if you don‘t personally own one but your roommates/parents do and you are allowed to use it, that counts as yes

forget Resting Bitch Face, I have Resting Competent Face. People see me and think ah yes she can point me to the nearest train station. Fellow grocery shoppers ask if I know what kind of butter they should buy. If a strange man speaks to me on the street it is literally always an inquiry and never a catcall. Once someone randomly asked me what an equinox was and after I told her she nodded and said "you seemed like you'd know." why am I assigned oracle at random interaction

A COVID-19 question!

Thanks for your imput!

I regret to inform you that Discord's new Terms of Service includes an arbitration clause. You can find it here https://discord.com/terms/#16. This clause includes an opt-out, which I have transcribed here:

You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.

These clauses are underhanded ways that corporations seek to deprive you of your right to participate in class-action lawsuits and your right to a jury trial. (This does only apply to us users ,other people still spread the word though )

#whats arbitration someone help me

Bad news, @noodelzmop. Arbitration basically means that if you want to sue Discord for whatever reason, the dispute needs to be handled in house. Specifically, in their house. If you don't get this email out, you're basically signing away your right to legal recourse if they do criminally shitty stuff to you, like with the McDonalds app.

I have been told that emailing "I am confirming that as of the date of this email, I am choosing to opt out of binding arbitration to settle disputes with Discord." With the Email you used for your discord account is enough for the notice but take this with a grain of salt as this was not said by a lawyer

reiterating that this only applies to US users

THIRTY DAY LIMIT BTW. I suggest taking sixty seconds to fire off a quick email with op’s recommended text. I have no plans to sue discord but better safe than sorry

Fanfic tiktok is wild... I see so many people saying shit like "I could never read anything below 60k!!", or "What story can you even tell in under 5k words?" or "A oneshot below 10k isn't even a story!" or "I always filter completed fics by 100k< only!"

And I'm like...

A) which fandoms are you reading fics for where you have this kind of offerings on the regular?

B) have you heard of short stories? If you truly think every story NEEDS to be longform to connect with people, I sincerely feel sorry for you.

C) Average novel length is between 50k to 100k. I'm sorry, but CONSISTENTLY demanding fic writers to push out fics of that length is insane. Just think about it: YOU DEMAND AUTHORS TO PUT OUT FICS THAT COMPARE TO COMMERCIAL NOVELS IN LENGTH (AND QUALITY) AS A BASELINE.

Yall are wilding.

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.

"Don’t just delete an app, make sure you delete your account first. The app mentioned in the screenshot [Ovia] has a policy of retaining your data for SEVEN years after you stop using the app."

A quote from bluesky about this app. Please take note.

at the theatre the other day with my sisters & we have a family tendency to pee a lot so we all troop down to the bathroom in the interval. and then as per usual spend basically the entire interval queuing bcos there's about 3 milliion women wanting to pee and 3 stalls.

anyway we're coming up on the front of a queue and a woman at the back calls out to my sister (angry) 'they're ringing the bell' and we're like huh and she's like 'they're ringing the bell hurry it up' like it's somehow our responsibility to make the line go faster??

me & my little sister get back to our seats first and my sister is like 'wow that lady was really weird & rude' and im like yeah. but also unironically having to queue that long for the bathroom is a gender equity issue. and she's like 'lmao yeah have you read Invisible Women'

our other sister gets back and is like 'wow that lady was really weird and rude' and we're like yeah. sucks having to wait that long for the bathroom though and she's like 'well it's a gender equity issue' and we're like RIGHT??

it's a gender equity issue anyway

for anyone unfamiliar i found this article explaining why women having to queue ages for the toilet is a gender equity issue:

This is something they actually considered when they built the big new arena in Portland, Oregon! (Well, relatively new. It opened in 1995.) Women's restrooms outnumber men's restrooms by 3 to 1. I'm unaware of any other facility that has actually thought about the gender distribution of restrooms like this.

awkward how reassuring i find this

well ya duh society shames speech patterns associated with young women

“Speech fillers” are just a human’s way of saying “wait a sec I’m thinking”. It means we think more before we speak, always trying to find the right way to say it. Every language has them. And people shouldn’t be annoyed by it, ever.

Fun fact: even Deaf people and ASL users have a “filler” and depends on the person. Sometimes it’s almost like a wave, other times it’s wiggling fingers.

When I was a teenager I had so many adult men get so uptight about me using ‘like’ as a filler word. I’d just say something like “oh it’s like three blocks from here” and a male teacher or uncle or something would butt in with “oh is it like three blocks from here or is it actually three blocks from here?” and lecture me about how it made me sound less intelligent and made it harder to take what I said seriously. I mean I’m sure this type of unnecessary language policing happens in other gender combinations, but I only seemed to experienced adult men doing it to teenage girls.

Now that I know about filler words and how universal they are and the important purpose they serve I wish I could go back in time to counter-lecture them about what filler words are and how there’s no shame in using them in conversations, instead of just sitting there feeling ashamed.

