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“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Use Firefox.

This is a response to the laws that eliminate or severely limit third party tracking cookies. Since Google makes so much money on advertising, it had to figure out other ways to get your data. It’s already been tracking people who use the web while logged into Google, but now they’re baking it into Chrome.

As someone who works in advertising, the reason I new use Firefox is because I heard the industry rumblings about this for the last 3 years. It’s finally here, so if you care about making it harder to be tracked/advertised to, switch to Firefox.

[I was born stupid. But I will not die hungry!]

I’m seeing stuff in the notes about “Miles would do this” and I just want to say: you’re absolutely right. All Spider-folks across all universes share one (1) singular brain cell and most of the time it’s Gwen’s.

As the current author of Spider-Gwen, I can attest that Gwen has not seen the brain cell in years.

I FOUND IT

I finally lay my eyes upon this glorious post myself

there should be a tax that youtubers pay where 1.5% of all of their revenue goes back to Kevin Macleod for basically supplying YouTube with it’s own soundtrack.

who is this man and what music did he make???

if you hear a royalty free song on youtube, there’s approximately an 80% chance Kevin Macleod wrote it.

here’s some you’ve almost definitely heard:

for those wondering, yes, he also made THE generic royalty free song that was EVERYWHERE in 2014.

He has a Patreon!

And he doesn’t even make a 1000$ per month!

also, his site incompetech.com also has graph paper generators, if you’re in need of that. It has any kind of graph paper - INCLUDING hex paper, you tabletop gamers out there! (or knitting paper if you’re into that)

HOHOHOHO?

Y'all, I’ve been a fan of Kevin MacLeod for YEARS. I can identify his music within two seconds. He’s a fucking genius and he deserves all the love and credit and money people can give.

He scored invader zim AND xiaolin showdown

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.

Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.

Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.

So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.

They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.

Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.

However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.

So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.

It gets better.

Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.

Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.

And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.

Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. It’s a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.

[Image 1: a photo of Eyem’s abbey and graveyard.]

[Image 2: a photo of a stone basin.]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

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What the fuck

This is absolutely fascinating. I've now been looking at Alex Colville's paintings and trying to work out what it is about them that makes them look like CGI and how/why he did that in a world where CGI didn't exist yet. Here's what I've got so far:

- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)

- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.

- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)

- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture

- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.

- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)

- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.

What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.

But Colville wasn't a computer, so he did these same things *on purpose*. For some reason he was *aiming* for that precise-but-all-wrong look. I mean, mission accomplished! The question in my mind is, did he do this because he was trying to make the pictures unsettling and alienating, or because in some way, this was how he actually saw the world?

omf i never thought i'd find posts about alex colville on tumblr, but! he's a local artist where i'm from & i work at a library/archives and have processed a lot of documents related to his art. just wanted to give my two cents!

my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had:

iirc she was in a horrible automobile crash, as the car she was in collided with a train. i find it genuinely horrifying to look at, knowing the context, but a lot of colville's work is like that? idk he just seems to capture the feeling you get in nightmares where everything is treacle-ish and slow and inevitable.

Ok, but if you’re an independent contractor in the US and this happens? Find a lawyer, because you might have just gotten a huge payday.

Your position was just referred to as employment. Independent contractors do not have employers; they do not have employment. Congrats, your contact at this company just provided evidence that you were illegally missclassified.

This contact is claiming that you have set hours you’re obligated to fulfill. Unless a work task can only be done at a set time for practical reasons (i.e. you’re an audio freelancer paid to support a live event that occurs at a particular time and requires a certain amount of pre-show setup), a company cannot set an independent contractor’s work hours. This is further evidence that you were missclassified.

The whole exchange establishes that the company is interpreting an employer-employee relationship rather than expecting a service. Discipline and potential for firing (you cannot fire an independent contractor; no longer purchasing their service is not equivalent) establish that this person views themselves as a manager. Independent contractors cannot have managers.

