attention bajoran workers! my wife left me.

capybara

Guinea big.

The landlord fears the urban oyster mushroom farmer

I have seen this on every social media site and folks- if your home is damp enough to get full fruity flushes of oyster mushrooms (from stray spores from a grow bag batch), they are the LEAST of your worries. You know what doesn’t produce highly visible fruiting bodies? Most molds. And wood rot. Go ahead and grow them indoors, because they’re a canary in the coal mine if they start fruiting anywhere.

^ the above reblog right here!!! People in the notes saying "don't do this!!!" Are missing the part where people are not deliberately growing Oyster Mushrooms all over their apartment, but that the stray spores from Mushroom Growing Kits are revealing systemic dampness problems that Landlords cannot dismiss and forces them to take action.

you should grow oyster mushrooms, so if they start growing out of your walls, you will know that your walls are probably full of mold as well.

Twitter users are defending their right to assume Picasso was a renaissance artist. Tiktok users think watching any film made outside the US makes you a snob. “Replace classic lit with YA and fan fiction” discourse is flourishing. I think we’re just living in anti intellectual times.

it's not anti-intellectualism it's anti-snobbery

Let me ask you this: how many “snobs” have you actually met? Because I have met many people who take interest in art history, watch vintage film or films from films from outside the US (which by the way are not all “arthouse” films), or read and cherish historically and culturally significant literature. But I have never met anyone who will treat me like I’m a bad person for watching Mama Mia or just wanting to be entertained once in a while. I have, however, met people who think art history is stupid and pointless and that those who study it deserve to live in poverty, who are xenophobic and dismissive toward any art made outside the US (or western Europe for that matter), or roll their eyes at people who read literature they consider boring because they’ve never given it a try. In fact, most of the people I know who you would consider “snobs” out of projected insecurity are cautious to bring up their interests because they think they’ll be made fun of. Is anti intellectualism “anti elitist?” At times, but it’s the sort of pseudo populism that fits comfortably within contemporary right wing discourse. Have you paid any attention to politics the last decade or so? If you are allergic to culture and new information, fine. Just don’t claim the moral high ground for it.

you could have just asked for her wig instead of snatching it like that

unmute

You only need to know one thing: meow.

[Video transcript:

(Meow in the background. The meows continue through the video.)

So, (meow) today I am making... (meow) (snicker) pine- (meow) pinecone dice. (meow) (meow) My cat- (meow) He- (meow) He wants to narrate, too (meow). SHUT UP, THUNDER. (a beat.) He's not allowed in the bedroom (meow) 'cause he beats my other cat up (meow) and she's in here right now (meow) so he's throwing a fit.

Anyways, we're making pineco- (wheeze) i lost my train of thought.

So, I use- (meow) (exasperated) pi- i can't fucking these blank inserts (meow) to put the pinecones in (a series of meows interrupt) and then I put the pl- I had this all planned out and I was gonna explain exactly what I was doing and then the (meow)... the CAT... (meow) (a beat.) (Some purring) Can you (purring) hear that? Listen to that)(meow)

Anyways I hope you like the dice, bye.

End transcript]

Well, you did name him “Thunder”, so…

I'm only mildly morally outraged by taylor swift. She's kind of the poster child for rich blonde white women but she's not the worst one yknow. She's like the hillary clinton of pop music but I'm grateful that she's not a politician. I do find her lyrics and the way swifties act about those lyrics REALLY funny though. God bless

Some people really whip themselves up into a frenzy about this white woman and her notes app poetry she's getting paid gazillions of dollars for and I'm not convinced it's that serious. Personally. But it's really really really funny. The whole phenomenon of swifties posting lyrics like Can you believe she wrote this herself she's a musical genius. & she's like "I wanted to fuck like a mountain rat / but you were a mouse trap / we're tom and jerry / but like in a straight way" and when you start giggling about it they're like YOUUU DONT UNDERSTAND ART

this is a ray tracer program. Ray tracers render a 3d scene by simulating a bunch of rays coming out of the camera and seeing what they hit and/or how they bounce. This can be done in excel because excel can be programmed with a programming language called VBA

There is no good reason to implement a ray tracer in excel. Op would be lucky if the robots ever grant them the mercy of death

the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belonging, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

beyond that the columbia common is literally an open space during the day; the gates are open and it's possible to pass through it like you'd pass through a regular block. even after my student ID expired i was still able to walk through the commons bc ID is not requested until you enter an actual building. it's quite common to see parents, toddlers, and such who are clearly not enrolled just hanging out. so not only were the students not trespassing at a SCHOOL THEY PAY FOR, there was also not a precedent for non-students to be disallowed from the grass and walkways.

