“If my soul leaves my body, this spell will keep it around and lucid enough to magic myself back together.”
“Effective. Next?”
“My spell feeds off the life force of microscopic things! When bacteria die near me, it adds to my total. Wiping down the sink with antibacterial cleaner gives me SUCH a buzz; I think I may have to dial it down a bit.”
“…I would be very curious to see your notes about this spell.”
“I made myself an ontological component of reality. but then it turned out I was already an ontological component of reality and had been forever and that really confused me. maybe my work became omniretroactive????”
“I’m going to need to hear how you did that.”
“█████████████████████████████████████”
“…i’m sorry, what???”
“oh. right. since I am always was ontologically component of reality, the method in which i reached that would then be able to remove that, and since that’s not possible in any way, the information pertaining to that….”
“You… don’t know???”
“No, I do know, but that information is tautologically impossible to communicate.”
“I constructed an enchantment that has set the net energy released from my death to be negative. This means that the natural state of being for my body is to be alive, and death is only a temporary thing that must be actively maintained.”
“An interesting method for self-revival. Next?”
“I have rotated my age along a perpendicular time axis, letting me freely set and modify my age and keep it constant passively.”
“Every ten years my back story is updated for a modern audience and my age is re-set. The side effect is that nobody I know stays dead… and nothing I do matters because it’s always re-set to the status quo.”
“Effective, but not the most elegant. Any other effects?”
“It turns out that everything is really dramatic now. And I never seem to finish any
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
breaking news from the AP, our boys on the front have just sacked constantinople. take that, heretics. coming up next are the soothing lute dirges of bing crosby
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Hi yes hello it’s me the local wizard, and I- Ok well “evil” feels like a strong word but yes, that’s me. Anyway, I need your help. I know I stole away the kingdoms 12 princesses, that’s my bad. Listen, I didn’t think this through. It didn’t occur to me that having a dozen angry young women from early teen to early 20s and giving them giant powerful wings would be a bad idea.
I know I’m the one who cast the curse but it can still only be broken with true love. I’m begging you, somebody, please come and fall in love with these girls and make them leave, I can’t take it anymore, it sucks so bad. I can’t keep getting viciously bullied by one of the largest living species of waterfowl anymore. I’ve tried running away but they can fly so they just find me. I’m getting nothing done.
I’ll pay you, I’ll grant you wishes, I don’t care, please just come and fall in love with the mean angry women who live in my yard and hate me so bad
CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In the mid-1970s, my dad – then a budding computer scientist, subsequently a math teacher – brought home my first computer: the CARDiac, a Turing-complete, all-cardboard papercraft computer that you could write and execute programs on:
CARDiac stands for "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation," and it was created in 1968 at Bell Labs as a way to teach high schoolers how computers worked. I wasn't anywhere near high school age (I think I was in third grade?) but the CARDiac was revelatory. The year before, I'd had access to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler that let me operate a PDP machine at the University of Toronto, and I'd been endlessly fascinated with the possibilities. I wrote simple BASIC programs, chatted with ELIZA, and messaged other system users, one keystroke at a time, all on paper (the terminal didn't have a screen, just a printer, and we fed it 1,000' rolls of paper towels my mom brought home from her kindergarten classroom, which I then rolled back up so she could put them back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on).
Interacting with a computer in real-time was captivating, but it wasn't until I assembled and used the CARDiac that it all snapped into place. With the CARDiac, you composed simple programs with pencil and paper, then followed instructions that directed you to move paper tokens in and out of various slots representing memory cells and an accumulator. All an electronic computer does is repeat these crude mechanical operations, millions of times per second, using microscopic transistors. None of that action can be observed with the naked eye, of course. If you had a very sensitive multimeter and a very good microscope, it's conceivable that you could indirectly watch this intricate dance, but only on very early processors, and only if you drastically slowed down their operations.
