Reblogged a-ginger-in-black
watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)
loth-catgirl
slander! Did any potentates steal the barley on his watch????
They did not.
The relevant video:
Reblogged
Sometime around eight or nine my best friend and I learned about hickies. I suspect he’s the one who learned it and shared it with me. We were both utterly fascinated and on a dare I sucked mightily on my own upper arm to give myself one.
This was great fun, self made bruise. Hilarious.
But looking at the mark later I thought that perhaps it might be best to bandage it lest any questions crop up. My parents were often suspicious of my friendship with the boy across the street anyway, and I had a vague inkling that perhaps hickies might fall under the vaguely looming topic of Sex.
So I put a bandaid on it.
I’m not sure if my mom was suspicious regardless but as I was getting out of the shower a day later she popped in and spotted my unbandaged mark. The handle was flown off. She was a creature made only of yelling. She demanded to know where it had come from.
I told her I’d done it myself. She scoffed and said I couldn’t even reach that place on my arm. I put my mouth over the mark. She escalated her volume to ask why I’d hidden it if it were nothing and I gestured vaguely to encompass her irate direction. She did not care for that or believe me, but the discussion was tabled.
Tension simmered in the house. A few days later it was a weekend and I asked if I could stay over at my friend’s house. To the bafflement of my friend and I our parents were increasingly hesitant to allow this childhood bonding. If he’d been a girl there would be no issue but he was a boy.
It didn’t seem to matter that we were both children and that my menstrual cycle would not arrive for several more years. Or that a boy was safer from me than many female friends would be on later sleepovers. The constant jokes we both loathed from both sets of parents that someday we’d get married now seemed ominous.
There were phone calls. The sleepover was reluctantly agreed to. I packed up my pillowcase with all the stuff I’d need for the night and headed toward the door. My father stopped me.
He insisted I sit down. I sat.
He stuttered, “Now. You’re like. Ah. A flower. And your friend is a- uh. A bee. And bees will sting you- uhm- if they can so you need to use- uh- protection- from stinging.”
I was nine. I had no fucking idea what was going on and my dad was not really helping. As he rambled I slowly started to intuit that this was about S-E-X and was very probably the result of my hickey but I had no idea how to make him stop talking.
I will never understand why it was my father giving this talk in the first place. My mother had previously worked in a sex shop and phrases like, “Make sure to use lube, you don’t wanna rub it raw down there,” were a common part of my youth. My father meanwhile turned red as a beet and stammered at any mention of Sex.
He finished his mortifying and confusing talk with, “Don’t tell your friend about this talk.”
The door closed to my friends room and I immediately told him about it.
We were both utterly horrified at the thought of each other as anything more than frenemies. We fought, we played games, we set off fireworks. Why did adults need to taint that?
But tainted it was.
Both sets of parents continued to radiate an unwholesome suspicion about our friendship now and we never brought up the topic of sleepovers ever again. It is a source of tremendous amusement that despite all their worry over our relationship my friend and I both turned out gay.
Reblogged skrytch
every time I think about Dilbert I think about this comic and how the question being asked is Not Stupid and its answer is genuinely interesting and arguably very important information anyone using a computer should know
This tag is incredibly really good because it is 100% why you might need to defrag your drives sometimes.
If you've ever bought a flash drive or something and wonder why its advertised as 512GB but you can only use 480GB or whatever of it, it's because that other 32GB is being used as a directory for where the actual files are located on the drive. (I'm pulling those numbers out of my ass but you get the idea.) If you had full access to the entire drive it would just be a stream of data with no idea where to start or end.
When you delete a file, you're not actually deleting the 1's and 0's. You're telling the directory "this specific range of data is no longer allocated to something and can be used for something else." It's the reason forensics can obtain data from a drive even if it's been "deleted" because for all intents and purposes, it's still there. It's also the reason you have Fast and Slow options for formatting a drive; the former just clears that directory and the latter actually goes in and tries to overwrite every bit of memory to wipe it clean.
When you fill up a drive and delete lots of files, those empty ranges of data can be spread out haphazardly. Defragging the drive is just moving things around so they're more organized and related data is all grouped together and that "free" space is consolidated.
Also yes Scott Adams is now dead ❤️
Reblogged cursmudgeon
Another thing about light pollution and adjacent things is. They threatened my area with rolling blackouts last winter. Now this was of course largely because the AI datacenters are hogging all the electricity, but in the notifications about it they always specified that that residential areas would be the blacked out areas. Not offices. Not businesses. If you're at home and freezing, well, you can just go loiter in a McDonald's I guess. Never mind that this is extremely difficult for disabled people and often not allowed for pets.
Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.
Like. There's something deeply rotten about the priorities here. These places that are so flagrantly wasting electricity will never be subject to the rolling blackouts that could freeze you out of your home. Not even at night, when no one is there, when they don't need their lights on. Their waste is prioritized over normal people's life.