People... watch out for these things!

The saying applies with more than usual force here: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer: you're the product being sold. (And maybe you're the product being sold even if you are paying for it.)

DO NOT MAKE YOUR PERSONAL PHYSICAL DATA AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO COULD THEN SELL IT TO THOSE INVESTED IN USING IT TO SURVEIL YOU AND POTENTIALLY CHARGE YOU WITH CRIMES.

I still fucking hate that I have to give people advice on this but here we are. You should consider your own personal threat model. Who do you trust and who should you maybe not trust with information this intimate? Pen and paper might work for you but it might not be the best solution for everyone. Police or an abusive partner can pretty easily seize a paper record. A *trusted* app like Cycle Tracking in iOS health which does end to end encryption if you enable multi factor authentication might be safer from those threats (but have new downsides). Abortion rights activists have successfully used Tails to provide a very high level of protection for their organizing but that’s even more difficult and *probably* overkill for cycle tracking, but it’s *your* threat model, you get to decide what your biggest risks are and what tradeoffs you’re going to accept.

There’s no easy answer unfortunately aside from absolutely do not track in something like the Ovia app mentioned above. Thinking about if app X or Y is safe? Just read their privacy policy and terms of use. They will likely hand over your data to law enforcement if required by law or even upon a simple request! They will likely be selling your data or sharing it with their “partners”. Even if they promise it’s anonymized this is probably 1) bullshit and 2) easily reversed by aggregating data from multiple sources together.

I can recommend the iOS Cycle Tracking because Apple is clear about what happens to that data, how it’s being protected, that they don’t sell or share any data related to health, and they have a long public track record of resisting law enforcement requests to provide access to data they themselves don’t have because it’s on a device or is end to end encrypted.

I don’t want to sound like an alarmist or overly paranoid. I am a realist. At the end of the day this is hopefully pretty unlikely to ever be an issue for the vast vast majority of most people. But the problem with opsec is if you don’t plan from the start by the time you realize you’re being targeted by law enforcement or your partner who you love is now your abuser it can be too late. One day I hope none of this will be necessary. Stay safe everyone!

sisko: *sigh* against my will and for complicated political reasons I am sent to save your sorry cardassian ass yet again. just get in the fucking car already pls

gul dukat: there's a hidden meaning in that! the usurper of terok nor obviously desires me carnally

So much of Garak as a person starts to make sense once you know his childhood was a fucking gothic novel. His main playground was a graveyard and he'd play pretend by perfoming improv eulogies to an imagined audience. For a long time his main touchstone for most important figures from recent history is 'oh yeah I know about that guy my dad buried him. great flower arrangements for that one'. He finds out later his 'parents' are actually a brother and sister who had to get married to avoid the utter shame and social devastation of having a child born out of wedlock, and they live in the basement of his biological father's house. (the madwoman in the attic vs. the tiny elim in the basement.) His biological father calls himself his uncle and locks him in a closet whenever he fails to live up to his insane and unpredictable expectations and everyone just has to act like that's normal and expected, and his will hangs over everything at all times, unseen but always felt keener than anything else. The father who actually raised him grows the world's most beautiful (and as it turns out, most poisonous) orchids and keeps the mask of a god hidden in a box in his work shed. Everyone in the house is choking down secrets like it's the only air they know how to breathe anymore.

What I'm saying is that right from the get-go this guy never had the faintest shot at turning out normal, so I'm glad that by middle age he's found a way to get a bit silly with it as he continues to be deeply deeply not normal about anything ever <3

one of my favorite garak mannerisms is whenever someone says something to him he clearly finds completely wild and his eyes briefly widen like

before he reacts properly. when someone tells you something SO fucking stupid that you momentarily turn into a muppet

a wikipedia poem on software entropy

Article Link

"Minnetonka first started selling its “Thunderbird” moccasins in 1965. Now, for the first time, they’ve been redesigned by a Native American designer.

It’s one step in the company’s larger work to deal with its history of cultural appropriation. The Minneapolis-based company launched in the 1940s as a small business making souvenirs for roadside gift shops in the region—including Native American-inspired moccasins, though the business wasn’t started or run by Native Americans. The moccasins soon became its biggest seller.