This one text exchange could:

If the company is going to screw you over like that, may as well make them pay for it.

Since this is getting a lot of reblogs, here’s a federal source that can help you determine if you’re illegally classified as a contractor:

You can also file a form with the IRS to force the company to correct your classification (assuming you meet the criteria), without necessarily having to sue:

Keep in mind that this is just federal. Most states also prohibit missclassification as an independent contractor; and even if states have more lenient rules, companies still have to comply with this federal law. The rules have largely been bipartisan and existed for decades, so they’re common.

States also have an interest in having regulations about missclassification: it’s a significant loss of tax revenue. Your self employment tax does not fully equal what a company would have paid for you in payroll taxes.

A lawyer can help point you in the right direction if a company is currently missclassifying you.

Drowning this because a) really don't want to make a long post longer and, b) this isn't the type of person who'd respond well to constructive criticism of their worldview from someone familiar with the topic.

Since I'm not looking for an argument, I thought I'd use it as a learning exercise for everyone else. Also under a cut because it got very long and I started quoting papyri because I was annoyed.

Executive chef at a top Thai restaurant tells Gordon Ramsay that his Pad Thai is trash [x]

Lmao “what do you want to know from me?” Fuck!

So no one thinks that Gordon’s being “Put in his place” or something, this is from Gordon’s show where he specifically goes to places around the world to be schooled in how they do their cuisine and un-fuck the British (Imperialist but we can’t admit that on TV, but he does hint STRONGLY at it in some episodes) way of cooking “exotic” dishes by learning from the people who do it best.

That’s the world’s most successful chef putting himself in a position to learn from chefs around the world in world-class restaurants, grandmother’s houses, in a cramped make-shift kitchen on a rocking and speeding steam train, and more. He doesn’t shy away from learning from people who’ve never been in the remote vicinity of a culinary arts school or run a “professional” kitchen.

And here he’s showing a chef what he thinks of as Pad Thai and if you don’t think one of the most talented chefs on earth didn’t know he was specifically setting himself up to fail to make a point to his audience, then hopefully you do now! <3 

the context- he wasnt saying ‘heres my world famous pad tai for you to sample, a recipe i hold more dear then my own mother’ its closer to  ‘here, this is how i was taught to cook pad tai in liverpool by a man named charles, how far off am i?’

Also!!! The subtext!!! He’s not just speaking directly to the other chef, he’s leading his answer for the audience- “It’s not pad thai”, the man says- and chef Ramsay says back, “I think it tastes good”- and it probably tastes GREAT! But he’s creating a platform for his host to say, “Your food can taste good, but it isn’t authentic. You’re calling it by the wrong name when you do this. I will show you what to do now”.

And so love that! Being a good interviewer isn’t always as straightforward as giving your speaker air time- you have to guide the message they want to share in a way your audience can internalize and process without getting defensive or confused, and he’s doing that by showing respect and playing up his lack of expertise- like how a rodeo clown dresses up in silly costumes to distract us from how they’re guiding the bull. What a lovely piece!

How i make my little gouache sketches

Read this & be mindful of those partaking in Ramadan. 

I would rather everyone read and shared this instead of “remember to tag your food/nsfw/etc!” post that’s going around every year. (None of these things actually break your fast and if you’re fasting and worried about seeing them, you shouldn’t be on tumblr).

Being considerate and kind goes a long way, so I’d appreciate if this post went around instead.

I wonder if our ancestors ever had artistic doubts...

when i tell you i had an aneurysm

"Average canyon is full of arachnids" factoid actually just a statistical anomaly. Average canyon has a normal amount of arachnids. Spider Gorge-

tumblr has like 5 jokes that just get recycled.

it’s very efficient that way.

average tumblr user only knows five jokes factoid actually just statistical error. Spiders Georg-

I’ve seen this a million times and every time I forget what’s coming