A few years ago I consciously started trying to say less filler words in my speech

Due to the fact that I still have to think and process my words this means now instead of saying “um” or “like” or something, I just straight up go blank for several seconds

Honestly I think the silence is more awkward bc it makes people think that I’m trying to pass the conversation back to them in the middle of an unfinished sentence

Ok, so, as most know hobbits LOVE mushrooms, but what if they love ALL mushrooms, even the poisonous ones. What if a hobbit’s body is able to handle more of the poison and it doesn’t affect them at all. And they love it!

And then they nearly give Aragorn a heart-attack when they’re heading to Rivendell. 

Pippin, just being pippin: Look, MUSHROoms!!

The other three, running at full speed: MUSHROOMS!

Aragorn, who is a skilled ranger who knows every plant, tree, and flower to survive: No those are poisonous!

Frodo, who’s mouth is stuffed full: No they’re not. We eat these all the time back in the shire.

Merry, speaking with his mouth full, spitting mushroom everywhere: Yeah, they’re definitely not poisonous. Do you want one?

Aragorn, now having an existential crisis: No, n-no. I’m good.

Sam, mumbling under his breath: Well I wasn’t gonna share anyways.

@penny-anna this seems like your kind of hobbit lore

… OKAY NO WAIT THIS IS IMPORTANT

What if that’s the reason Sam and Frodo survived in Mordor? 

What if all those references to noxious fumes and tainted water and everything were completely literal? They avoided eating anything made there, but they had to keep drinking and breathing. 

What if part of Mordor’s defenses was that it’s literally poisonous to any creature not specifically bred to live in those conditions? What if Faramir was so careful about warning them about drinking the water because he knew it was fatal? What if Sauron’s general lack of concern about shit going down inside his own borders (aside from treachery, which apparently happened a lot) was knowing that any Mortal Man or Elf or Whatever that wandered in was gonna be stone dead in a few days, and his desire to catch any infiltrators on the borders was to keep them alive long enough for questioning?

And then these two hobbits who have spent their entire lives merrily ingesting enough poisonous fungi for breakfast to give Shelob a stomach-ache trot into Mordor and drink the poisonous waters and breath the poisonous fumes and scratch themselves on the poisonous thorns and feel mildly unwell.

Years later Sam gets a pained note from Faramir asking him how the hell he and Frodo survived when all the water is tainted with arsenic according to the survivors of the exploratory party and Sam writes back confused ‘What’s arsenic, it tasted bad and a bit metallic, that’s all I know honestly’ and Faramir goes to rant at Aragorn about how bizarre this is and is really confused when Aragorn goes into full-on flashbacks of watching those four tiny dumbasses STUFFING DEATH CAPS INTO THEIR MOUTHS LIKE GODDAMN CANDY. 

Oooooo, I like that!! And it would make sense after Boromir went on and on about how impossible it was to be able to breathe in Mordor.

Death caps are actually really interesting because they kill you (if you don’t receive proper treatment quickly enough) by destroying your cells over the course of a couple days by, basically, blocking your cells’ ability to create proteins. To my understanding the reason death cap mushrooms don’t poison themselves is because their RNA polymerase is structured differently. So it could just be a simple case of “hobbits are inherently immune to some things that will easily kill a human or an elf”—kind of in a similar way to how there are lots of things that humans can safely eat that we have to keep away from our dogs and cats because that food is deadly to them but not us.

So my first interpretation of the original post was that hobbits can eat deeply toxic mushrooms not because they’ve ~built up an immunity~ Princess Bride style, but because they’re so genetically different from humans that it’s like, “no no no, this mushroom isn’t toxic, it’s just toxic to YOU guys,” the same way we don’t consider grapes or chocolate to be toxic even though those foods are very dangerous to dogs.

Maybe like an evolutionary adaptation to their enormous food requirements: Mammals differ in their ability to detoxify poisons in part based on their dietary evolution. Cats for instance, as hypercarnivores, absolutely suck at detoxifying poisons - their all meat diet means they’ve lost a lot of the metabolic pathways in the liver that other mammals like us and dogs use to neutralise toxic compounds. This is why it’s so easy to accidentally poison cats, this is why you can’t use spot on dog flea stuff on cats; the dog version is about 10x stronger as a dog’s liver starts immediately breaking down the compound so the dose must be higher to be effective, while a cat can’t glycosylate the medication and so it just kinda stays in them unchanged till they excrete it. 

Plants are full of poisons to prevent things eating them, yes that includes lots of the ones we consider safe. Humans, as extreme omnivores adapted to way more plants in their diet than dogs, can eat all sorts of things that will kill a dog because we’ve got a load more metabolic pathways that degrade or modify toxic compounds we eat. Many herbivores, especially ruminants that have extra microscopic helpers to detoxify stuff, can eat things that will murder a human stone dead: deer will eat yew trees ffs. Rabbits eat death caps with no ill effect.

