

Articles:

Hey, that's us and a bunch of our friends! This whole thing SUCKS so bad and we're pissed. We've intentionally not listed our products on Amazon for the 15 years we've been in business. We're ready to join a class action lawsuit and kick some ass.

Friday makes really good tea, both just by the flavors and as reflections of fandoms. I absolutely LOVE my Second Breakfast (hobbits) and General's Jasmine (Uncle Iroh).

Go check out the Friday Afternoon Tea website DIRECTLY if you want to support them - and if you, unlike me, are in Seattle, go visit the brick-and-mortar store!

And boycott Amazon.

PSA: stuttering in fics

as someone with a speech impediment, all of the people saying that only one type of stuttering is valid are wrong.

stuttering CAN look like this: "t-this is a-an example s-s-sentence"

OR this: "this-this is an example sen-sentence."

OR this: "t-t-t-th-..t-ttttthis is an example sentence."

OR this: "this is, uhm, an example, uh, sentence."

OR this: "this is an example sssssss-sentence."

OR this: "this is an examp-...this an example sentence."

sometimes the sentence won't even come out of your mouth at all.

there are probably many examples i'm forgetting, but that's the point! it usually is a mix of a few of these, but some people do one of them more often than others! some people with speech impediments have certain sounds that they almost consistently have trouble with (for me it's "st").

people with speech impediments also rarely-if ever-stutter whilst they're singing or whispering.

most importantly!!!! people with speech impediments are capable of saying a sentence without stuttering!! it can just be a gamble sometimes.

and if more people could portray the frustration that comes with stuttering and not being able to get words out, i'd be a very happy girl.

(fun fact: sometimes when my mouth won't let me say what i want to say, i get so annoyed that i just yell or grumble out "WORDS.")

this was your speech impediment PSA!!!!

out of all the posts i’ve made i’m happy that it’s THIS one that blew up

out of all the posts

i’ve made i’m happy that it’s

THIS one that blew up

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I took that sugar cube as a child. I also remember the March of Dimes sign on the easel at many stores, all with dimes stuck on them.

I've told this story more than once, and I'm telling it again because it changed my life. When I was a kid I was terrified of needles, and hated getting all my shots. I was a sick kid with a lot of undiagnosed disabilities, and my gramp picked up on the anxiety I had and decided to talk to me about it. He offered to take me to get my flu shot for a christmas gift that year, and when I grumbled about getting a flu shot he said, "well, I had scarlet fever when I was your age. My parents didn't believe in doctors so I wasn't allowed to get my shots, and so I got very sick and almost died."

It stopped me in my tracks. I was 6. I had heard from adults my whole life that shots were important, but I didn't really understand the consequences of not getting them. I asked him to tell me why his parents didn't believe in doctors. He said he grew up out in the midwest on a farm, and his parents were "a type of christian" that believed people got sick because god wanted them to get sick, and going to the doctor was going against what god wanted. His parents were terrified of making god angry, which was something I could understand considering I was raised evangelical. But I was confused because he HADN'T died. I asked him how he'd made it this far if he had never been allowed to go to the doctor and he'd been so sick.

And he told me that when he turned 15 he'd run away from home, hopped on a train that took him all the way up to New York, and started asking door to door where he could get these new vaccines he'd heard about. Everyone told him the air force base was the place to go. He went in, asked around, and got his vaccines. At 16, he had his very first annual physical. Shortly after he met my gram, who was the telephone operator for the doctors office he went to every year for his checkups. And he told me as we sat there in the doctor's office that he was the ONLY person on both sides of his family to live past the age of 60.

I was both horrified and amazed. I went in, got my shot, and he held my hand and said he was proud of me because what I was doing was important. I was still very scared of needles, but it was easier to deal with the sore arm knowing I was keeping myself safe. He lived to be 90 years old, and he was proud to be the first person in his assisted living facility to be vaccinated for covid. When we went to visit him for his 90th birthday just before he died I asked him what he was proud of doing now that he was 90, and he said he was proud of living this long because as a child no one believed anyone could survive the things he could. He said he was perfectly happy to have married, had kids and grandkids, and eat his Applebees knowing he'd cheated death 15 times over.

