This is fucking awesome LMAOOOO

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So, let me guess– you just started a new book, right? And you’re stumped. You have no idea how much an AK47 goes for nowadays. I get ya, cousin. Tough world we live in. A writer’s gotta know, but them NSA hounds are after ya 24/7. I know, cousin, I know. If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…

You’re in luck, cousin. I have just the thing for ya.

It’s called Havocscope. It’s got information and prices for all sorts of edgy information. Ever wondered how much cocaine costs by the gram, or how much a kidney sells for, or (worst of all) how much it costs to hire an assassin?

I got your back, cousin. Just head over to Havocscope.

((PS: In case you’re wondering, Havocscope is a database full of information regarding the criminal underworld. The information you will find there has been taken from newspapers and police reports. It’s perfectly legal, no need to worry about the NSA hounds, cousin ;p))

Want more writerly content? Follow maxkirin.tumblr.com!

Assassins

“Below are selected prices that are paid to professional assassins by criminal organizations and drug cartels for a contract hit.

In Australia, the median price to hire a hit man is $13,610 (9,800 Euros), with the price going up to $83,000 (60,000 Euros) based on the task.

In Mexico, the cost for a low level assassin is $208 (150 Euros), and up to $20,832 (15,000 Euros) for a higher profile target like a police chief.

The prices paid in Argentina are between $3,749 (2,700 Euros) to $5,555 (4,000 Euros) per hit.

Government statistics in Spain state that 40 assassinations take place each year, with prices for the hit ranging between $27 (20 Euros) to $69,000 (50,000 Euros).”

So cheap! I always thought things like this would cost more than $1 million…

This is super useful to know!

and not just for writing!!

@katherine-rose

HOLY FUCK

HOW MANY HOURS HAVE I WASTED TRYING TO FIND HEROIN PRICES ON THE INTERNET WHAT A GREAT DATABASE

I needed this

Actually useful. Sometimes incognito isn’t enough.

and suddenly my life just became much easier

I’ve heard of this before but the GIFs made it better 

i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.

so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.

hey this is apparently helping a lot of people! adding that on top of this you can also go to settings > personalization > colors and turn off transparency to also boost performance. this wasn't the Big Fix for me but might as well do that too if you're trying to optimize.

past a certain note threshold on tumblr posts you unlock a bloodborne-esque insight and the strange lives of this site's users become visible to you

(x)

we fucking found them?

Ok I know we joke about this but I just went to the settings and first clicked "adjust for best performance" and then re-checked only 1 box:

"Smooth edges of screen fonts"

My computer was running hot before I turned everything off; the office I'm in is very warm, I could feel the heat of my CPU through the keyboard. The fans were going, not as loud as they usually get, but they were still blasting.

Y'all.

I can barely feel the warmth through the keyboard now. It's been like 2 minutes. The fan is nearly silent.

Click the Windows key and start typing "System settings", and "View Advanced system settings" will pop up. Then click "Settings" under Performance:

Then you'll see this:

TURN IT ALL OFF.

I turned "Show window contents while dragging" and then turned that off again. It's up to you.

My computer is so quiet and reasonably-temperatured now and I barely notice a difference in utility, why is windows like this

maybe I can even play computer games again

The second best thing you can do for a Win10 computer is turn off whatever unnecessary services it's decided it needs to run in the background always. Some services it does need, but others are useless. Here's an article that goes into step by steps.

10AppsManager lets you uninstall bloatware. Winaero Tweaker lets you disable crap like Cortana/Copilot, ads, telemetry, internet search results when you search from the taskbar, and all kinds of other stuff, plus it gives you lots of other little options that are just nice to have (like, it can restore the old MS Paint program in place of Paint 3D). Both are totally free.

Oh, and check your startup programs in the Task Manager tab to make sure your computer isn't automatically starting eight million programs every time it boots. But I think people mostly know about that. (Unless this is me going "they only know one or two feldspars... and quartz of course.")

The first best thing you can do for a Windows computer is install Linux Mint. But some of us do need a few pesky Windows-specific programs. Bleh. Still, if you're up for a project, you can have both (and it's awesome). Here's an article about setting up a dual boot Windows/Mint system.

[cc: Getting your mail in rural Virginia is always a fun time, because I’m over here getting my Micheal’s coupon out of the mailbox and my poor neighbor just sees:

(Spooky person standing near the roadisde of an empty rural road, waves.)]

