yes... ha ha ha... yes!

was reminded of that youtube channel that records footage of that bridge that scalps trucks today. one of the fascinating developments that's happened since i last heard about it is that, in one of their many attempts to stop the trucks from being can-opened, they installed a traffic light that detects when a vehicle that's over the allowed height is coming and turns red so the driver can stop and hopefully notice the signage all around that's screaming "YOUR VEHICLE IS OVERHEIGHT TURN AROUND" and avoid an accident. However as a result sometimes drivers see the light turning yellow and IMMEDIATELY start flooring it to avoid having to stop, ensuring that the roof of their truck just gets fucking annihilated instantly. Really beautiful stuff you should check it out

the comments have me in tears

@rogue-bard

It DOES have a sign. It turns on when it detects something too tall for the bridge. It even flashes. And the traffic lights will go red to get people to stop when it detects an over height vehicle so they read the signs. (note this lovely example where the lights are red, because the truck thought it was better than the lights)

every time I see this post I've forgotten how clearly signposted the canopener bridge is, and every time it hits me like a truck (hitting the canopener bridge and getting the top of its trailer ripped asunder)

🅷🅴🆈 🆆🅷🅰🆃'🆂 🆄🅿 🆈🅾🆄 🅼🅴🅼🅴 🅻🅾🆅🅸🅽🅶 🅵🆄🅲🅺🆂

I’ve been informed that this post only turns up as “a poo” for some people because their phones don’t have the other letters.

For those who were wondering

[Image description: a photo of a richly glowing sunset at a scenic location. Text over the photo is broken into two lines: "They didn't come here legally" / I don't give one single fuck. End ID.]

having a friend crush is so god damn embarrassing like yeah.... i like how you play toys and i think youre really cool..... and im scared to talk to you........do you wanna..... play toys with me too...... or something...... its whatever if not..... kicks a rock. Fuck my life dude

this doesnt end even when you actually become friends btw. "oh no what if they think im weird and cringe for wanting to hang out with them and they beat me with rocks and make fun of me" DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU HAVE NEEDS AND ARE A PERSON

Opened a wip I started back for new years 2025 and got to the end

daily affirmations:

it is okay to skip a song you like because youre not in the mood

it will not hurt the songs feelings

the song knows it is still loved

so do all of your childhood stuffed animals

happy bday goat

“you can’t hate ICE agents for wanting a fat paycheck” ah yes. people who are willing to disregard all morals for cash. congratulations you played right into their hands you uneducated piece of shit

you couldn’t pay me an amount even feasible to do this evil shit. you are lower than dirt

This. You can and should judge people for working for ICE, they're people who willingly signed up for an American secret police force that's violating the rights of people constantly in order to act as enforcers of a fascist government.

Basically everyone is not an ICE agent. Like, virtually all of us, the entire population, are not ICE agents. No matter how steep our bills are, very nearly every single American is not an ICE agent.

We can, and should, judge them forever. It should be the sort of thing their grandkids are ashamed to discover. The sort of thing that hamstrings a career forever. "What were you doing in 2025-26? Oh, you were with ICE? Thank you for your time, get out right now."

They should all be judged and shunned for the rest of their lives.

The funniest thing I've learned in the last day is that the "$50K bonus" only pays out after 5 years of service.

Like, lmao, you thought Trump was gonna give you a big chunk of cash? Silly.

Except, critically, at bedtime.

Ravings and urges get miscoded over time. Let’s say you’re thirsty, and you live in a strawberry field. Strawberries contain some water and a bunch of sugar so, over time, you may start to crave strawberries when you are thirsty because you get a reward and some relief in shorter time from the need starting than the trek to the stream. This can happen for every need: sleep, food, whatever.

Trevor Noah has a great tip, that when he craves ice cream at night he breaks it down into parts: I want something cold, I want something sweet. He drinks a glass of cold water then waits to see if he still has the ice cream craving. Usually he doesn’t.

So listening to your body isn’t “follow every urge” but “decompose the urge to discover the underlying need.”

If you always feel like getting cozy in bed you may be: cold, dehydrated, and/or malnourished (maybe a need for high calories that are bioaccessible…not processed).

If you do not feel tired at bedtime you may: need to eat dinner earlier because your body is still digesting, need to exercise or go outside more during the day, get the fuck off your screen for an hour so your brain can enter sleep mode.

Hope this helps someone.

P.S. notice i said nothing about neurodivergence. Not that it’s not a likelihood but the over-pathologization of behaviors prevents us from taking simple actions to improve our wellbeing. Also, these tips are pretty accessible and applicable to most brain variations.