An opinion piece I photographed from an 1860s small press periodical from Hartford Connecticut.

Get your fucking vaccinations.

I am reblogging this because the United States is in danger of LOSING ITS MEASLES ERADICATION STATUS because there have been so many (preventable, largely children, largely unvaccinated) cases in the past year.

Get your fucking vaccinations.

Vaccinate your kids or don't fucking have any

I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should-

We also figured out—the hard way—that the ancients probably cut each layer of linen to the proper shape before gluing them together. For our first linothorax, we glued together 15 layers of linen to form a one centimeter-thick slab, and then tried to cut out the required shape. Large shears were defeated; bolt cutters failed. The only way we were ultimately able to cut the laminated linen slab was with an electric saw equipped with a blade for cutting metal. At least this confirmed our suspicion that linen armor would have been extremely tough. We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project.

I love this in every way possible. What is it from? Where can I read more?

The pitfalls of experimental archaeology and puppies.

link to source:

“Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery, or how Linen Armor Came to Dominate our Lives.”

holy shit read the article. it’s short but wild

We found that even more of a threat than rain was one’s own sweat on a hot day. So, yes, it does need waterproofing, both inside and out. We did a number of experiments along those lines, and found that rubbing a block of beeswax over all sides of the armor provided nice waterproofing. It also makes the armor smell nice! When you wear it for a couple hours, your own body heat softens the glue a bit and makes it conform to your body shape, so it is much more comfortable to wear than rigid types of armor. Our reconstructions weighed about 10 pounds–about one third the weight of bronze armor that would provide the same degree of protection.

Honey i gotta go to war… not to smell my bee armor or hang with the boys or anything no.. uhh we need to uh do war things?

from the article:

While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him. And while we had confidence in our armor, our relief was still considerable when the arrowhead stuck and lodged in the armor’s outer layers, a safe distance away from flesh.

a good life-size mannequin is expensive but i guarantee it would've cost way less than they were spending on all that linen.

Academics are just like that.

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tastyresippys

Food history has been so sanitized by the demonization of carbs. “Our ancestors only had fruits and veggies they didn’t have all these refined carbs” our ancestors drank beer 25/8 because the water was bad. Our ancestors drizzled honey on shit ever since we knew it existed. We’ve been making bread for our entire recorded history. It’s true that bleached sugars specifically are a new thing but high glycemic carbs are not new at all, we’ve been consuming them for thousands of years

Quick correction bc I see this myth everywhere.

People drank beer & fruit wine 25/8 because it was high in calories and also tasty and pretty cheap/easy to make in bulk.

IT WAS NOT USED TO REPLACE OR SANITIZE WATER! THEIR WATER WAS NOT BAD!

The alcohol content in beer/wine back then was too low to actually sanitize anything effectively, and beer/wine only lasts for 6 months (usually less) even while still sealed in a cask, due to oxidization. Oxidation turns fermented liquids into vinegar. Wine and beer wasn’t meant for long-term storage.

This is great, because vinegar is the great preserver! VINEGAR is what people used to store their foods long-term, along with SALT and DRYING and SMOKING.

“Pickling” can be done with pure vinegar if you don’t have any expensive salt around, and vinegar can be made by fermenting any fruit or grain with wild yeast! If you’re lucky, you can also get wine/beer treats out of it on the way.

Circling back around: beer/wine was NEVER a replacement for water. Humans have been drinking from ground springs, wells, rainwater, and clear running water since our ape ancestors got the instinct to avoid stagnant pools.

If you didn’t have immediate access to a source of clean water, you didn’t fucking build a town there!

That’s a big reason why, WORLDWIDE, settlements are ALL historically clustered around sources of water like springs, wells, and rivers. (Or utilized rainwater catchment & storage) And why “the town well is poisoned/dried up!” Is a huge and terrible thing that comes up in a ton of old stories. Losing your source of freshwater means everyone has to move somewhere else, or die.

Even in huge cities, you’d be surprised at how sophisticated freshwater delivery systems were in the middle-ages. London had the “great conduit.” - a man-made, underground channel that moved water directly from a freshwater spring to fill a water tank in the Cheapside marketplace, accessible to the public. This conduit was built in 1245.