[ID: Tags reading, ‘#not to be a lesbian but oh my fucking god. oh my god. fucking jesus fuck oh my fucking jesus fucking christ. god in heaven. holy [fucking] shit]’ /End ID]

Dracula and Jonathan’s Tango - from The Polish National Opera production of ‘Dracula’.

With Choreography by Krzysztof Pastor and Music by Wojciech Kilar.

Heads up, the whole thing is officially available on YouTube, for the next two months

ASDFGHJKL?!?!?!?!

This is the ideal gymnast body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like...

Natalie M’phylgwnth from Carcosa just finished her beam routine, which has left another judge screaming and blind. We’re going to take a break as they look for another volunteer.

There's more:

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a banger

VeryVeryVinny

they collab'ed on a full version!

(i love their cover art)

Listen, I’m only 6 episodes into the podcast, but you can’t tell me this isn’t just Welcome to Night Vale

In the Odyssey the axes were arranged so that she would be sitting behind them, so that if any of the suitors truly had managed to string Odysseus' bow and make the shot, the arrow would strike her in the heart.

And there is so much in that, already, but there is so much more in all the greater context of Penelope and Odysseus' marriage.

Even before Odysseus came to Sparta with all the many suitors looking to win Helen's hand, he was clever enough to know that a King with no bride price to offer from a tiny, almost insignificant island like Ithaca would stand no cha ce of winning Helen's hand. He had never intended to we'd Helen. He had been there to make connections, and to win the hand of another beautiful Spartan princess.

He forged a deal with Helen's father to help him see Helen safely married without fear of those not chosen shedding blood, in exchange for just the opportunity to try and win Penelope's hand. And with his swift speed or swift mind, he did so.

They were not a love match then. Just two practical people, who understood the way the world they lived in worked. It was duty that had Penelope alight into Odysseus' chariot, to be drawn away to his ship and across the water to what would be her new home.

When her father, heartsick that he might never again see his beloved daughter again, chased after them and stopped them outside the city gates, began his begging, I think that was when she fell in love with her husband. Her father, one of the most powerful men in the Greek world, begged them to stay, offering this strange, trickster she had been married to all that any man could ever dream. Wealth, connection, the promise to make Odysseus his heir and with such an oath see the King of Ithaca instead one day become Co-King of the much greater Sparta.

Did she think that this had been part of her husband's plan, I wonder? Odysseus, grandson of an infamous shape-shifting thief, great grandson of the trickster thief-god Hermes. More than clever enough that he must have known all her father would give up to keep her close. Did she think it all a ploy to get what he truly wanted?

But no. No, cunning Odysseus, clever Odysseus, loyal Odysseus, he wanted none of those things. His father had only him as son, Ithaca without him would be left abandoned. He was a trickster, but he was steadfast in his devotions. He would not be swayed from his duties to his kingdom.

But he hadn’t made that choice for her, either. Even though he could, even though as her husband it was his right to carry her away with him across the sea. He did not take that choice, but turned and gave it to her instead.

He would return to Ithaca, but he would not force her to come with him. He would not steak her from the place her heart lie. If she wanted to stay in Sparta, with her father, he would return her to her father's home, would bear her no grief or ill will, only the consideration of her choice.

How could she not love him then? How could she not love his clever mind and loyal heart and the respect he gave her that no other man living or dead - her father included - would ever had even considered granting her even a portion of?

She left with Odysseus that day. She made her choice. And these men that roamed the halls of her palace like jackals and snakes, would not take that from her.

She would sit behind the axes.

Reblog daily for health and prosperity

I feel a bit better about living in a cyberpunk dystopia if it's one with puppygirl hacker polycules in it.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

This scene happens with literally 0 context or build up whatsoever

Nobody tell me what anime this is bc I don’t care but this looks disgusting where’s the flavor

“You know it from anime and manga,” bitch isn’t Beef Stroganoff a Russian dish

I just realized that they don’t even make the corkscrew noodles-

I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who got aggressively offended about this.

they did actually fail for making that

the beef is actually not optional

This is so funny I don’t even care for baseball but this is great

Yep! And what ended up happening is what we baseball fans call a FARTSLAM, which stands for Fielder Allows Runner To Score Like A Moron.

Plays like this are why I love Baseball

Idgaf about baseball but if I see the Cubs I go feral.

lmaoooo the way he calls safe too

for non baseball people im going to explain how amazing and funny this is:

The owner puts a guardian to the horse and his happiness is priceless ...

this tiktok video of the two volleyball players but the one keeps offering her hand to the other when she step off the bus….why am i blushing

#butch chivalry is beautiful

Rebloging for heterosexual reasons