how do we live through such tiny freedoms

Do you ever write a sentence and then realize “Nah, that’s too self aware for you” and backspace a bunch of times.

[Image ID: Tumblr tag reading: #*has character development* Woah!!! not yet pal /End ID]

It's so weird to me when people are like 'but that will cost the government money!' So what? They're the government, they're supposed to be spending money. What, you want them to take your tax dollars and then do nothing with it? Lock it all up in a big government vault and just look at it? Why are you so scared of giving a third grader lunch or a homeless person a house.

thinking about when i was small, how my mom told me that pipe cleaners were just a tool until people started idly shaping things with them and it grew so popular that they were marketed as crafting materials. and that story about how the original frisbees were disposable pie plates that students flattened to throw. and how when i was a child i had a wooden mancala set with shiny, colorful stones, but on invention it was played with rocks and grooves dug into the dirt. and middle school, paper football and tic-tac-toe and mash and mad libs, games that just need pen and paper. and before that, games of pretend with pirates and princes and masked marauders. how at slumber parties after lights out, we used to whisper storytelling games, i say one sentence and you say the next. and shadow puppets. and the way all the kids in the neighborhood used to divide into teams and throw fallen pine cones at one another. and the floor is lava game, and the quiet game, and the games i play with my coworkers that are just words and retention. and "put a finger down" on the high school bus. and little girls clapping together, and how the first jump-rope was undoubtedly just a length of rope who knows how long ago, and how natural it is to play, how we seek play at every age and with any resources we have and with whatever time we can squeeze it into in a day. i'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist but i think after food and shelter and water and air what comes next is games and stories and laughter. i think that there is nothing -- not sex or fighting or forming unlikely bonds with animals -- there is nothing more human than to play.

thinking about that one wordless calvin and hobbes sunday strip thats just calvins dad ditching his work to go play in the snow... its going to make me cry

ohhhh my god

”#I LOVE that the comic keeps the lens on Calvin’s dad to the degree of not even showing Calvin’s excited face when his dad surprises him, #You can see the joy and excitement of the moment in his pose and reflected in his dad’s expression, #it’s a great little artistic decision, #I realized what gets me about it it’s the hat covering his dad’s head and hair so the dad just looks like Calvin. #you don’t HAVE to show Calvin! You already see him in the dad becoming a kid for a moment you only have to draw that once”

does anybody have that post of that protein/ribosome/something walking along the dna strand with it little feets

i can't remember what or where it was and it's driving me bonkers

Motor protein!

Hello dears, thank you for your generosity and loyalty. My sincere appreciation to all of you. I created a donation campaign on Gofundme several months ago and your support has been great in helping my family, but what we are used to from all governments is fighting the Palestinians and depriving us of life, the transfers from Govendme have stopped and I have been deprived of money until this moment

A new campaign was created by my friend and the campaign was created on the Covid website because it publicly supports the Palestinian cause. Therefore, So now I am asking for your support and I need you more than ever because of the deliberate starvation policy that my family is going through the occupation, and we hope that we will be able to evacuate them as soon as the crossing opens . Your support brings us back to life.

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@omegaversereloaded @paper-mario-wiki @sporesgalaxy @sabertoothwalrus @zzoupz

Original campaign vetted by @/90-ghost

please share and donate if you can!

Can't quite cope with how much this looks like me and my dad

It begins

Photo credit to the exceeding bemused sound technician we bribed with two cans of Carlsberg to permit us access to his gazebo.

hey it's me black mold. thanks for running your window air conditioner all summer. whatever you do, do not regularly clean the removable filter. that's not necessary

you should also never ever unplug the air conditioner and stick a flashlight in the vent that blows air to see if we're in there. it's very bad, that place should not be checked

and whatever you do, if you've already made the mistake of unplugging it, don't remove it from the window for cleaning if possible. and whether it's possible to remove the unit or not, don't carefully disassemble the front panel, document where the screws go and plastic bits go, and open up the vent more to be able to get into it easily

as black mold, i'm an expert on this. you should heed my warnings: now, if you've somehow made the mistake of doing all of the above, you should not use warm water and dish soap to CLEAN the inside of the vent thoroughly. DON'T ever use a bottle brush to get into the hard to reach places. and certainly don't rinse and dry the cleaned area before carefully putting it back together

there's nothing wrong with us, black mold. we don't cause or exacerbate breathing conditions like asthma or other illnesses. it's cool, we're cool

furthermore, if you're capable of removing the window unit, DONT take a hose with the same soapy water and wash the portion of the window unit that sits outside the window and is therefore weatherproofed.