Mesopotamians in the BRONZE AGE built clay pipes for sewage removal, and other pipes for rain water collection, and wells. In 4,000 BC.

Building Aqueducts to move spring water into towns was first attributed to the Minoans, who lived in 2,000 BC.

Sanskrit texts from 2,000 BC also detail how to purify water you’re not sure about: expose it to Sunlight, filter it through Charcoal, dip a piece of copper in it at least 7 times, and filter it again. (UV treatment kills bacteria, Charcoal catches many poisons and heavy metal, copper is also antibacterial) <- even if they didn’t know what germs were, prehistoric humans were great at recognizing patterns, and noticing when people DIDNT die.

Persians in 700 BC used ‘qanat’, or tunnels dug into hillsides to let gravity move (CLEAN!) groundwater to nearby towns + for agriculture irrigation. Qanats were still the main water supply for the entire Iranian capitol city until about 1933.

The Roman Empire (312 BC) also built aqueducts to move spring and groundwater across miles and miles.

The Incas (1450) built wondrous examples of hydraulic engineering. Their “stairway of fountains” supplied the entire city of Machu Picchu with fresh spring water from a pair of rain-fed springs atop the mountain. The fountain canals could carry about 80 gallons a minute.

Getting clean drinking water was just not an issue for normal people in MOST long-term settlements. They may not understand germ theory, but they knew clean water was important and would kick up a BIG fuss if those water sources were sabotaged.

In conclusion: people absolutely drank beer and wine with breakfast. They also drank water. It was not a replacement.

In many cultures, there were weak beers. They had names like small beer — they were specifically beers that had low alcohol because people knew that beer got you drunk and if you watered it down or re-brewed using previously used hops or barley or whatever, then you would get a beer that wouldn’t get you drunk.

Same with wines: there was get you drunk wine, and there was wind that you could drink a lot of. They were also cordial made by concentrating fruit juice, or historical drinks like Posca.

As far back is the Babylonian Empire they were making pastries out of dates and pistachios and flour.

Previous to that they probably were as well, but we don’t have any written records of it.

Literally as soon as somebody figured out that you could smash some high fat, high carb, high sugar stuffed together and bake it into something resembling cookies, they absolutely did.

So you should go and eat a cookie, because all of your ancestors spent a lot of time arranging the situation of civilisation to make sure that cookies were available. And if you don’t eat one then they’re going to be very sad

And so will you.

Also there’s a degree of Eurocentrism in the “everyone was drinking beer constantly” thing. In premodern Europe, yeah, beer was a very common beverage. This is absolutely not the case in all premodern societies.

Most cultures had some kind of intoxicant, yes, and in many cases an alcoholic beverage would be among the more common options (as @fuckingrecipes says, high in calories, tasty, & easy to make*), but by no means was everyone on the same page with consuming it recreationally or as an everyday part of their diet. Sometimes it was only for special occasions, or for ceremonial purposes, or just not that big a part of their lives.

* Beer is actually one of the more complicated ones, which might be why people used to thinking of it as the Default Booze assume there must have been a stronger driving force than “fun to get drunk” behind alcohol production. Grain is harder to ferment, but you can also make bread with it, in some regions it’s easier to grow in large quantities than fruits & such, and there are some state-building pressures behind mass grain cultivation that would take a while to get into. Fruit wines & ciders are dead easy, mead is practically naturally occurring, and palm wine is basically the instant microwave dinner of alcohol — you can tap a tree in the morning & get drunk off it in the afternoon.

And no, it was never about the water being unsafe to drink. (It’s theoretically possible that in some specific times & places this could have come up, but it’s not Why we have alcohol.) Just logistically, there’s no way to make that work. Even if you’re producing drinks with a high enough alcohol content to actually be sterile, which you probably aren’t without having access to more advanced distillation technology** than you’d need to just purify the water in the first place, you’re not going to have enough of that to replace all the water you’d normally drink. You’d have to dilute it again, and we’re back where we started. And even if you have the resources necessary to devise a system where you produce enough high-alcohol-content beverages to drink nothing else… well, I don’t know if you know this, but liquor is not great for hydration purposes, so you’d better put water back into your diet anyway. As a concept, it just doesn’t work once you think about it.

