I would like to try a "what language family is your first language in" poll but wrangling english speakers who don't know english is germanic would be too much of a hassle I think

This website is too mobile focused these days. Reblog and tell me what your desktop/laptop background is.

The outside view of the upside-down pyramid from the Steven Universe episode “Serious Steven.”

I don’t even care if it’s macaroni, ramen or those little bowls you stick in the microwave. Please, I need reassurance that most of the population on tumblr WOULDN’T STARVE TO DEATH if their parents couldn’t fix them food or they couldn’t go out to eat. 

My parents started me cooking when i was tall enough to reach the counter and before that i was the family cheese grater

My problem isn’t that I can’t cook. I can! My banana bread is the envy of every job crew I’ve ever made it for and my baked lemon chicken is absolutely to die. And I get better every time I cook….

….which is not very often, because of the executive dysfunction.

THAT is the problem.

So after wondering about this odd choice in terms, I finally looked it up and

The OG Ishikawa Goemon was a ninja? Literally, he was a ninja. There's like a half dozen versions of his life, because he's a folk hero, and in half of them he's a trained ninja and in the other half he's just a bandit. I’ve been thinking the whole time I’ve been into Lupin III that it’s weird how they keep calling our Goemon a samurai, because he’s not, actually? He’s not a samurai. He’s a goddamn ninja.

Why are we not on the same page here???

Ishikawa Goemon (manga/anime) is a samurai like Don Quixote is a knight--too late, historically inaccurate, and attacking inanimate objects.

Please reblog to increase sample size, I am trying to find out how much normal people know about this because I am Not Normal and my assumed baseline of knowledge cannot be trusted

You guys gotta reblog come on

This was the origin of a meme amongst my friends for years. This was pre-9/11, and we were sitting around at a party discussing the Challenger Disaster, with the "Where were you when you found out?" I heard that something had happened that morning, but was fuzzy on the details. I remember one of my teachers crying.

Then, just after lunch, I went to journalism class and they had the TVs up showing the news. That's when I got to see it.

My friend said, "You were in GRADE SCHOOl? I was in GRAD school!!!"

Which rapidly became "I was in Grad School/I was in Grade School!"

My other friend had the best story, though. He had been at work. At McDonnell Douglas.

@infamousbrad , would you like to tell your story?

Sure, I can do that, it's also a glimpse into life pre-Internet.

I was working in the McDonnell Aircraft's QA division, doing minicomputer support. I had the 11th IBM PC that Mac ever bought sitting in my cube, and I'd improvised a cable compatible with our spare dial-up modems so I could run a BBS off of it in the evenings.

And one morning my supervisor comes up to me and said, "Can you get the news on that thing?" Which would have been hugely illegal, since we were in a secure environment, but before I could deny it, he said, "This one time you're not in trouble. Something big just happened. Everybody VP and above just disappeared into a conference room at HQ, nobody knows why, nothing's leaking out, and all of our buildings are under lockdown. The managers NEED to know."

Well, I had a personal CompuServe (pre-Internet Reddit) account, and I had written some some mediocre terminal software in MS-BASIC for PC, so I dialed out to CompuServe, which had an Associated Press forum that posted quarter-hour news updates.

So for the whole day, I was the only person locked into McDonnell Douglas who knew how to get news, which I refreshed and printed out so my boss could fax it to all the other bosses every 15 minutes, and within the first hour we knew that the earliest zoomed-in photos showed that the starting point of the explosion was the tip of the nose of one of the side boosters.

We made those nose cones. I spent the whole day smuggling information across the information quarantine to people who desperately wanted to know, "Are we the ones who killed the first Teacher in Space?"

(We weren't. The reason that solid-rocket-booster nose-cone drilled into the side of the main external liquid-fuel tank was because of a thrust-breach way farther down the stack. Which didn't come out until overnight. But that was a weird day to be working at almost any rocket-parts company.)

(Also, journalism historians should really mark the day that the AP broke the print-journalism monopoly on its content as the beginning of the death of journalism as we knew it. A few newspaper publishers were all up in arms about it at the time, but it was hard to explain to us CompuServe users just how important that news-monopoly was to funding investigative journalism. It was Craigslist before there was Craigslist.)

✨ Please reblog the polls to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖 Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

ALT

(ID in alt)

What gets me so much in the first post is how much they do not understand how some people DO NOT WANT to keep harassing the same people over and over for their money.

Like, do these kind of people come from a background of gambling boxes in games, where they try to get people addicted to paying more and more money for gacha BS? When I sell a Robomat or Comicron One model in my Storenvy, I don't expect people to come back and by ANOTHER one the next month. I try to put out NEW products, certainly, but especially when it's donations, the idea of getting people to pay again and again when it may just be some spare change they have or they just want to contribute to something they believe in... and here comes them saying "WE'LL USE AI TO EXPLOIT THESE PEOPLE AND DRAIN THEIR WALLETS!"

Sure, hyperbolic, but people KNOW when someone's trying to sell them something and I can't think of any way to RUIN customer (or in this case donor) goodwill then harassing them for more of the money they already gave. They've done their bit for queen and country and now you want them to do it again and again and you think they'll be HAPPY to see you knocking on their doors again when they ALREADY did it?

It's a position born from unmitigated greed, going against the very spirit of donating for a good cause. Sure, maybe DIFFERENT fundraisers at different times (we hit on hard times this year, we were good for a while, but a year or two later we need help again), but the same one over and over? I feel like there'd be such a loss in trust and support.

Wow, just noticed yet another instance of a trans women who appears to have had her account nuked for making a post about tumblr's obviously broken and biased moderation system, and the offending post appears to have been scrubbed from the site (I went looking for my reblog from less than a week ago and it's just gone).

Tumblr staff can not have it both ways. You cannot say the blatant instances of anti-trans hate speech and harassment, much of which does get reported, are abhorrent but technically not in violation of the terms of service under the excuse of "free speech" when you are at the same time deleting accounts for merely criticizing how you run this place!

At the risk of having my own account scrubbed I gotta say, that is some stunning hypocrisy. Also, I think the previous sentence demonstrates that this has a chilling effect! The way the TOS is being unevenly applied and the utter lack of clarity on how these decisions get made, makes the rest of us feel afraid to speak up. None of us know where exactly the lines are and it kinda seems like they're drawn and enforced according to staff's arbitrary whims!

happy PRIDE i’m here i’m queer and i believe the land should be given back to the proper indigenous stewards.

Non-Natives reblogging this are great and wonderful

Please remember that "land back" does not mean "indigenous people are mystical elves with innate epigenetic wisdom of land stewardship and they don't belong in big cities," nor does it mean "non-indigenous people can't be farmers."

What it DOES mean is that "non-indigenous farmers should be paying the equivalent of property taxes to the native governments their land was stolen from."

It means, "there's a great deal of indigenous scholarship on sustainable agricultural practices that farmers should be taking into account, because indigenous agriculture was more advanced than European agriculture at the time Europe invaded the Americas and western agriculture *still* hasn't caught up in terms of figuring out how to produce equivalently high crop yields without compromising the ecosystem."

It means, "non-indigenous farmers should be in an intellectual discourse with indigenous agricultural scientists and indigenous peoples that still do traditional farming, figuring how to repair the damage western farming practices have done to the ecosystem."

It also means that indigenous peoples should regain the right to sustain themselves on the land according to the practices they want, and they should have free reign to perform their cultural practices and protect their holy sites, as opposed to the current model where if they try to honor their dead on public lands they get violently removed.