Ramblings of a Rusty Pencil

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it’ll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I’d recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn’t read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can’t for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You’ll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It’s genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

a lot of fun activities are as much of escapism as they are entertainment by their own right. something you do when you want to have fun. but you can not always force more fun. and trying to force there to be more fun when things have stopped being fun can make there be less fun in the long term. you might start to associate the fun thing with bad feelings, frustration, and having a bad time. which is not ideal for something that should be fun.

ok ok ok I’m so sorry but I HAVE to talk about this

there’s something so loving about what tom björklund does and just- fuck I’m foaming at the mouth here

facial reconstruction isn’t a new concept (see the Kennewick Man/Patrick Stewart incident) but it’s difficult to find people that are truly good at it! genuinely there is a big gap in this field because there just aren’t a lot of people who do it professionally!

facial reconstruction, especially from bone or bone fragments, is such a fascinating intersection of art and science, and a tremendous amount of care is put into determining what these people might have looked like.

with that said, it’s VERY easy to screw it up

configuring muscle attachments and fat distribution is genuinely *very* difficult to do, and when you do it badly, you get this (pictured above). by adding too much muscle, they gave this 600 year old man a VERY interesting jawline (notice that the bottom of the chin doesn’t match up with the bone at all!) and they *really* made him look older than he was. would you believe me if I said that he was estimated to only be 46 years old?

basically I’m just REALLY excited about Tom Björklund’s art because it’s amazing work, just from an anthropology perspective

just look at this!!!

facial reconstructions aren’t just an artsy thing that you can just say “oh, that’s cool!” to

by giving these people faces, even if they aren’t always accurate, we open the doors for the average person to connect with the past at a very human level. sure, looking at bones is cool, but looking at art of someone that lived thousands of years ago is *incredible*

Like we have 1.7 million+ items in our collection do you think that a staff of 50 actually has time to even physically page thru or run thru every one of them? If every single staff member were only taking one hour to look through every single book or other collection piece (movies, games, whatever) (which: an hour would NOT be enough even to look at every single part of most of them, but okay fine, an hour), that's still 1.7 million hours divided between 50 people. That's 34K work hours, which at 35 hours a week is more than 971 weeks, aka and that's with all of us doing nothing else, at all.

That would be 18 years just to give each single solitary book an hour, reviewing full time, 35 hours a week, with 50 staff only doing that. And we're a small, single-branch library.

Don't be silly.

Also also (forgive my tangent, OP) it is as a librarian/information-services professional, honestly, that I will cut you over AO3. As a pure end-user/fan/etc are there things about it that are not my favourite/I wish were different? Yeah, sure.

As a public-facing information professional whose education and preferred career path involves the impossibilities of classification and cataloguing and subject-heading and "community-led collection and program development" and all that shit that is also what everyone at AO3 has to do daily for like millions larger community than I do, I will throw down right here and right now, man. You could literally not pay me enough to take leadership role in a community-led collection for our fuckheaded fan community, I know us way too well. We are worse to deal with than a municipal community, we are literally everything you could point out about the most fractious possible arts community with everyone absolutely sure that their preferred way of doing things is the obvious mass will of the community (while being diametrically opposed to the way that an entire other huge chunk of the community wants) - you could not PAY ME, and it's mostly being done out of love, for free, on a budget a fraction the size of what my (small, municipal) library works with.

Say that you’ve bought a concert ticket for $50 for a band that you don’t know that well. Half an hour into the show, you realize that you don’t actually enjoy the music and you aren’t having a good time - instead of leaving the concert to go do something else, however, you sit through the remaining hours of the concert because you don’t want to “waste” the cost of the ticket. 

Congratulations, you’ve just fallen victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

The “sunk cost fallacy” is something that all humans are prone to when we make decisions. Simply put, it’s the human tendency to consider past costs when we make choices, even when those costs are no longer relevant. When you’re deciding whether or not to stay at that concert you aren’t enjoying, you will likely consider the cost of the ticket when you’re making your decision - for instance, you’d probably be a lot more willing to leave a $5 concert that you aren’t enjoying than a $50 concert that you aren’t enjoying. But taking the cost of the ticket into account at all is a mistake. 

When you’re making a rational decision, the only thing that matters is the future. Time, effort and money that you’re spent up until that point no longer matter - it doesn’t make sense to consider them, because no matter what you decide, you can’t actually get them back. They are “sunk” costs. If you decide to stay at that concert, you are out $50 and you’ll have a mediocre evening. If you decide to go leave and do something more fun, you are out $50 and you’ll have a better evening. No matter what you choose, you have lost $50 - but choosing to leave the concert means that you haven’t also spent an evening doing something you don’t like.

The sunk cost fallacy is sometimes also described as “throwing good money after bad” - people will waste additional time, resources and effort simply to justify the fact that they’ve already wasted time, resources and effort, even if it leaves them worse off overall. 