Much later, I learned a word for what I got from the CARDiac: legibility. Together, the CARDiac and I made a working digital computer, with me standing in for the physics that propels electrons down the endless labyrinth of a microchip, like a pinball triggering various blooping, beeping bumpers. Though the computing we performed was sub-trivial (adding one and one was a major undertaking!), the physical performance of that computing imbued me with Fingerspitzengefühl ("fingertip feeling"):
This stood me in great stead in the years to come. To this day, when I think about my computer, I sometimes imagine those little cardboard tokens, shuffling in and out of the slits in my paper CARDiac. There's something very reassuring about this imagery. No matter how many levels of abstraction sit between me and the nanoscale transistors ranked in their billions beneath my fingertips, they are all undertaking those familiar operations I painstakingly performed on my child's desk all those years ago.
(This is one of the things that makes Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works such an amazing kids' book! By illustrating how a computer's operations are built up from simple boolean logic that can be represented as physical switches, the comic performs that same legibilizing magic that I got from the CARDiac:)
Not long after my CARDiac experience, my dad brought home an Apple ][+, which came with a schematic that revealed the inner workings of the machine in ways that I found visually striking, if significantly less accessible than the CARDiac:
(For me, at least. For the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, it was the start of a journey that turned him into one of the world's virtuoso reverse-engineers and science communicators):
The Apple ][+ did very little when you took it out of the box. It came with a few floppies' worth of demo programs, and we bought a few more down at the local computer store, but most of the programs I ended up using with that machine were ones I typed in myself, from magazines I bought at the corner store (I spent half my magazine budget on Cracked, Mad and Crazy, the other half on computer magazines full of BASIC program listings).
Typing in a program, keystroke by keystroke, was another Fingerspitzengefühl-generating exercise. I wasn't much of a typist, so it was slow going, and of course I made a lot of typos. What's more, BASIC had already fragmented into several dialects by this point, so even a correctly typed program could fail to run until it had been adapted for the BASIC that shipped with the computer. Getting a program to run on my computer required me to hone my typing skills, but even more so, my problem solving skills.
After months of this, I (re-)invented the debugger, from first principles, coming up with lots of little tricks and gimmicks (many of them horribly inefficient) for identifying and solving my programs' errors. In later years, I had lots of opportunity to work with real debuggers, created and maintained by trained programmers who'd forgotten more than I would ever know about writing code, and my own cack-handed efforts to build my own version of their tools conferred a confidence and intuitive understanding that I could not have achieved otherwise. Figuring out the need for a debugger and then rolling my own (crude, inefficient) one made all debuggers more legible to me.
I think that "legibility" is an underrated trait. If a system is legible to you, then you have a superior basis for understanding it, improving it, and making it work again when it breaks down.
There's an old joke that goes, "physics is applied math; chemistry is applied physics, and biology is applied chemistry" (I've also heard versions that start with "math is applied philosophy" and carry on to "sociology is applied biology," etc). While this isn't entirely true, there's something profound in it: we understand and manipulate our complex reality by wrapping it in abstractions that package up a writhing, shuffling, vibrating machine inside a smooth, serene membrane with a sturdy and easily grasped handle. You could do chemistry using the tools of physics, but it would take hours to perform the kind of calculations a chemist does in seconds (just as it takes an eternity to add one and one with a CARDiac).
Nevertheless, there are times when it is useful for a biologist to think about chemical processes, and for a chemist to think about interactions at the level of physics, and for a physicist to do math. The membrane and the handle are essential, but sometimes you have to decap the sealed package and inspect and manipulate its internals directly. Problem solving, improvement and maintenance all require the ability to move up and down the stack of abstractions to figure out where to stick your probes and stage your interventions.
This is where legibility comes in. Interacting with physical processes improves your mental model. In Broad Band (a magisterial history of women in computing), Claire Evans talks about how the first programmers were women who did the "unskilled" labor of physically cabling components together, developing powerful Fingerspitzengefühl, with such high-fidelity, trans-abstraction mental models of the machines' operations that they became the world's best programmers and debuggers:
My early adventures in programming were so powerful and instructive because nearly all the programs I interacted with on my Apple ][+ were written in BASIC (not just the ones I keyed in, but also the demo software and much of the packaged software we bought). That meant that I could get a listing of any program I was using, peeling open the membrane to look at the machinery underneath. I could even laboriously trace the operations of that program using my toy debugger. This, too, was legibility: the ability to flip between the effects of the running code, and the instructions themselves (and then to mentally map those instructions onto the movement of cardboard tokens in my CARDiac).