With how much hobbits eat (probably need a lot of energy to fuel their enormous, overworked livers), there’s got to be a lot of selection pressure for not being choosy, and even for being able to handle accumulation of other things like heavy metals just due to the sheer quantity of stuff they consume. Mordor was a polluted land, heavy with toxins usually present only in minuscule quantities in the air and soil, but hobbits eat their bodyweight in potatoes alone every week and are used to high doses of environmental pollutants and just kinda shrug it off as their liver slaps a few methyl groups on things and fires them off to the kidneys for removal. 

Consider this though: Their weird biology makes them stupidly susceptible to something other races are fine with. Like how Sydney funnel-web venom is mildly irritating to most mammals like cats and dogs, but, due to some quirk in primate sodium channels, can kill humans. Everyone gets used to the hobbits just munching away on assorted deadly poisons, maybe flavoured with a little lead, casually drinking hemlock tea and seeing Sam and Merry absolutely lose their shit at someone getting a nettle sting or eating broad beans because “those things will kill you!!!!”.

I mean…this seems completely feasible, if you consider lembas bread, a bite is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man, Merry ate FOUR whole breads and barely burped, Sam and Frodo ate about a quarter piece of the bread a day plus whatever food they could get their hands on in the wild.

He sits on my lap while I spin, he does the little jiggle

In Romanian the verb "a toarce" means both "to purr" and "to spin wool".

In Romanian

the verb “a toarce” means both “to

purr” and “to spin wool”.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

in dutch to purr is 'spinnen' and to spin is also 'spinnen' so i definitely think there is a thing here

Can everyone who reads this PLEASE reblog it?!?!?  Libraries literally saved my life as a child!

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!

Our library also has quarterly books sales of almost free books!! For 5$USD we get in a day early and can buy as many as we want. Anyone else has to wait and there is a limit for the first 2 days.

Also many, many libraries have inter library loan(it may be called something different). This means if they don’t have the item you want, they can get it for you. This may include photocopy/pdf of articles. This can also include along with books and DVDs, microfilm/fiche which is also a huge resource. Check around for libraries that are listed as depositories if you want to look at government documents.

Remember that many colleges and universities have open stacks for the public. You will likely have to pay a membership fee but you will get to stuff.

I love the library ☺

The library was one of my favorite places to go as a kid and I still live to go and just. Sit and read. Or do homework. The university I’m at has a massive 8-story one I love to just wonder around in~ Great places

Libraries are amazing places, we need to protect them to ensure their continued existence.

I used to wander about the fiction section in my local library, and choose books with the most interesting titles - I discovered two amazing authors that way

If you feel disconnected from your local community & want to find ways to get involved, seriously consider spending some time at the library. Go to some events! Organize a reading group!

Support your libraries!

Read banned books!

People who don’t learn can be more easily controlled and told what to think!

me, quietly whispering to the ao3 page of an author who doesn’t even know I exist: I am obsessed with you

me, whispering to the ao3 page of an author who hasn’t updated anything in four years: I think about you often and I hope you’re alright

Fun fact: telling us this makes us update. Fanfic is stored in the social recognition euphoria.

with the news Gumroad is going to be cracking down on nsfw content due to payment processor pressure, reminder that itch.io is mostly known for games but explicitly allows books/zines/etc too and many nsfw creators swear by them as a host for their paid works. (with the caveat that they do limit this to nsfw content that is fictional, not eg irl porn work, among other content requirements; the full policy is here.)

itch.io is especially noteworthy because their approach to creator/platform split is incredibly flexible; you as the creator choose the split. you can in fact choose to take 100% and give itch.io nothing, only losing out on any payment processor fees. obviously itch does need people to choose to share some revenue with them to continue going, but if you as a creator need to retain your profits to keep going, you can set it wherever you like and itch honours that. and as itch has a culture of people choosing to set it above zero because the community wants to keep it going, if you need to reduce their cut, it's an option!

itch isn't as popular as a platform to share non-game works so promoting your stuff elsewhere is important for visibility. but as someone who regularly buys both comics and books off there, it is very, very viable. here is a basic 101 guide:

now: itch uses the same payment processors that prompted the gumroad changes, and may at some point be challenged on the same grounds. it's not inherently a safe haven. but itch.io has historically made its commitment to working to keep nsfw content viable on its platform clear (look up the epic store apple lawsuit nonsense sometime; it didn’t result in a nsfw ban despite everything) and as of now is still small and niche enough they are not getting challenged the way larger, more generally popular sites like gumroad are; they are not trying to be a big commercially viable site, just stable enough to keep trucking, so they are less likely to be subject to that much scrutiny, or cave to it.

Changeling is available on Itch.io, and I set the payment split to be the same as the other, larger, platforms I publish on for exactly this reason.

The mere fact that they LET me set the payment split, means I'm much more willing to let them actually keep an appropriate portion.