Common examples of sunk cost fallacy in everyday life include:

refusing to get rid of clothes that don’t fit or that you never wear because they were expensive

going to an event that you no longer want to go to because you already bought the ticket 

spending more and more money on repairing a car or computer (or something else that depreciates in value over time) instead of buying a new one because you don’t want to waste the money you put into earlier repairs

continuing to watch a movie or TV show you aren’t enjoying anymore because you’ve already watched part of it 

finishing a plate of food that you’re not enjoying or are too full to enjoy, because you don’t want to waste it

refusing to get rid of unused, unwanted or broken items in your home because the items were expensive

Perhaps the most damaging example of sunk cost fallacy in everyday life, however, is relationships. 

People often use the length of a relationship to justify staying in it. You’ve probably heard this logic - you may even have used it yourself: “I can’t break up with him or the two years we spent together will be for nothing.”

“If I leave her, it will mean I wasted the five years I spent with her.”

“high risk people will protect themselves” how? did you think about that? are we able to go grocery shopping? are we able to see loved ones? are we able to access lifesaving medical appointments? no! you refuse to protect us!

"Abled entitlement ensures your risk assessment will always be, 'if I get sick, I will be able to recover OK. My family will be OK. My children will be OK.'  Never, 'Will they be OK? Will their children be OK? Will their family be OK? Will everyone they might also interact with be OK?' Never, 'Could this harm their neighborhood? Their state? Their country? Their continent?' Shielded by your abled privileged bravado of 'it won’t happen to me.'  Never, 'Who might I be exposing? I might be OK, but someone else may not.'

[...]

Abled supremacy means that many of you mistakenly think that if you do get COVID and if you end up with long COVID, that the state will take care of you or that your community will. You believe this because you do not know about the lived reality of disability in this country. [...] Our government does not care about the disabled people that already exist.

[...]

You interrogate your privilege, but never your abled privilege. You educate yourself about oppression, but never ableism. You love your queer, BIPOC, working class, abolitionist, anti-racist, feminist, immigrant communities, but never seem to remember that disabled people exist in these and every community.

[...]

When you talk to me about racial justice or housing justice or healing justice or gender justice, who exactly are you talking about? Whose justice are you fighting for? Because it never seems to include disabled people or if it does, it is only in theory, not practice; only to make yourself look better. Or it is only when disabled people are in the room or when we initiate the conversation.

[...]

I need you to not only say that you are in solidarity with disabled people or that you value disability justice; I need you to practice it. I need you to engage in the hard conversations with fellow abled people about vaccines and boosters, masks and canceling indoor in-person gatherings, unnecessary travel and work. Many disabled people have been doing this labor because we do not have a choice.

[...]

This pandemic will create millions more disabled people with chronic illnesses. Are we ready for what is coming next? Are we prepared for how many more disabled people with chronic health conditions there will be? Are we ready for how that will and should necessarily shift our movements and political work? Or are we going to continue to shut out disability and disabled people from movements and communities? Are we going to continue to not include ableism and abled supremacy in our liberation work?

[...]

Next stop - The End Times. 🔥 

so, first of all, tumblr’s culture has changed a lot in the past couple years. there’s a genuine community effort to not start any drama, and ironically a lot of the current hostility is an effort to keep things calm. there’s also a change in how people interact with posts, so if you haven’t been here in a while please skip down to the tags/replies/reblog with text section.

for newcomers: you should be reblogging posts about as liberally as you would like something on twitter. if you only like stuff, people will think you are rude/a bot. you’ve probably heard people talk about “cultivating your dash,” and thats because this platform is 100% centered around your dashboard. trending matters less, unfollowing and blocking in order to shape your dash into it’s best form is widely accepted, the majority of the content you’ll find and interact with will be because of your dash, and the only way to put things on your dash is to reblog them. tumblr users are deeply distrustful of algorithms and have largely turned off the “see posts your friends have liked” function (i recommend you also turn of the various algorithms in settings → general settings → dashboard preferences).

so, once you’ve reblogged a post, there’s three ways to add content to it. the tags, replies, and reblogging with text. all of them have different connotations

the tags: an inside voice. originally they were meant for organizing your blog (and they’re still used for this), but they’ve also morphed into a way to share thoughts that aren’t funny/insightful enough for non-followers to be interested in. when in doubt, put your comment in the tags

replies: basically talking to your friends in class. your followers have no way of finding your replies (they don’t pop up on the dash, nobody gets notified except for the original poster) so chances are, only the person who made the post is gonna see your comment. it’s for quick one-offs that you’re okay with other people overhearing, but really is only made for one person. they’re like a public dm

reblog with text: an outside voice. you’re getting up on a stage in town square and entertaining people. make sure it’s funny or insightful— bottom line, add something new to the conversation. you should use this the least

general rules of thumb: 

when in doubt, reblog. people will judge you if your blog is only personal posts and you only interact with other content by liking it.  

the only things people will judge you for reblogging are personal vent posts. leave a like to give a little virtual hug

if a post is asking about your personality/opinions (i.e: tell me what’s the last tv show you watched, that kind of thing) put it in the tags