products are so bad now that i have to do approximately 8 hours of research before i buy anything

Seriously, if you're planning to spend a coupla hundred bucks on an appliance, or thousands for a car, spend $4 for a month of Consumer Reports (consumerreports.org).

They're a not-for-profit consumers union, dedicated to fair and honest reviews of everything people buy. Totally worth the membership.

And yeah, if money is tight you can join for a month then cancel the membership easily when you're done with your research.

Also check to see if your local public library has a subscription, either in print or digital format (might be listed as a database rather than a magazine - that's the case at my library in Canada).

Most libraries will provide access to CR, either in print or digital format. The digital archives are what you want when researching a specific product, since they cover different areas each issue.

Lots of good recommendations in the notes, I'd also recommend this one:

It's focused on camping gear, but many of their recommendations are also excellent for everyday use!

“Humans are inherently selfish--" Then why do so many cultures value hospitality, to the point of dictating it in their religions? Why is it so common for hosts to offer their visitors their best food, and as much of it as they can? At some point, multiple cultures decided that they knew what it felt like to be alone and vulnerable, and promised each other to never let those who stay with them feel that way. That doesn't sound very "inherently selfish" to me.

"humans are the plague"

No. Humans are animals as much as the fish and the bear. We are pack animals who have survived by strong bonds and community.

Do not buy the lie that humans are inherently evil. Societies can trick you into believing this, but it's not the truth of humanity.

Humans crave being together, sharing together, and thriving together.

Capitalism just wants you to believe we're destined for selfishness.

Y’all “critical thinking” does not equal “criticism”.

I am very tired of saying positive things about characters and getting told I need to do some critical thinking (so that I’ll see the characters are actually bad). No. That’s not how that works. I already did some critical thinking and came to the conclusions that these characters are wonderful. Criticism or straight up character bashing is not more enlightened and is not how critical thinking works. “Critical thinking” is not “thinking about all the bad or problematic aspects of something.” It’s looking objectively at evidence, looking at context, recognizing and examining personal biases and assumptions, considering what assumptions and biases are being used in a given argument by other people, etc. Sometimes this process brings up criticisms, yes, but sometimes it also leads to the conclusion that something is actually good despite it being made out to be bad. 

I’m both pro herbal medicine and pro vaccination because you can treat burns with aloe vera juice and sore throats with lavender infused honey but you can’t rid a country of polio with plants. 

THIS.

Don’t forget kids, jewelweed is a natural counteragent to poison ivy rashes but it won’t do shit against whooping cough

Mint for nausea, valerian and chamomile for sleep, antibiotics for fucking infections.

I’m in love with this post

Scrolled past this agakn and just can't get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.

I've seen this photo and similar ones online for years, and with pretty much every nation where rug weaving is still practiced claiming it was an example of their handiwork, so I did a bit of sleuthing and it turns out the photo is from Thailand!

Quoting from the "Share knowledge of electrical systems - control cabinets - MDB cabinets - PLC control systems" Facebook page (Google translated, sorry):

"In daily life, for the picture of wires in the house that must be wired to various points and use wire clips to lock the wires in place, which does not require many steps. It is probably an image that we are used to seeing. But for the electrician's work as shown in the picture, it is a unique and intricate wire installation. This is... the science and art of wiring inside the building that creates intricate and beautiful patterns. I didn't think that wire clipping could play with patterns like this. It is another story that creates surprise for those who see it. When the electrician with great skills wires using wire ties to various devices by securing the wires to the walls or ceilings of the building with wire ties at every distance, it is like a former artist. Some people make woven patterns, OTOP mat weaving patterns, yantra patterns, Phra Thep Phanom patterns, various lotus patterns, etc. It depends on your imagination. It is considered a creative idea. It also creates good value for the work. Therefore, I would like to commend the technician's effort and patience. Then you can see the work as seen in the picture.

The science and art of wiring of the previous generation of technicians is wiring with VAF type wires that require the method of nailing wires to attach to the wall, cement or wood to make it look beautiful.

Which is different from the new generation of wiring that often uses the method of wiring in pipes embedded in the wall, in pipes on the exposed wall or wiring in various types of electrical wire storage trays using THW type wires and wires for various types of pipes, NYY wires, VCT wires, etc., which also gives another type of beauty that is very popular today. The wiring of the pipes must take into account the neatness and beauty, but must not neglect the details, specifications of the correct pipe and wire sizes at all times.

As for the old wiring method "clipping" which is still popular with technicians and some electricity users

The method of wiring by using clips to attach to the wall has various methods of wiring, emphasizing simple wiring, wiring that emphasizes neat wiring, making it beautiful, and there is also wiring that emphasizes wiring in a beautiful pattern using wire clips to tie it beautifully in the desired pattern. It is considered a wiring that truly relies on science and art. This type of work is often the work of A technician with long experience Because they have to plan the wire pattern, place the clips, and run the wires to get the beautiful pattern as desired. Otherwise, the work will not come out beautifully. For the patterns that are often used to assemble on the electrical wires

They are usually auspicious words, surnames, symbols, various Thai patterns. When the wire clips are placed in the right place, the pattern that appears will be beautiful, showing status, showing the relationship, such as the pattern written as a surname.

These works are works that show the art and experience of the technician as well. To make beautiful wire clips on the electrical wires, the technician must first lay out the outline to make that pattern, then gradually tie the wires one by one until it is complete as desired."

And I also found the OG pics!

Humans are capable of creating the most beautiful things from the most utilitarian means, and the fact that everyday art this isn't common practice everywhere makes me want to invent a time machine just so I could go back and kill the first person who came up with minimalism.