Reblogged k64ribbon
Reblogged unpretty
Reblogged skrytch
I cannot for the life of me find the OG post, if anyone knows what these accounts are called now I will cry (positive)
(This trick is also used in construction when concrete pours have gone Very Wrong. Such as this, from 11 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/23/londons-victoria-line-suspended-after-control-room-is-flooded-with-cement )
Reblogged discworld-heritage-posts
Help Our Friend Name Their Sexy Troll (Discworld)
Reblogged askeataiho
“It is said that, during the fantasy book in the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please… there is no need to go that far. There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly ‘bad’ races, magic that works like electricity and horses that work like cars. It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart form all the other EFP. Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock-making or the mail coach system. Read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees. Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works. I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local bird life and the need for people in heavily over-flown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.”
— “Notes from a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep It Real” (2007), Terry Pratchett. (via the-library-and-step-on-it)
Reblogged tuulikki
Marie Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
The journals are actually not as radioactive as people say. The radioactivity has decayed somewhat, although they'll still be dangerous for a while. The problem is the dust particles that you might end up breathing in or getting in your mouth (possibly by putting fingers there). Like yes, they're not good to be around, but also not catastrophic. We do have, for good reasons, significantly better safety standards nowadays. But Marie Curie, who was doing much more dangerous things than using her journals, lived to 66 when the radiation exposure caught up with her. (For example, she wore a vial of radium around her neck for decades...). The stuff is on her journals because of the things that were in her lab!
Don't eat the journals though. That would be bad for you.
It would also be bad for history.
Reblogged ledbiantastic
The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.
Whole list of documents censored/removed/deleted by this shitshow of a regime
PDF with non-paywalled article
⬆️The archived page that was deleted. This is one of the reasons the Internet Archive is so important.
Reblogged annmcn
Highlighting that this is “considered quite rare” but in actuality we have absolutely no idea how common this, or indeed a great many variants in sexual development, are. Because if it’s not visible from the outside then we only learn about it if doctors (or coroners) go looking, and doctors only go looking if it’s causing a problem.
Reblogged luminouspica
Me, reblogging from anyone I don't follow: I'm introducing diversity into the gene pool. This will make my mutuals' dashes stronger and healthier.
Me reblogging old posts: I am reintroducing historical species into the gene pool to hybridize with the dashboard equivalent of pugs, making them stronger and healthier.
Me reblogging legacy posts: there are New Users, young Mutuals who were not here for the Old Times and do not remember the Old Ways. Someone must teach them, lest they be Lost.
Me reblogging 20 posts a day from a new hyper-fixation completely out of left field: I must strengthen the bodies and minds of my followers. Only the most determined will remain, and once we’re through, their resilience will know no bounds
Reblogged talontheacedragon
Actually, people are good by nature and you’re a fool if you think otherwise.
When you sneeze in public, strangers will say “bless you”, even though they don’t know you.
When you ask for directions on the street someone will show you the way, even though they have nothing to gain from it.
People squeeze their legs against the chair so you don’t have to hop over them on your way to your seat in the theatre, and make funny faces to make babies laugh, and purposefully step on leaves to hear them scrunch, and hold the door open for someone leaving behind them, and ask what floor you’re heading to when you enter the elevator, and send others photos of things that reminded them of them, and recommend each other songs, and ask if anyone else wants a coffee because they’re getting one, and make videos teaching how to sew a button, and wish on shooting stars, and share fun facts, and listen to others rant about things they don’t even understand, and let you cross the street first, and give a bit of their food to others, and laugh at jokes they don’t find funny to make you feel good, and listen to kids talk for hours about nonsense, and let you know your keys fell from your pocket, and they may be strangers, but with every little gesture they’re saying “I love you, I love you, I love you”.
God, I needed to read this today. Humanity is overwhelmingly full of hope and kindness and it’s very easy to forget that these days.
I will always choose to believe that there is more good in this world than I can ever know.
Reblogged
vivecguccibelt
“Bisexuals don’t belong in the LGBT community” ohhh ok I guess the B stands for ‘bitch’ and that’s where you fit in, gotcha
rapidashpatronus
I was explaining bi and trans erasure/phobia in the gay community to my mum and she was outraged and burst out “WHAT DO THEY THINK IT STANDS FOR? LESBIANS, GAYS, BICYCLES AND TRICYCLES?!” and I don’t think I’ll forget that until my dying day.
These people would happily drop the b and the t. They just seem to think there’s moral purity in having a smaller group.
I don’t know how to explain to these people that we’re not an exclusive club we’re effectively a trade union for continued existence.
(Also, there's already a term of lesbian and gay people. It's "lesbian and gay people".)