@mrsq8geek heavily plicated

The four types of pasta: air earth fire and water

love it when mutuals i don’t really talk to reblog one of my posts it’s like hell yeah. glad you liked that. please don’t leave me.

this isn’t what i normally post here but firefox just switched ceos and this “anthony” dumbass is trying to put more “ai” slopware into it, meaning more bloat and privacy loss

if you use this browser you should go to their support forums and complain about it

Link to the support forums so you can leave your feedback.

Also, how to remove AI features from Firefox:

irritatingly, the list of AI settings in Firefox has grown. to kill them all as of today (Nov 20, 2025), go into about:config and set all of these to false (yes, you’ll have to copy and paste them one by one):

in addition to nuking AI, it’ll also speed up your browsing

A kingfisher made from a circular saw blade, paint pen, and spray paint. I sketched it, @echomary cut it out and added the copper eye, and I painted it. This was a gift, but we'd love to make more birds like this! What birds would you want to see?

I spent a lot of time handcuffed and in a cage in high school, for a charity bit the grocery store I worked at would do

the bit was that I was "put in jail for having too big a heart" and customers could donate to my bail to get me out (and the money would go to a children's hospital or something)

now. I was very clearly a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a large cage. and I would honestly tell people that I had been in there for hours. and people would say, that's terrible! that's awful! and I would show them my wrists red from the tight handcuffs, and say but I'm sooooooo close to making bail.

and then they would dump some cash in the basket, I'd thank them, and they'd walk away.

and every so often, one of the managers would come by and collect some of the cash, so I could keep being soooooo close to making bail.

I was very good with this bit. Parents with small kids would pay $5-10 if I told their children I had been placed in jail for not cleaning my room/doing my homework, etc. For people in their 20s, I'd threaten that I was very bad at playing the harmonica, but I WOULD play it and we'd all suffer unless they paid me. and for the most amount of money, older men in suits would almost always pay $20s if I avoided eye contact and stammered a lot.

eventually, the managers started to feel bad because I was in the cage so fucking long and often, that I'd need someone to brace me when I got out because I'd have no feeling in my legs. wobbling like a newborn giraffe.

but I would also rake in at LEAST $100 an hour in charity.

so they were like, hey champ. can we, uh, give you a pillow to sit on. in the cage. would you like a pillow so you're not just sitting on a cold metal slab. can we give you a pillow.

and I had to explain to them that if they gave me a pillow, people would think I was more comfortable, so they wouldn't feel as bad, so I'd bring in less money.

the compromise was that they'd bring me a nice coffee every couple hours, which I would have to try to block with my body from the customers.

all this money went to charity. that's what the money was for. it's what was on the sign. but how much they were willing to pay was very contingent on how comfortable I looked, never mind the fact that I was still a teenaged employee handcuffed inside a cage.

and out of the dozens of shifts I did this on, not ONCE did ANYONE say, hey kid I'm going to go talk to your manager because what the fuck is going on here. they would just drop money in the basket, and I'd thank them and sip from my secret drink.

I actually had people get MAD at me that I told them I was far away from bail, they donated like $15, and then 20 minutes I got let out because my shift ended.

again. the money was for charity. it was on the sign that was very clearly placed on the upper half of my cage.

so yeah. even when people think they mean well. people can be really, really fucking stupid.

took me a bit but this is roughly what the cage looked like, without the middle platform

It was something that was originally used in the back for carting boxes, but was repurposed into a teenager cage

they'd wheel it out and the one open side would be backed against either a wall or a large display (like very tall rows of soda boxes or something)

Then I'd get in, they'd push the thing so it would be as flush as possible against the wall, and then I'd stick my hands through the bars for them to handcuff me. there'd be a sign up top explaining the bit, and then a shopping basket tied on front for people to drop the money into.

the handcuffs were fake, and I could unlock them myself for obvious safety reasons. I would get more donations if they were tight, though.

