@telesilla : #gen x would die for some goddamn recognition

btw, since the spam comments fiasco, the new default comments setting on ao3 fics is only logged in users can comment. the default used to be anyone can comment. you have to actively allow anon comments now; don't forget to check it if you're like me and prefer to leave your fics totally unregulated 😅

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

Gonna need yall to stop putting Biden is Just As Bad propaganda on my dash. Had to unfollow someone because I don’t want to a start a fight with them over it, but I’m about to bite the next person who puts that shit in front of me.

If you don’t like Biden, vote in your god damn local and mid term elections for third party or further left candidates so that we get better democratic candidates for future elections. But this one is already fucking decided, and I’m NOT ending up under a Trump led dictatorship because yall value protecting your personal sense of moral purity over the collective good. Whether it offends your personal morals to vote for Biden is IRRELEVANT in the face of the alternative.

This isn’t a lesser of two evils situation. One guy sucks. The other guy is LITERALLY PLANNING TO OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY AND INSTALL HIMSELF AS A PUTIN STYLE DICTATOR.

PLEASE look up Project 2025 and stop acting like abstaining is some kind of personal ethical decision!

I cannot believe we're doing a reprise of "Sure, Donald Trump is the idiot unqualified heir to a corrupt fortune who's failed everything he's touched, an exploitative asshole who lives to rip people off, the embodiment of the worst excesses of late capitalism... but Hillary Clinton once gave a speech to Goldman Sachs (and donated the speaker's fee to charity) so she's just as bad!"

What do people actually want Biden to do about Gaza? Do you think when a nation disapproves of what an ally is doing, they tear up all the treaties and yank back all the weapons and aid? Not possible!

Everyone yelled that Biden should call for a cease-fire and he called for a cease-fire. Now it's just incoherent yelling that Biden is bad even though he did the thing everyone said he should do.

Even if it was politically feasible to sanction Israel for Netanyahu's violence (and it's not; Iran has threatened Israel so if we abandon them, we'd be risking the lives of innocent people in Israel who never wanted this conflict, and Palestine would likely be even worse off if violence escalated in the entire Middle East)... it would take years to unwind all our legal, binding commitments to our ally.

I know it sucks to realize that even the US President is an imperfect and limited human being who can't just fucking Captain America his way through an international crisis, but Biden cannot in fact go beat up Netanyahu in single combat to make Israel do what we say. He can't just say "Give us all our aid and military hardware back" either. They have it, it's theirs, that mistake was made by other presidents long before Biden.

I know it feels righteous to say "Stop the violence!" and not actually think about how you expect anyone to realistically accomplish that in this hideously complex and hellish situation. But seriously. Either you want the US to imperialistically take over Israel and make them do what we want, or you acknowledge that we simply cannot control what happens in other countries, even our allies, nor can we abandon our obligations to them overnight when they have awful leaders.

We can't just say "fuck you, you're on your own" to the ten million people of Israel because their current leader is waging an unjust war.

The US has no good choices here. Often there are no good choices, and we can only attempt to choose options that are less bad than the alternatives. So if that's how you feel about 2024, congrats, you and Biden have that in common.

i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken

His ghost is setting those cars on fire actually

I hadn’t really considered “the agnostic demigod of electromagnetism is the reason Musk’s companies fail” before, but I like the concept. 

Let’s help him out. Likes charge, reblogs cast

The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.

Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”

LET'S SPREAD THIS LIKE WILDFIRE

It is very rare that posting actually is activism.

But in this case, getting this man's name trending on multiple platforms could literally save his life.

Exactly this ^^^

This is one of the very rare cases where the only thing we are being asked to do is make something go viral.

Seattle Public Library is doing this awesome program called Books Unbanned that allows teens and young adults (ages 13-26) access to their collection of e-books and e-audiobooks from anywhere in the USA. All you need to do is fill out a simple form and you get their Books Unbanned card. Please share this information far and wide. I know they're not the only ones to have done this, but the more the merrier!

this is purely for fun and I've certainly been guilty of a few of these things myself in my years of fic writing. don't be weird in the notes and don't use this as an excuse to insult someone's writing.

"He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding."

Actually, at this point it's not even a peeve, I just really really want to know what it is about this phrase that is so compelling that I've been seeing it in about 5% of all fanfic I've read for 20 years.

I seem to remember it even got a bit of a drubbing as an overused phrase circa 2009 or so, and it faded out a bit then, but then it came roaring back. I used to see the other peeves listed above much more often, but over time as they got criticism as annoyances, the usage went way down. Genuinely can't remember when I last saw 'orbs' or 'member.' But the breath he didn't know he was holding breathes on.

Gen X: [raises hand] Can... can we also maybe not get worked to death?

We remain latchkey kids.

Gen X: quit telling everyone we're dead

absolutely everyone: sometimes we can still hear their voices

Reblog with your score

HOW?

16.

The thing is, if my husband plays a video game, I usually hang out with him and half-watch him play it, so I feel no need to play it myself after that unless it's multiplayer (Soul Calibur, Tekken, Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, Team Fortress, etc) or he says it's super super fun to play (Half-Life, Portal, Devil May Cry). So there were another 25 on the list I started to count like "Yep, played that one-- wait, no I didn't, I just watched my guy play it enough that I feel like I played it too."

Tempted to give myself a +2 for all the hours and hours of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Shenmue I watched, actually... even if I never touched the controller I feel like I earned it.

This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies

Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.

Give it a day

If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.

Employee-customer solidarity

Even if they don't- Your review can be the thing that wrecks someone up accidentally;

"Janie was so helpful when I wanted to buy a new washing machine on Friday, she stayed with me for half an hour and wasn't pushy at all, we had a good laugh about our cats' silly antics and she got Adam and Suzy to carry it to the car for me- 10/10 excellent service, I'd come back any day!"

-But Management has a policy that workers should spend no more than 10 focused minutes on any customer at a time, and that they should always try to upsell the insurance and the higher price model, so Janie was breaking policy.

-And they aren't supposed to have their phones on the sales floor, so now Janie is going to be quizzed on whether she was showing photos of her cat to a customer.

-Adam is a warehouse worker and shouldn't have been in the front-of-house at all, Suzy is a porter, and store policy is both to use a trolley to move heavy items, and that only the porters should do it, so now Janie is in trouble for pulling Adam off-task, Adam is in trouble for walking through the shop floor, and Suzy is in trouble for poor handling procedure. Maybe the store even has a paid delivery service that Janie was supposed to upsell as soon as you said "I can't put this in my car without help", so this was all against policy.

Your review should always be as bland as possible, "10/10, five star service, will shop here again, thank you to Janie at the Town Street branch" You NEVER know what was technically a rule-break, capitalism is not your friend, the review process is part of the panopticon.

FIVE STARS, TEN OUT OF TEN, VERY GOOD, NOTHING MORE.

I never thought about "the review process is part of the panopticon" but of course it is

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #13

April 5-12 2024

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)

I'm not gonna tell americans how to vote because it's your business, but as someone from a country that went through an actual right wing dictatorship my approach to voting was never "which candidate meets my standards for them to earn my precious vote", but rather "what's the worse that can happen and how do I keep it from happening"