European Initiative to Ban Conversion Practices in the EU
Please do not keep scrolling, this is important!
Are you european?
Please sign this petition if you already haven’t! If we want to ban conversion practices in the EU, we need to reach at least one million signs and reach a minimun threshold in at least 7 countries. Only 2 countries have reached that threshold and we only got 172.000 signs!
The collection period ends this year, in may 17!! Please, if you want to help the LGTB+ community, sign the petition!!
Then spread the word! Reblog this post, or make your own! There’s probably a few europeans following you, so make them know the petition and ask them to sign it!
If you claim that Tumblr is “the most LGTB+ friendly website that exists”, this is the way you can prove it! Do it for the community, sign it, spread it, but please, do not ignore this!!
Thank you my friends for helping me. Please continue to donate so I can reach my goal of 5k. I need this to be able to save my children and get them to safety and live in peace. I urgently need your donations. The situation here has become very dangerous and famine is killing us. Please continue to donate.
My friends please help me reach 3k . I am only $298 away from the amount.
Tagging some people to help by donating and/or sharing:🙏🙏🙏
HALT! Do you have sensory issues? Overwhelmed by sound in a messy environment? Desperately wanting to write that essay/fanfiction but your ADHD is getting on the way? In need of atmospheric sound for your tabletop game??
Please let me introduce you to MyNoise.net - a lifesaver on all aspects.
Mynoise provides an incredible index of noise machine generators with personalizing sliders to suit your every taste.
Missing the sound of a lively coffee shop during the pandemic? They have that. That specific, calming noise of a public park in a peaceful afternoon? they have that. Rain sounds? City sounds?Want to fuck around and listen to some uninterrupted Gregorian chants? They have that also!
According to the website:
“myNoise generators cover the whole audible frequency range, from 20Hz to 20kHz, over 10 color-coded sliders. Through a simple but accurate calibration process, all myNoise generators can be shaped to your personal hearing thresholds and compensate for your audio equipment and listening environment deficiencies, including the presence and nature of background noise. Calibration is unique to this website, and makes calibrated noise machines stand out from regular white noise machines. During the calibration process, we are able to measure your personal hearing levels, and adapt our noises accordingly. If you are suffering from age-related hearing, you’ll be surprised to hear frequencies you thought were lost.”
And that’s not all. When I say ‘incredible’ I really mean it; I’ve found myself using the website on multiple occasions, for work, creative and stress-related issues, and the variety of machines provided cannot be overstated. You’ve got animal noises, nature soundscapes, street sounds, meditation aids, melody-based lullabies, magical soundscapes, medieval ambiance, situation specific sounds, white noise generators– and a lot more!!! They even have noise to block out IRL sounds you don’t want to hear.
Just take a brief look at what the index page provides:
There’s something for EVERYONE. And it’s all for free! It’s been for free for years, and it is the creator’s wish that it remains accessible to everyone who might need this kind of aid in life. I am using it to write this post right now. Though if you read some of the above index, you may have noticed that the support for the website has been very low lately.
Which brings me to the reason I’m making this post. Mynoise is curated and maintained by a single person:
One small but extremely annoying effect of Tech Modernization or w/e is how UI contrast is garbage anymore, especially just, like, application windows in general.
“Ooh our scrollbar expands when you mouse over it! Or does it? Only you can know by sitting there like an idiot for 3 seconds waiting for it to expand, only to move your cursor away just as it does so!” or Discord’s even more excellent “scrollbar is 2 shades off of the background color and is one (1) pixel wide” fuck OFF
I tried to move a system window around yesterday and had to click 3 times before I got the half of the upper bar that let me drag it. Why are there two separate bars with absolutely nothing to visually differentiate them on that.
“Well if you look closely-” I should not!! have to squint!!! at the screen for a minute straight to detect basic UI elements!! Not mention how ableist this shit is, and for what? ~✨Aesthetic✨~?
and then every website and app imitates this but in different ways so everything is consistently dogshit to try to use but not always in ways you can immediately grok it’s!!!! terrible!!!! just put lines on things again I’m begging you!!!!
I know I sound like a broken record when I praise Windows 95 UI, but holy fuck Microsoft figured this shit out already about 30 years ago. It’s all there, black and white, clear as christmas:
So much of modern UX woes stem from not knowing, or intentionally ignoring the genuine design study put forth into GUIs in the 90s.
3D elements are 3D in a specific way with lighting from a specific side to make it obvious where a window element begins and ends.
The gradient always should from from one side, and keep it consistent.
Make your color shading and shape of scroll bars consistently side and easy to press. I have a 4K display, don’t make me hunt for the magic activation pixel that makes your 3-pixel wide scroll bar appear.
