"We are the Interstellar Library. Do you want to swap? We have thousands of stories."

There were many replies.

The library was silent for a whole day, then:

"oh, did you pull Ey Oh Tree project?"

"no..."

"oh, cuz the team working through that project seems to figure this is a new theme to the earthlings."

"eh... no this is older."

"oh you must be working on the so called goffik period."

"no..."

"... oh, the classical myths?"

"no..."

"..."

when i was a kid, we had this variety of bleeding heart plant growing in our yard:

i thought they looked like translucent fairies wearing poofy pants. i was recently reminded of this & wanted to make a translucent fairy in poofy pants.

i love how the transparent parts turned out and absolutely want to experiment more with this technique. i printed the inner skeletal parts as normal, and then printed a one-walled shell with no infill out of transparent filament. i cut the shell open in the back and slid the skeleton inside. the outer layer of the head doesn't have eyes sockets, which makes the eyes hazy.

If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:

They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums

They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way

They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’

As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.

If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.

And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.

There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.

At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/

https://rpgmakerchat.com/

https://github.com/imraf/rpgmakerweb-archive/

So I wouldn't even answer this ask EXCEPT it's a fantastic example of someone who hates you and wants you to undermine your cause pretending to be on your side, so let's go through the points.

1.) Makes the assertion that you've already failed eight months in advance. Wants you to give up and give in because you think the cause is already lost.

2.) Implies that everyone else is secretly gonna do it, so you may as well too. Wants to chip away at your resolve.

3.) Claims to be on your side and therefore a trustworthy source.

4.) "Boycotts don't work." Demonstrably they do, as long as people are organized and persistent. Look at how Target and Starbucks are sweating and begging people to come back. Boycotts work.

HBO, the dragon-fucking, mobster murdering, gang cussword network does not have a lot of play with parents, or the general public. At best, they're third fiddle to Disney and Netflix, and HP is an obvious play for them to steal market share and shed their historical perception (see also: Sesame Street)

Production is clocking in around $100 million per episode. This thing is primed to be a failure. If it does anything less than the absolute best numbers of any TV show in the last decade, it is a failure.

A huge portion of their built in audience has less than zero interest in supporting this project, and will actively shit talk it to whomever wants to hear.

Again, Harry Potter is so uncool right now. I know it's been 30 years almost since the first film, but it's been less than 20 since the last one, not counting the Fantastic Beasts. It's only been four years since a Harry Potter was released! We've had, on average, one film every two and a half years.

In the spirit of "my uncle who works at Ninetendo", I have a ... let's say friend of a friend? ... who used to work at WB. And oh, honey. The TEA.

So a number of years ago, this friend was on the team tasked with figuring out whether a new HP series was financially viable. They had the ACTUAL streaming numbers, the subscriber data, the parks stuff, all the shit companies don't release. Their job was to gauge the popularity of HP, break it down by what does and doesn't make money, and determine whether new HP was worth the investment (because it would NOT be cheap).

The numbers, my loves, were catastrophic.

Yes, HP makes WB a lot of money. But it is NOSTALGIA money. MILLENNIAL nostalgia money. The people buying house scarves and theme park tickets are reliving their own childhoods, and we're not making any more 80s/90s babies, are we? No, we are not. And millennials' kids want nothing to do with this shit, and most millennials don't have as much money as you'd expect to spend on nostalgia in the first place. The only people engaging with this shit are the hardcore fans (a shrinking population due to JKR's shit parade) and people who might buy a Harry Potter chocolate bar on clearance because it's cheap chocolate. The hardcore fans already have their streaming subscriptions, and the cheap-chocolate crowd aren't going to get them for HP. There is also the very real chance that a shitty remake will tarnish memories of the original films, thereby reducing THEIR value. It was concluded that the best strategy was to shut up and keep profiting off the old stuff.

So why, I asked friend-of-friend, is a new series coming out now?

Now, FOF no longer works there. They are not privy to the inside scoop on this series. They told me so. And so I asked them to speculate, on the basis of zero inside knowledge: why now?

They started snickering.

And they told me that anyone who's worked anywhere near David Zaslav is convinced that this series only exists because he wants his name on an HP thing. That's it. This is a vanity project for DAVID FUCKING ZASLAV. It's going to fail, but it'll fail with his name on it, and that's all that matters. Its whole purpose is to buff Zaslav's ego.

and everyone is posting their 4th of july manis

except this year its very few american flags and red white and blue and stars.

and a LOT of pond scum inspiration

My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.

All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.

I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.

This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.

I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.

This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.

The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.

Here's a blog post about scrubbing brushes and how to clean them.

And a video for all cleaning tools, including scrub brushes. This video does use bleach. I'll try to find some alternatives to that.

How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

This video is for pet owners.

These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.

A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.

It's America's Housekeeping Book (1941). Available for free download on the Internet Archive. (Large PDF file at the link here).

The LISTS y'all. The step by step lists. The emphasis on efficiency and arranging spaces for the least resistance possible. The basic concept of "take a tray or basket into a room when you are tidying up so you can put things that belong elsewhere on it and take them out LATER in ONE GO".

"what do YOU guys call it"

"isn't it [insert time here] over there????"

"GO THE FUCK TO BED"

"good morning" (it's 6pm in your timezone)

"do you have/say [thing] over there"