[Photo: Minnetonka]

Adrienne Benjamin, an Anishanaabe artist and community activist who became the company’s “reconciliation advisor,” was initially reluctant when a tribal elder approached her about meeting with the company. Other activists had dismissed the idea that the company would do the work to truly transform. But Benjamin agreed to the meeting, and the conversation convinced her to move forward.

“I sensed a genuine commitment to positive change,” she says. “They had really done their homework as far as understanding and acknowledging the wrong and the appropriation. I think they knew for a long time that things needed to get better, and they just weren’t sure what a first step was.”

Pictured: Lucie Skjefte and son Animikii [Photo: Minnetonka]

In 2020, Minnetonka publicly apologized “for having benefited from selling Native-inspired designs without directly honoring Native culture or communities.” It also said that it was actively recruiting Native Americans to work at the company, reexamining its branding, looking for Native-owned businesses to partner with, continuing to support Native American nonprofits, and that it planned to collaborate with Native American artists and designers.

Benjamin partnered with the company on the first collaboration, a collection of hand-beaded hats, and then recruited the Minneapolis-based designer Lucie Skjefte, a citizen of the Red Lake Nation, who designed the beadwork for another moccasin style and a pair of slippers for the brand. Skjefte says that she felt comfortable working with the company knowing that it had already done work with Benjamin on reconciliation. And she wasn’t a stranger to the brand. “Our grandmothers and our mothers would always look for moccasins in a clutch kind of situation where they didn’t have a pair ready and available to make on their own—then they would buy Minnetonka mocs and walk into a traditional pow wow and wear them,” she says. Her mother, she says, who passed away in 2019, would have been “immensely proud” that Skjefte’s design work was part of the moccasins—and on the new version of the Thunderbird moccasin, one of the company’s top-selling styles.

[Photo: Minnetonka]

“I started thinking about all of those stories, and what resonated with me visually,” Skjefte says. The redesign, she says, is much more detailed and authentic than the previous version. “Through the redesign and beading process, we are actively reclaiming and reconnecting our Animikii or Thunderbird motif with its Indigenous roots,” she says. Skjefte will earn royalties for the design, and Minnetonka will also separately donate a portion of the sale of each shoe to Mni Sota Fund, a nonprofit that helps Native Americans in Minnesota get training and capital for home ownership and entrepreneurship.

Some companies go a step farther—Manitobah Mukluks, based in Canada, has an Indigenous founder and more than half Indigenous staff. (While Minnetonka is actively recruiting more Native American workers, the company says that employees self-report race and it can’t share any data about its current number of Indigenous employees.) Beyond its own line of products, Manitobah also has an online Indigenous Market that features artists who earn 100% of the profit for their work.

White Bear Moccasins, a Native-owned-and-made brand in Montana, makes moccasins from bison hide. Each custom pair can take six to eight hours to make; the shoes cost hundreds of dollars, though they can also be repaired and last as long as a lifetime, says owner Shauna White Bear. In interviews, White Bear has said that she wants “to take our craft back,” from companies like Minnetonka. But she also told Fast Company that she doesn’t think that Minnetonka, as a family-owned business, should have to lose its livelihood now and stop making moccasins.

The situation is arguably different for other fashion brands that might use a Native American symbol—or rip off a Native American design completely—on a single product that could easily be taken off the market. Benjamin says that she has also worked with other companies that have discontinued products.

She sees five steps in the process of reconciliation. First, the person or company who did wrong has to acknowledge the wrong. Then they need to publicly apologize, begin to change behavior, start to rebuild trust, and then, eventually, the wronged party might take the step of forgiveness. Right now, she says, Minnetonka is in the third phase of behavior change. The brand plans to continue to collaborate with Native American designers.

The company can be an example to others on how to listen and build true relationships, Benjamin says. “I think that’s the only way that these relationships are going to get any better—people have to sit down and talk about it,” she says. “People have to be real. People have to apologize. They have to want to reconcile with people.”

The leadership at Minnetonka can also be allies in pushing other companies to do better. “My voice is important at the table as an Indigenous woman,” Benjamin says. “Lucie’s voice is important. But at tables where there’s a majority of people that aren’t Indigenous, sometimes those allies’ voices are more powerful in those spaces, because that means that they’ve signed on to what we’re saying. The power has signed on to moving forward and we agree with ‘Yes, this was wrong.’ That’s the stuff that’s going to change [things] right there.”"

-via FastCompany, February 7, 2024

Gift it to the goth girl to win her heart.

Stole a mermaid's actual fucking heart oh my God

Getting conflicting information here