It’s a desktop application, I’ve got the screen real estate to spare to have the actual GUI elements present on screen at all times (I know, heresy).
The moment aesthetic takes precedence over form and function, you’ve failed as a UI designer.
And any argument about “we don’t have the resolution” can go right out the window, we were having nice, clear and legible interface widgets on nine inch screens in 1984. We continued to have nice, clear and legible interfaces on machines vastly less powerful than today’s and on screens vastly less pixel-dense than today’s. We used to know what the hell we were doing. At least one of these examples even has on-screen instructions in case the widgets functionality isn’t immediately apparent.
since this has come back to my dashboard again i want to call attention to one more thing that these GUIs have that modern ones don’t even try to do.
RESIZE WIDGETS.
Do you tire of trying to grab and resize a window whose border is literally only 1 pixel wide?
Do you see how large the corner widgets are in those clips above? Those are at least 16x16 pixels. They’re almost as large as the Close buttons on a modern GUI. If you can see the bottom right corner of your window, resizing it is a snap. You can aim much more easily at a 16x16 widget than you can at a one-pixel-wide vertical line.
OK, maybe technically Windows’ borders are wider than 1 pixel. They’re technically 3 pixels. That is still just really goddamn tiny compared to 16 of them.
We used to be a society. Look at this. Look at this.
WINDOWS FUGGIN’ 95 HAD THE CORNER WIDGET. Why the hell can’t Windows 11?
dire wolf drama has led me to learning that one of the most major anatomical differences between them and all living canids is that they had Massive Dick Bones indicating their swinger lifestyle
Oh yeah, one of my favorite thing at the tar pits museum was seeing one mounted with its baculum! you NEVER see that in museums, they usually don’t mount specimens with it!
Seriously, the tar pits are the best thing in LA.
Prev, re: your tags…. I want to know about the mastodon having an existential crisis at the la brea tar pits
WHO thought it’d be a good idea to make a statue of a mastodon actively dying in tar while her mate and child look on
WHO thought it would be a good idea to give the baby this facial expression?
The male looks on, impassive. This is not the first wife he’s lost to the tar pit, and she won’t be the last. Such is the way of the tar.
But the baby???
This is his first encounter with death. Nothing is ever going to be the same again. He and his mother scream silently against the LA skyline. They’ve been screaming since 1968, and they will continue to scream until they decay into the tar, collapsing into their inevitable destiny.
Oh. Oh no. I don’t regret asking but Jesus Christ.
I kind of do agree with the decision to have such statues though? Like. Emotional connection to the specimens and the past. Like seeing video of elders when they were young and thinking “wow, we have had overlapping experiences. I recognize myself in this record of you, and this can see myself clearer in your current self.”
Probably trickier to explain that to small children though.
Oh yeah I absolutely LOVE these statues. They’re so incredibly evocative and make you instantly feel things and connect to the dangers these animals faced. And it’s so DIFFERENT than what you typically see with death in paleoart, because it’s so very often at the teeth of another animal.
But this? This is an accident. This could happen to anyone, and the tragedy of that moment kinda sums up like, a lot of the narrative of extinction to me. Until the anthropocene, that’s what extinction was, a series of accidents, right? It was this story of inevitability, but also a story about animals that couldn’t predict it, never saw it coming.
And it also, I think, highlights the tragedy of the human-driven extinction events: we do see it coming. Unlike the Chicxulub impact and other drivers of extinction, we keep having these chances where we could turn back! We could do something differently! But time and time and time again, we choose not to, or rather the powerful people who don’t consult the rest of us when making decisions choose not to. Our march seems inevitable- maybe this time we’ll hit the brakes, maybe this time we’ll make the right decision. Maybe this time we’ll look up and see what’s coming. Maybe one day we’ll be in the service of mammoth, not mammon. Maybe we’re the mastodons. Maybe we’re the tar pit.
BUT THEN ON THE OTHER HAND this is at the same time a very strange decision, because it’s the kind of story that public art usually shies very, very far away from! It’s grief and loss and existentialism all wrapped up in fiberglass mastodons on Wilshire Boulevard! It’s this forced juxtaposition of death and the natural world fenced off in the middle of a city of almost four million people! It’s… man, I don’t even know where I’m going with this, I just think it’s ridiculous and beautiful and moving and a bunch of incredible, contradictory things all at once.
There is a reason I love the La Brea tar pits so much. It’s not just that they’re a cool paleontological site with a fantastic museum- it’s that when I look at the way people think about them, the way the museum educators talk about them, the way the city grew up around them, I think that conceptually the tar pits can represent a lot more than what they are.
