owldude:

owldude:

why did no one tell me quantum computers looked like that

what the fuck

(via thechaomaster)

odusseus-xvi:

AH AH AH YES (video by QsmpFRA on twitter :)

dduane:

arrows-for-pens:

distractedbyshinyobjects:

distractedbyshinyobjects:

The vulture capitalist hedge fund that bought and subsequently destroyed Toys R Us now owns Overdrive/Libby.

They have already begun making it worse/less usable and they have a chokepoint monopoly on the delivery method of ebooks borrowed from public libraries in the US.

A fun thing about capitalism is that rich people can buy something a lot of people love and depend on, and then destroy it for fun and profit, and there’s not really anything we can do about it.

The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries

Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry

open.substack.com

And now they’re in closing negotiations to buy Simon and Schuster. I’m sure this will have no negative consequences for books at all.

I couldn’t get OP’s link to work so here’s a clean version: https://karawynn.substack.com/p/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries

They’ve bought it. :/

Simon & Schuster sold to private equity firm KKR for $1.62bn

Paramount Global has sold the publisher after a federal judge blocked rival Penguin Random House from buying it

the Guardian

(via luxheroica)

pascalcampion:

Late night thoughts

zegalba:

Virga, the phenomenon of rain not reaching the ground. Virga is produced when rain is falling from the base of the cloud but evaporates in dry air before reaching the ground surface.

(via shortlifelongart)

psychoticallytrans:

This post is specifically meant to help kids and emerging adults that were not taught what you might not want to share online.

The purpose of not sharing personal information is to make it more difficult to connect up information about you, and especially to make it difficult to connect the “you” online to the “you” offline. The reasons one may want to do this range from maintaining safe relationships outside of an abusive relationship, to making it harder to put together enough information to break into their bank account, to being actively concerned about doxxing and swatting.

For any of these reasons, if you’re not completely sure you will be fine having that information on the internet indefinitely, it’s best not to share it in the first place. The internet is full of turmoil, but we all know that some posts never die, and that others are archived.

Here’s some information that is generally considered a bad idea to share publicly or privately online, with the exception of applying for jobs or working with online financial and legal systems, and some strong alternatives.

1. Your full legal name, or any particularly distinctive part of your legal name. My first name has less than six hundred people with it in the States. I use a nickname on this blog for a reason. Nicknames are a great alternative to legal names.
2. Your birthday, especially if you also share your exact age. That allows for people to look for you based on your exact birth date, which is a very powerful piece of information. Unlike your legal name, there’s no way I know of to change it. Consider not sharing this at all. For age, “minor” or “adult” are all the information a reasonable person should need.
3. Your precise location. Big cities, like Tokyo, New York City, or London, have a high enough population to act as a bit of a smokescreen, but as a rule of thumb, stick to stating a local with at least a million people in it. I often just use my time zone, since it’s the main thing people need to know online.

There’s other information that is questionable to share openly online, particularly your personal phone number and email, but those are the three big pieces of information that it’s generally not a good idea to share either publicly or privately. This is because they can be plugged into background checkers and other databases to try to find you offline. The more information you share, the more someone can narrow down who you are. If that is something you are concerned about, consider following these guidelines about what not to share.

I encourage people to add onto and spread around this post.

(via the-stray-liger)

woolandcoffee:

aspiringwarriorlibrarian:

I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

We stan an icon.

(via in-sufficientdata)

buried-in-stardust:

OP: “So it turns out the plucking of the hairpin and the hairstyle falling apart the way it does in novels really is real.”

(via tanoraqui)

caimofnoceur:

47 more free and helpful things, that everyone can take advantage of

Music

• Gnoosic is your place go for new music recommendations. It asks for three of your favourite bands, and based on them, spits out an artist that you might like. You can also “like”, “dislike”, or mark it as something you aren’t familiar with – which further refines the results.
• NoCopyrightSounds is a copyright free / stream safe record label, providing free to use music to the content creator community. NCS Music is free to use for independent Creators and their UGC (User Generated Content) on YouTube & Twitch - always remember to credit the Artist, track and NCS and link back to our original NCS upload.
• Radio Garden take a trip ‘round the world’s airwaves! Just pick a city — literally any city — and Radio Garden will play you whatever its local radio station is broadcasting.
• Radiooooo Radio Garden walked so Radiooooo could run. This site adds a timeline function so you can listen to radio from not just anywhere, but anywhen. Get down to those 1910s Germany bops!