** Everyone say thank you to medieval Arabic alchemists for figuring out how to distill alcohol. Next time you crack open a bottle of whiskey or suchlike, raise a glass in the general direction of Baghdad and/or pour one out for the House of Wisdom.

update from the discord group courtesy of one of my mutuals;

do not trust that damned survey. change your discord password. utilize 2FA.

I use 2FA on every website I log into, and it didn't ask for any details when I took the survey, but I still don't trust that thing at all. One can never be too safe.

whoops I accidentally double reblogged but:

hi, i did some research on this but this link was not phishing and here's why:

qualtrics is a legit website that companies pay to host data gathering surveys to collect metrics on various things. you can also create free surveys but from what i understand the survey results aren't as in-depth as the paid versions get you.

it looks like the survey originates from a banner on the discord app and you click on it and it takes you to the site and you do the thing there. it was only rolled out to a certain amount of people (for the purposes to maybe only get people they thought would be pro-AI? who knows with Discord) but was then passed around everywhere because Fuck AI. And then Discord realized that things weren't going the way they wanted and pulled the survery.

I did some further research on the URL itself:

From ESET link checker it rates it as safe, I also plugged it into a few others as well like Fortinet and Bitdefender and both of those came back safe too, here's a screenshot of ESET:

info on the link itself from urlvoid:

the actual qualtrics site info from urlvoid as well to compare the age of the domain (usually phishing domains are very very young and/or brand new and not legitimate domains but these are both legitimate domains.)

and, inb4 people say "phishing attempts don't always have to ask you to enter your login credentials to scrape your info"

no keyloggers or malware after I clicked on the link (it's been 8 hours now and my discord account is fine).

hopefully, this will quell some panic about the discord thing, its always good practice to protect your account with MFA when it's offered and to change your password when you suspect something may not be right, it's better to err on the side of caution etc, but in this case, it's alright and there's no need to create any undue panic about a link to a survey. fuck AI and Discord should know better than to try and pull more wool over its userbases' eyes because did they not learn from the NFT thing?

okey dokey bye bye now

hi guys! discord is doing a survey on how people would like ai to be integrated into discord. take it and say fuck no to every question. when you get to "in general, how do you feel about discord inegrating ai features?", respond that you would actively get everyone you know off of discord and wouldn't pay for nitro or other shop items if they added ai features.

watch out for the trap! there's ONE QUESTION where the last option *isn't* the max 'no AI' option, read each part carefully to be sure

huuuughhhhh yahoo selling scraped data from tumblr to AI sloo probably uughhhwaaauuwghhhhhh

on one hand, ughhhh gross.

on the other hand, holy data poisoning batman LMAO, buy data from tumblr, tumblr data so good to put in ai, nothing wrong ever happen with tumblr data in ai, train ai on good tumblr yes data, all tumblr data always very clean and useful, ai love tumblr data, no hieroglyphic-adjacent tumblr linguistic dialect to corrupt neat and tidy Large Language Model ever, very normal to cite crab rave and mishapocalypse in ai output

with mama

From the article:

How do I opt out?
To opt out of sharing your public Tumblr content with third parties, you'll need to toggle on a new "Prevent third-party sharing" option in the settings of each individual blog you run. This needs to be done on a web browser, not through the Tumblr app. These updates have been added to Tumblr's support article about user privacy.

I used the phrase "waiting on tenterhooks" and then thought "what the hell is a tenterhook".

It's these things! So when you're waiting on tenterhooks, you're stretched tight like a piece of cloth. Very evocative, now that I know what it means.

like 40% of english idioms are just Textiles Again

official linguistics post

And another 30% are Boats Again

🚨

HEADS UP: The U.S. Postal Service quietly changed how postmarks work.

Mail is no longer automatically postmarked with the date you drop it off. Instead, the postmark now reflects the date it’s first processed by an automated sorting facility — which can be days later.

If you mail something right at a deadline, the official postmark could be later than your drop-off date and may be considered late.

If mailing date matters to you, go inside the post office and request a hand-stamped postmark.

This will invalidate votes too

saying it louder for people who do mail-in ballots. you need to get them in early.

things english speakers know, but don’t know we know.

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windycityteacher

WOAH WHAT?