whatever you do, don't allow the air conditioner to dry before plugging it back in and turning it on again

and if you have a central air conditioner, you will definitely never ever consult a manual or sources online to perform a similar cleaning procedure on the cooling unit outside.

lastly, if you're physically unable to do the things we (the black mold) warned you not to do above, you should never ever ask someone to help you or hire a service to do it.

This is the essay that got Cassandra Hsiao accepted into all 8 Ivy League Universities

—

Read this and think, then think again.

Maybe being good at social media should not be the main qualifier for all creative work

Seeing the notes on this talk about all the other careers that I hadn't even considered being affected by this is just depressing. What do you mean you need to be Instagram famous to have a career as a hairdresser?

The UK Government have launched a consultation on whether AI should be allowed to scrape content online with complete disregard for copyright.

The consultation is stuffed to the brim with technobabble buzzwords and jargon that frames AI as wonderful and that this is a foregone conclusion.

You can submit a response via the link above and tell them what you really think.

So many questions.

I've completed 5 pages of this thing. There are 10 more pages of questions to go.

Almost like it’s designed to stop people answering!

I like to collect headlines that read like a time traveler’s last desperate gambit at fixing reality

brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed

It's because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.

Not just that, but there's also character development. See Beast, from Beauty and the Beast. He changed after messing it up REALLY BAD the first time. He learned, relaxed, and opened up to Belle...

You won't catch a broody uncommunicative man IRL doing that 98.9% of the time.

brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed

It's because the writer communicates their feelings for them. If people wanna pull that off in real life they need to hire a guy to walk around behind them narrating.

It's hilarious to me how Colossal Biosciences wants to be movie-version John Hammond but are 100% book-version John Hammond. In the Jurassic Park novel, it's very clear: John Hammond is a con artist who gives people an illusion, not the truth. He knew from the beginning that what he was making weren't dinosaurs, but he didn't care because he had a story to sell. He wasn't just "filling in gaps" with the frog dna, his scientists were basically making things up from whole cloth and he had no pretence about it- but he also knew what the public wanted to believe.

Case in point: https://time.com/7274542/colossal-dire-wolf/

These are not dire wolves. These are GMO gray wolves. Dire wolves aren't even in the same genus as gray wolves, and we know this from genetics.

What Colossal is doing is scamming the public. They want you to believe that they can pull off miracles. They can't. It's the flea circus where everything is mechanised, but because you want to believe, you "see" the fleas. They might be good at genetic modification and they might be good at hyping themselves up, but they haven't de-extincted the dire wolf. They didn't activate mammoth genes in a mouse. They are lying to you and they're going to keep doing it. Don't believe the hype.

It's from Jurassic Park!

"You know the first attraction I ever built, when I came down from Scotland? It was a flea circus, Petticoat Lane."

“Really?”

“Quite wonderful. We had a wee trapeze, a merry-go-round- carousel- and a see-saw. They all moved, motorized of course, but people would say they could see the fleas. Oh, I can see the fleas, Mummy, can’t you see the fleas? Clown fleas and high-wire fleas and fleas on parade. But this place? I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real. Something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit."

In the book, his preceding venture is described differently:

"Hammond was flamboyant, a born showman, and back in 1983 he had had an elephant that he carried around with him in a little cage. The elephant was nine inches high and a foot long, and perfectly formed, except his tusks were stunted. Hammond took the elephant with him to fund-raising meetings. Gennaro usually carried it into the room, the cage covered with a little blanket, like a tea cozy, and Hammond would give his usual speech about the prospects for developing what he called “consumer biologicals.” Then, at the dramatic moment, Hammond would whip away the blanket to reveal the elephant. And he would ask for money. The elephant was always a rousing success; its tiny body, hardly bigger than a cat’s, promised untold wonders to come from the laboratory of Norman Atherton, the Stanford geneticist who was Hammond’s partner in the new venture. But as Hammond talked about the elephant, he left a great deal unsaid.