Bro, don't just mention a source and drop those image while CONTINUING to not provide links. 😭

Anyway, here's some links that are as close to original sources as I can readily find:

And related, from this Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/163M5xYbdf/

HEROIC POSTER OF THE DAY!

Many thanks for finding the source on this, as you can see I grabbed it from a Facebook post where it had no attribution of any kind (OP didn't know either)

sometimes its just like *street lights reflecting off the wet asphalt at night* maybe life isnt so ugly after all

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

@thetransfemininereview has written several articles about creating your own archive!

Here's one of them, but I would recommend checking out the rest of the website as well :)

if your necromancer is digging that is NOT cute. they only exhume bodies when they're extremely stressed. a proper well-enriched necromancer is provided with enemies to kill and reanimate on a regular basis and will make their enemies claw out their own graves as a play behavior.

alternatively you might have a mad scientist that was sold as a necromancer. this is sadly very common but the two breeds actually have very different habitat requirements

Even mad scientists usually prefer bodies fresh or frozen rather than buried tbh, at least in my experience. However, providing them with graves 3 weeks old or less to dig up can be excellent enrichment PERIODICALLY - it shouldn't be the staple! Most mad scientists simply aren't bred with the physical strength or stamina to hold up to that kind of hard labor on a regular basis (though if kept in symbiosis with proper minions, thugs, or particularly hardy sidekicks, they will happily direct their symbiotes to do it for them, which is a very fun social behavior to observe!). Mad scientists bred with that kind of physical capability are a very specialized breed, which is also - unsurprisingly - very difficult for most private owners to keep both safely contained and properly enriched in captivity. (Weird, it's almost like adding significant strength and stamina to a species already known for creative problem-solving and intelligence, which can already be escape artists if not kept properly enriched and busy, makes them ridiculously difficult to keep contained. Whodathunk.)

(anyway good post OP sorry for getting off on a tangent and rambling a bit <3)

don’t listen to them, my necromancer hisses at me every time I try to get them fresh bodies or living enemies. they only ever want bones

prev you have a skeleton-type necromancer! they are only interested in bones and view anything with flesh and blood as superfluous. people tend to sell them as regular necromancers but they actually have highly specialized habit & diet requirements and can be prone to a lot of Problems. have you tried burying old corpses with no skin left on for them?

Maybe don't bury???

In my experience, bone-type necromancers tend to be even less likely to be physically suited to digging. If you do want to use burying bones as a form of enrichment, it might be suited more to if you get a bone-type necromancer paired with a henchman when you get them, aim for bonded pairs, as that lessens the chance of the necro murdering the hench spontaneously. Sometimes they do that.

actually a few murder attempts are bonding behavior!! sometimes even mating behavior

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: what we want is for these things to be run like a HOUSEHOLD… a home. A household still has a budget and an income and resources to manage; all the moving parts are the same but the focus is different.

a business will let every person in it die a terrible death if it makes the business profit. A household will spend it’s last dollar to keep the people in it safe and healthy.

A household will use money as a resource to add value to the lives of the people in the household. A business will use people as a resource to add monetary value to the business

We don’t want a government run like a business, we want a country run like a household. Because we live here.

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

daily affirmations: you are isildur’s heir, not isildur himself. You are not bound to his fate.

I was going to make a "same braincell" joke but honestly reading this over and over again was actually very moving and I might need to go lie down.....maybe the real affirmations were the friends we made along the way etc etc

One of the most important things I’ve learned as a Real Adult™ is the importance of a job half done. 

Today I did a load of dishes, wiped off my stove, and swept the kitchen floor. Did I do the best job, or finish every dish? No! My stove still has that caked on caramel that I need to bust out an SOS pad to take care of, one of our big pots is still sitting in the sink, and somehow a kitty kibble unearthed itself while I was wiping down the stove (?? how??).. but the kitchen looks a LOT better. It’s once again an inhabitable, usable space.

Parents, bosses, teachers, even my own self, harp upon absolute perfect completion of a task as the be all and end all of a job well done, but god damn, my kitchen isn’t terrible because I took the time to improve it. Little steps, especially when you’re struggling, are important. They mean a LOT. They are a sign that you won, if only in that brief moment, and they make getting all the other stuff done so much easier later on down the road. 

I…need to remember this. Thank you.

Oh damn the Catholics have joined in on the war against AI "art".

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

Hayao Miyazaki on AI

I reblogged something to this effect recently, but he's not talking about AI here, the original quote was referring to how a depiction of CGI zombies were animated in such a way that felt exploitative of disabled people.

Usamericans are absolutely delusional.

Things to say when you arent an evil empire

"how could our empire collapse when we've overextended it so much? checkmate commies"

First humans ever to leave the solar system suddenly drop out of communications and the ship can't be found with any equipment. After one month of no contact their home countries start reluctantly holding funerals for the space heroes only for them all to turn up, healthy, well fed and extremely disoriented, in the middle of Tokyo, talking about alien abduction. Turns out that aliens found the poor humans straying out of their solar system, presumably lost, and took them to Alien Wildlife Rehabilitation before dumping them back in the middle of their native habitat.

#bonus points if none if the crew are Japanese#aliens just dropped where they thought was best

I literally just googled "city with the highest population"

I’ll bet they have cool new tattoos that turn out to be tracking devices too. Just in case these spirited individuals try to make another break for it.

... do the tats make them stupid popular, like that time scientists gave birds tracker anklets and it accidentally made them ultra fuckable

Let’s say yes. Those alien scientists are learning so much, and none of it is accurate.