Neuroscience is the closest you're gonna get to a user's manual. This is all good advice.

unless its egregious, i'm not embarrassed to be fooled by ai. "oh i got lied to via something made by the Lying Machine the machine we made to Lie really well" like it's gonna happen it's no egg on your face. just be chill about it

don't get me wrong. it's always devastating always humbling. no one wants to fall for the lying machine it just sounds bad. but you can't dwell

You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?

So it was with this desktop greenhouse.

I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.

I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.

I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.

I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…

Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.

I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.

This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.

I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.

Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.

In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…

I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.

Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.

i'm not saying people shouldn't be reading more books, but i do think it's funny how many people thinking "reading comprehension" is just about how good you are at reading books and not like. criticial thinking skills.

Before my niece was in school and her first few summers, I babysat her pretty often, natch. Occasionally I'd take her to a movie (mostly as an excuse to watch a "kids" movie, ha) but there was a lot of PBS and Netflix because then I could lay out the grapes and crackers.

And after the movie, or every few episodes, I'd ask her, you know, what her favorite part was, or what did she think would happen next? Total glass eyes. Okay, okay, favorite is a bit much. Was there a part she liked? A character? ..... Any character's name?

I told my sister I was concerned of course. I got blown off. And then she started school and started getting notes about her reading comprehension and my sister was like but she knows how to read, I know she knows what words mean! And I was like no no no this is what I was talking about and like. Obviously I read the four year old picture books too but the example that came to mind was being disappointed we couldn't finish Carmen Sandiego and either not knowing or not wanting to tell me the main character's name.

And she's like, well that isn't reading.

Okay! So! The skill isn't named correctly but that's what it is!! That's what it is for a 4 year old, they should at least be on that level!

It's not about knowing the most words or the most complicated grammar, it's about being able to give a basic summary of a post and add a semi-relevant anecdote (lol). on its most basic level, it's about not pissing on the poor

A handful of people have told me I should have put my tags in the actual post so here you go:

The good thing about critical thinking skills is that they can be developed and improved upon with patience and practice

A lot of the things you think “just come naturally” or are “common sense” are actually things that you learned at some point. You just don’t remember learning them!

The one that I know that I learned in college because I remember having problems with it, and then it finally clicking, was warm and cool colors. Golden hour, or how to indicate cool or warm in art. It’s one of my very favorite ways to play with color, NOW, but, it took me most of a semester in a color focused art class, in my early twenties to SEE it.

Ugh. So many assignments where the teacher was like, “nope, bot there yet.” So many!! (So long ago, too. We were doing slide photography and showing the slides in class, every class meeting)

It was useful, to me, to encounter something that took so much work for me to actually see it. Before that, I had mostly just done what was easiest, what people told me I had a “talent” for.

No. The skill of learning new mental skills? The frustration tolerance to get through and get it to click? THAT was the most valuable thing I encountered in college because it applies to everything all the time everywhere.

And it’s good to understand that it is ALL SKILLS! All of it. The easy and the hard stuff. You CAN learn it. Figuring out how to get yourself to actually grasp it is harder, though. Different people learn in different ways.

The frustration tolerance, though. That was really hard for me. I am still working on it.

Both as a writer and as a general member of society, reading comprehension is a super important skill to have.

I think one of the ways that a lot of people get frustrated by how reading is taught in school is that some teachers will focus heavily on very specific details in books, and so you will end up being tested on reading retention rather than reading comprehension. I had a teacher in high school whose reading quizzes were all about random details in whatever passage we had been assigned for homework (e.g., how many minutes did it take for the floodwaters to get from Town A to Town B) rather than on the actual comprehension of the passage. This can make you feel like you can't do reading comprehension or are bad at it, because it's what you've been tested on (especially if you never took a literature class post-high school).

Here are some skills that I think are important for reading comprehension, whether you're approaching fiction, non-fiction, persuasive writing, or anything else:

This might be nothing or it might be everything, but I have two thoughts 1) storytime and 2) movie soundtracks

So 1, I used to read to younger children a lot, with that set up where you hold the book facing them so youre reading it upsidedown from your own perspective. Reading that way forces you (or at least it did me) to really understand the material, bc a lot of your reading will be paraphrased, from memory, from illustration cues, and/or interrupted by toddlers wanting to turn the page early or whole the book or whatever. So basically reading to younger readers can help develop this skill I think.

And 2, I used to be a HUGE baby about scary scenes in movies. I learned soundtrack literacy very very early so I could use the musical cues to know when to close my eyes. Then id have to piece together from context clues what happened when my eyes were closed. Learning critical skills on "easier" formats like tv and movies can help develop the abilities needed for something denser

it baffles me when people say “i got tricked into watching this show for a ship that isn’t even canon” bro if those men had kissed, you would’ve SEEN it. i’ve seen gifs of men making out in shows i have no desire to watch. i’ve seen sex scenes from movies that nobody has ever heard of. when men kiss on screen, i am notified

there's always some bullshit happening on reddit