For example, Hammond was starting a genetics company, but the tiny elephant hadn’t been made by any genetic procedure; Atherton had simply taken a dwarf-elephant embryo and raised it in an artificial womb with hormonal modifications. That in itself was quite an achievement, but nothing like what Hammond hinted had been done.

Also, Atherton hadn’t been able to duplicate his miniature elephant, and he’d tried. For one thing, everybody who saw the elephant wanted one. Then, too, the elephant was prone to colds, particularly during winter. The sneezes coming through the little trunk filled Hammond with dread. And sometimes the elephant would get his tusks stuck between the bars of the cage and snort irritably as he tried to get free; sometimes he got infections around the tusk line. Hammond always fretted that his elephant would die before Atherton could grow a replacement. Hammond also concealed from prospective investors the fact that the elephant’s behavior had changed substantially in the process of miniaturization. The little creature might look like an elephant, but he acted like a vicious rodent, quick-moving and mean-tempered. Hammond discouraged people from petting the elephant, to avoid nipped fingers. And although Hammond spoke confidently of seven billion dollars in annual revenues by 1993, his project was intensely speculative. Hammond had vision and enthusiasm, but there was no certainty that his plan would work at all."

Basically, the tl;dr is that I'm saying that like John Hammond, this company is making promises they can't keep based on science they aren't doing, and the public is lapping it up because they want to believe. They want to see the fleas, even when the fleas aren't there to be seen.

Something I miss from the start of the pandemic was being able to watch movie theater releases from home.

I know why they’ve gone back to in theater only releases, but as someone with multiple disabilities and a compromised immune system that makes movie-going hard, it was the first time in years I got to enjoy new releases as they came out.

I didn’t even particularly mind that it was costing me $20 to rent it for a single viewing. To me it was just another disabled tax, but one I was actually happy to pay for the price of finally feeling included in the experience of enjoying new media. (Not to mention actually going to the movie theater costs something closer to $40 these days.)

Factor in that I got to control my environment (not too dark or loud to avoid migraines. No nerve compression from sitting in chairs not designed for my body. Access to food I could eat and bathroom breaks as needed without missing anything.) the sheer joy alone of being able to talk to my friends about movies as they came out was really something I hadn’t realized I was missing until I had it back.

Normally by the time I get to see new media it’s several months later and everyone else has moved on.

It’s alienating.

The whole experience of being disabled alienates you from most of society, but it always tends to be the big things you think about and not the little. And that was one of the little things I missed.

And now there’s a new Superman movie coming out next year that I’m actually so, so excited to see. But barring a miracle of Biblical proportions, I know I’m not going to be able to hobble my butt into the cinema without risking my health.

So, I’ll be watching it months later when the hype has already died down. And my enthusiasm for it won’t be counted in box office figures despite being the type of person who would go see a movie multiple times in the cinema if I enjoyed it.

I dunno, man. It just sucks. I wish they had like, memberships or something you could pay to watch things at home.

And before anyone is like “just pirate it” — that’s not the point of the post. The point is people are excluded from things in ways you don’t even think about and the pandemic made it really clear that there were always ways to accommodate people like me.

People just don’t want to.

Same. Hard of hearing and audio processing issues, although I should also not have to fork over dozens of dollars for a single film on cinemax.cinema.

However for anyone interested i have recently discovered the fandango at home app which let's you buy or rent movies just like Amazon BUT including new theater releases within a reasonable time period. Its a (small) compromise

*googles*

Oh, I wasn’t aware that AMC had partnered with them. That’s neat, I guess. The last time I checked they weren’t doing things that were still in the theater but it looks like that’s changed a bit.

I wish we still had better access but huh, maybe I’ll still get to see Superman while it’s still technically in theaters.