Art

• Krita free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and Chrome OS
• 29a.ch interactive site that lets you color what looks to be a map of the cosmos, but I’m honestly not sure. Whatever it is, it’s mesmerizing.

Games

• Patatap is an interactive website that responds to the keys on your keyboard with a sound and a brief animation. Now imagine hammering in entire sentences – and you got an explosion of sounds, colors, and movement! Once you start typing in random paragraphs, it becomes almost hypnotic, in a way.
• Drench a very simple browser game, Drench gives you a board with different colored tiles, and you use the buttons to flip the colors around. Do this until your board is full of tiles of a single color only.
• River Styx an interactive point-and-click game that takes you through the river Styx and the Underworld. You will meet many Greek Gods and Goddesses here, and you will also be learning a lot about their myths and legends.
• 2048 this website lets you play a game called 2048, which is kinda like Tetris but with addition. Use your arrow keys to try to combine numbers until you reach 2048, or go ~beyond~ and try to reach 4096.
• Little Alchemy 2 fun little time killer. As its name suggests, the website deals with the process of transformation you achieve when you start mixing different things. You start with Earth, Fire, Water, and Air. The goal is to create as many different materials or objects as possible. For example, earth and air will form dust. There are no rules just mix and match your creations to create new ones. You will not even know where your time went.
• Akinator website is magic or rather feels like one. You can think of any character in this entire world and through a series of question, it will deduce the name. Don’t believe me, go try for yourself.
• Find the Invisible Cow You’re going to want to make sure your sound is on in this fun finding game! Find the invisible cow in this laugh out loud version of hot and cold.
• CookieClicker How fast can you click for cookies? Level up and become a cookie pro with this fun time-wasting website!

Knowledge

• Zooniverse A really neat website that brings people together to create one of the largest platforms for people-powered research. Volunteers come together to assist professional researchers. There is no need for a specialised background or training; all you have to do is to answer simple questions.
• Cool Hunting is a really cool publication platform that uncovers the latest in design, technology, style, travel, art and culture. If you are into art, architecture, and culture, then this website is perfect for you.
• OCEARCH Shark Tracker This one looks right on the money for the folks who can’t get enough of sharks! With OCEARCH Shark Tracker, you can keep a track of tagged sharks as they are busy swimming around the deep ocean. Moreover, the website also lets you zoom in on a particular location to check where sharks have been swimming for the past year.
• Ad Astra-app An essential tool for every astronomer. The star atlas and skyguide that makes it really easy to pick the best objects, make your own observation list and use it when you are outside
• 100,000 Stars is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on the web. It shows a representation of galaxy with stars inside it. You can take a tour which starts from the Sun and takes you to the outer edges of the galaxy while teaching you valuable insights in between.
• wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring how-to articles on a variety of topics. For example: How to make ginger ale, How change a lock or How to survive an encounter with an ostrich.

Cooking

• Cooking for Engineers is a godsend for those who love to cook. This website has it all, from recipes, to kitchen gear, to cooking tests, down to a handy dictionary. The best part about this website is its classic 90’s layout, which makes accessing the recipes and files intuitive and easier.
• My Fridge Food at this point, your fridge probs has, like, three random items in it, and you’re starting to panic about meal options. Enter My Fridge Food, which inputs everything you have in your kitchen and outputs a recipe. Bless.

Work, or relax

• Da Font Tired of your basic Times New Roman? You can spend hours downloading new fonts from typography artists to spice up your new document!
• A Soft Murmur If you’re looking to create your own ambient background music to listen to while you work or read, A Soft Murmur is the fun website for you! Create your own mix of white noise and other natural sounds to relax and waste some time.
• Rainy Mood Get all the benefits of rain without getting caught in it with Rainy Mood! This is perfect for setting a relaxed and chilled out mood.
• I Waste So Much Time The website is designed to literally allow you to waste your time. There are no long articles, just funny pictures with embedded texts. A very good time waster for short breaks.
• This Is My Website Now The website truly kills your time. It is just a collection of small games which you can play on your browser. Effective for less than 10 minutes of usage, it’s good for a short break.
• Instructables If you’ve always wanted to learn how to DIY but didn’t know where to start, try Instructables. They have community posts with step-by-step instructions to help you become a DIY master in no time.
• OBS Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers. only downside to it is that you have a power director watermark in the corner of your video, but its not very large.
• Sleepytime is your sleeping schedule out of whack? This fun website calculates exactly when you need to go to sleep and wake up in order to get a good night’s sleep.