After maybe a month or two, I asked for a harmonica to sell the bit. they also tried giving me a mug, but it was too awkward with the handcuffs. I got kind of okay at playing the harmonica, but the main point was just to do one sharp blast to startle people into looking down, and then I'd threaten that I had no idea how to play, but would do so anyway unless they donated to my bail. managers actually got me a prison jumpsuit to throw over my uniform, but it was really fucking awkward so we stopped eventually. I also got a metric fuckton of mardi gras beads so I could lure small children over, to then mournfully tell them of my imprisonment due to not cleaning my room, etc. parents would be moderately irritated that I'd lured their children over with beads, but would respect the game that I'd given their kids a whole new fear. I had some parents even ad lib what I could have been thrown in prison for. guaranteed donations.

obviously, the prison bit worked best with younger girls. my roughly 50-60 year old manager once congratulated me on doing so well with the donations because I "looked like a cute sad little puppy in one of those RSPCA commercials. like a helpless puppy or a kitten." wearing makeup and earrings also increased the rate of donations.

had to explain to another girl how I regularly got $20s, which was when an older guy in a suit walked by I'd rattle my handcuffs slightly to draw attention. 10/10 times the guy would walk over, and I had to tell this girl like. If you avoid eye contact and sound uncertain you will get at least $20. I am sorry. this is for children's cancer research.

cannot stress enough that the other employees fought to get to be in the cage. customers were so awful and the weather was so shitty. jail meant sitting down with very few expectations, talking and joking with people.

Anyway. Shit was definitely not an allegory, though it could be used as one for about 11 different things.

Still better than customer service.

Okay, hold up, I promise y'all these books still exist and are still being made, you just don't see them anymore because you don't go into the kid's section of the library. DK in particular publishes plenty of books for children and adults about culture worldwide. You may not find this exact book, but you will find plenty of children's books, fiction and nonfiction, that tackle diversity worldwide.

And if you can't, ask your local librarian!

The majestic man-taur

Half man... half another man

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

A small series of standing forms.

@batbetbitbotbut You know me too well :D

crowns

feeding her stuffie must live on....

told my coworker “they’re accusing the chivelord of chive fraud” and it turns out she doesn’t know what any of that means and i look crazy

HE CONFESSED TO THE CHIVE FRAUD

context for the people not following along with chivegate: chopping a cup of chives is a pretty standard test of a chef’s knife skills, so about a month ago a redditor on r/KitchenConfidential started cutting a cup of chives every day until reddit says they’re perfect. he quickly became a wildly popular character, his chives posts regularly hit the front page of reddit. ah what happy larks we’ve had. chive montage break.

but earlier today someone posted that for the past two days he had posted the same cup of chives, just a different photo and flipped. investigation, accusation, excuses, and despair followed in the comments. a few hours later the chivelord himself posted an apology, stating that he had been having car trouble and was unable to get and chop chives and had been too embarrassed skip a day. he offered to submit to the most-upvoted reasonable punishment, which as of right now is, in second place, buying a tripod and posting videos of him chopping his chives, and in first place, simply sitting with the weight of his betrayal

I love when a whumpee punches a mirror in the Aftermath because they can't stand looking at what's become of them, or maybe can't stand looking at the person who got them into the Situation in the first place, that quick burst of helpless rage...

But what about when it's not quick? What about when it's not enough?

What about a whumpee who can't get out of that moment? What about a whumpee who just keeps punching, even after the glass cracks? What about a whumpee who hates who they've become, or who they were, or even both so much that they could scream, so much that maybe they do scream as they slam their fist into the face in the mirror over and over? What about a whumpee who barely hears the broken pieces hit the floor, who barely feels the shards in their knuckles, who barely sees their own cracked and agonized face in the glass through their tears, until they exhaust themselves and collapse in a heap of bloody glass and heavy emotions they don't know how to cope with?

What then?