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ice-light-red

That is profound. I noticed this by accident when asked about adjectives by a Japanese student. She translated something from Japanese like “Brown big cat” and I corrected her. When she asked me why, I bluescreened.

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isashi-nigami

What the fuck, English isn’t even my first language and yet I picked up on that. How the fuck. What the fuck.

Reasoning: It Just Sounds Right

Oooh, don’t like that. Nope, I do not even like that a little bit.  That’s parting the veil and looking at some forbidden fucking knowledge there.

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bookavid

How did I even learn this language wtf

I had to read “brown big cat” like three times before my brain stopped interpreting it as “big brown cat”

I’m kinda reading “brown big cat” as “brown (big cat)”, that is, a “big cat” - like a tiger or lion or other felid of similar size - that happens to be brown. “Big brown cat”, on the other hand, sounds more like a brown cat that’s just a bit bigger than a regular housecat - like a bobcat or a maine coon cat or something like that.

yeah, a brown big cat is almost certainly a puma. a big brown cat is probably a maine coon.

yeah, if you put the adjectives out of order you wind up implying a compound noun, which is presumably why we have this rule; we stripped out so much inflection over the centuries word order now dictates a huge amount of our grammar

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artekka

Just looked up why we do this and one of the first lines in this article is, “Adjectives are where the elves of language both cheat and illumine reality.” so I know it’s a good article.

Things this article has taught me:

  • This same order of adjectives more or less applies to languages around the world “It’s possible that these elements of universal grammar clarify our thought in some way,” says Barbara Partee, a professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Yet when the human race tacitly decided that shape words go before color words go before origin words, it left no record of its rationale.
  • One theory is that the more specific term always falls closer to the noun. But that doesn’t explain everything in adjective order.
  • Another theory is that as you get closer to the noun, you encounter adjectives that denote more innate properties. In general, nouns pick out the type of thing we’re talking about, and adjectives describe it,” Partee told me. She observes that the modifiers most likely to sit right next to nouns are the ones most inclined to serve as nouns in different contexts: Rubber duck. Stone wall.
  • Rules are made to be broken. Switching up the order of adjectives allows you to redistribute emphasis. (If you wish to buy the black small purse, not the gray one, for instance, you can communicate your priorities by placing color before size).  Scrambling the order of adjectives also helps authors achieve a sense of spontaneity, of improvising as they go. Wolfe discovers such a rhythm, a feeling-his-way quality, when he discusses his childhood recollection of “brown tired autumn earth” and a “flat moist plug of apple tobacco.”
  • Brain scans have discovered that your brain has to work harder to read adjectives in the “wrong” order.

TL;DR: No one knows why we do this adjective thing but it’s pretty hardwired in.

Since it’s never credited, this is from Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, and just one reason why I think it’s required reading for anyone interested in prosecraft. Every page is this useful.

Harassment Spam Bot Alert!

Date posted: November 12, 2025

AO3 has recently seen a rise in guest spambot comments making false accusations about work creators or other users. For example, they may claim that a particular user is discriminating against minorities, trying to hide the fact that they use AI, or are at risk of having their works stolen or deleted.

These comments often copy existing AO3 usernames in order to make their accusations seem more legitimate. They may also try to lure people onto other platforms (similar to the art commission scam), or use fake links that actually lead to pornographic images.

As always, we recommend that you do not click on any suspicious links or give your contact information to scammers. Instead, simply mark the comments as spam or report them so that the Policy & Abuse committee can remove comments left by these spambots.

Learn how to recognize them and what to do below the cut!

As of December 2025, bots have also left guest comments harassing users by:

  • threatening to report you/your fic to the authorities or your employers
  • alleging security concerns like your email being compromised or spyware on your computer
  • claiming that they know your address and are going to visit you at your house
  • saying that you will die alone and unemployed over the holidays

What these bots claim is not true. These accusations do not mean your work will be deleted or that your accounts are insecure. We recommend that you mark these comments as spam following the instructions in our previous post.

These examples also do not represent the full range of harassment comments that you may receive. We will continue to try and keep you updated about trends; however, please note that the exact wording the bots use will continue to evolve.

If you're not sure if something is a spambot comment, you're welcome to contact Policy & Abuse for assistance. Refer to the original post for more information!

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