Boredom

• MapCrunch Go on an adventure without leaving your home — because you can’t! This site plops you down in a random location on the globe, and all that’s left to do is explore.
• List of Conspiracy Theories Get sucked down the dark rabbit hole of the internet that will have you denying history and wearing tinfoil hats. Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theories will have you scrolling for ages!
• This Person Does Not Exist If AI and deep-fakes fascinate you, this is a website that will either make you very excited, or give you nightmares about whether ‘The Matrix’ is real, and if you, at some point in your life, took the blue pill instead of the red one. Either way, the website generates fake people using GAN (or generative adversarial networks), and displays them to you. You can refresh the page to see a different face. Also, if this interests you, you might also like:
• This Cat Does Not Exist. You know, because why stare at human faces when you can look at cats instead.
• The Useless Web Want to see what the Internet truly has to offer? Take a peek at The Useless Web to see what truly is out there.
• Not Always Right Had a bad day at work? Did that one annoying, pesky customer or client who just wouldn’t shut up tried to give you a hard time, and succeeded? Then this website is just perfect for you! It’s a collection of stories about customers who just don’t know when to shut up.
• Zoom Quilt If you’re looking to be hypnotized, then check out this site, which is basically a picture that infinitely zooms in to reveal new pictures.

Just for fun

• Tickld is your go-to spot for anything humorous and funny, for anything that’s really cool and interesting, or stuff that’s just plain WTF.
• Paper Toilet Just because stores are sold out of toilet paper doesn’t mean you have to live without. This site features some interactive TP that you can roll up or down.
• The Passive-Aggressive Password Machine Type a password (real or fake) into this site and it’ll shade you for how much it sucks.
• CoolThings is a collection of cool things. From entertainment, to gadgets, to even toys and inventions, there is bound to be something here that will interest you.
• This Is Why I Am Broke This is a great website for discovering new gift ideas which are distinct. The products range from a few dollars to a few thousand. There’s something for everyone here.
• PostSecret is a very interesting website. Visitors are encouraged to send in anonymous postcards on which they write their secrets. There are all sorts of secrets on all kinds of postcards, and the variations make this a really interesting project. However, be warned – these secrets are very real… and very heavy.
• NOIYS – Post, read, forget is a place to post an anonymous note to be viewed by many people, only to be deleted within 24 hours. It’s the perfect website for venting anonymously and not worry about the consequences, as it will be deleted within a day. The best part (or maybe worst) is that strangers can reply to your note, too. That way, you can have a running conversation with a complete stranger.
• Scream Into the Void Take your outrage about our current situation (or any problem in your life) and throw it into the void. Just type out your feels and then click the “Scream” button, which does exactly what you think it does.

And lastly…

• Dildo Generator Welcome, good citizens of the web, to my favorite site of all time. It’s right in the name: You can generate a custom dildo by length, width, base, contours, and so many more variables. Things get wild pretty fast.
• Eyebleach Did you see something on the internet that was just too scary? Or just need to get it out of your head? Click on Eyebleach to be fed adorable pictures of puppies, kitties, or babies!

Earlier post

(via dduane)

horseimagebarn:

horse laying down looking at camera nose rather close to the lens its face is one of tranquility though a spark of curiosity and life still remains in its eyes

(via beeawolf)

supreme-leader-stoat:

“This story is a tragedy because it didn’t have to end this way.”

vs

“This story is a tragedy because it was always going to end this way.”

(via in-sufficientdata)

jeanjauthor:

shrewreadings:

fullyfunctionalminiaturebeehive:

doctorslippery:

soberscientistlife:

Not knowing that you have a villain inside you, a hero, and a bystander is a lesson that everyone should learn.

What is the quote from Jingo, by Sir Terry Pratchett, to the effect of “when someone does something terrible, we want it to be one of Them, because if it isn’t Them, then it is Us?”

“It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”

Jingo. 1997. Pratchett, Terry. NY, London, and Ankh-Morpork: Harper-Collins. p. 205

Everyone needs to know that they have a bystander, a hero, and a villain within themselves at all times.

(via thedeathofablog)