This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the "View Source" function that came built into every browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.
I read somewhere that the Bell Labs scientists who created the CARDiac were worried that, thanks to transistorization, the next generation of programmers wouldn't understand the physical, material processes that unfolded when their programs ran, and that this would mean a loss of legibility and intuition and Fingerspitzengefühl. I can't track down the reference now, but it stuck with me, because the CARDiac is such a perfect way of preserving those virtues.
Modern computer science curriculum includes some chip design for just this reason (just as chemists study physics and biologists study chemistry). But there are plenty of programmers – better programmers than I ever was or will be – who taught themselves and never had a CARDiac or gave much thought to chip design. They work at different layers of abstraction and in different ways to solve different problems. Maybe they could improve their art by tinkering with FPGAs, but there's always something even the most skilled artisan can do to round out and incrementally improve their craft.
In the same way, there are plenty of programmers – better ones than I ever was or will be – whose journey started at higher abstraction layers than a teletype terminal or a CARDiac. Maybe they started with a browser's View Source, teasing apart other people's Javascript to create weird Myspace customizations. Maybe they tweaked a programmable block in Minecraft. Maybe they modded a Scratch game. Or maybe they recorded macros using Applescript or Hypercard or Visual Basic to automate a routine task, only to later open up the source code generated by the macro recorder to make fine adjustments.
Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from unwrapping the membrane and exposing the code beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.
Which brings me to vibe coding. As I've written, there's a world of difference between writing code for production and writing "personal software" that solves a problem you have. Whatever deficits that code has (due to the fact that you're not a skilled programmer) are offset by the fact that you're the one making the tool (which means your needs aren't lossily filtered through a programmer's understanding of those needs):
There's nothing wrong with code that solves your problem, even if you don't know how that code works, even if it breaks in a couple of years, even if no one else could maintain, extend or debug that code. Personal software is fundamentally different from software made to be used and maintained by others:
Higher-level abstractions are necessary. Moving tokens between the slits in a CARDiac is a powerful exercise, but eventually you want to do something more substantial than adding one and one, and so you need to package up the mechanics of computing inside a membrane with an easily grasped handle (knowing that you can always open the membrane if need be).
The more automated code you generate – macros, pasted Javascript, Minecraft blocks – the greater the likelihood that you will be failed by a readymade, prefab component. At that point, you have means, motive and opportunity to open the membrane and start tinkering with the internals, and every time you do, you have a better chance of making a realization that improves your grasp on the whole system.
Automated code – whether from an LLM, View Source, Stack Overflow, or a macro recorder – is the top of a funnel. Many – most – of the people who enter the funnel won't slip further down the abstraction chute. They'll solve their problem (a virtue unto itself!) and move on. But the more people we put at the top of the funnel, the more chances our civilization gets to produce another skilled artisan who understands and can improve, iterate and repair the code the rest of us use.
This is also why I love Charles Petzold’s book “CODE” that takes you all the way from braille, binary numbers, understanding how logic gates work, all the way up to building memory, modern computer chips, low level programming, and operating systems. When read that, I felt like I finally understood how computers worked for the first time.
Computers are everywhere, most obviously in our laptops and smartphones, but also our cars, televisions, microwave ovens, alarm clocks, robo
They wanted to burn him out of memory, but they got a rebellious smoke. Valko deserves to live, and we will not allow him to be erased!
I don’t want to blame anyone or stir up hatred, but I simply can’t stay silent. It breaks my heart to see the entire development team, who poured so much of their soul into this character and this project, now crying over this decision.
I understand that fandoms have their internal conflicts, but erasing a character doesn’t make anyone truly happy. If a character doesn’t resonate with you, you can simply skip them — don’t take them away from those who love them. Every one of us deserves the right to our own journey in the game, and diversity is what keeps it alive.
They wanted to burn him out of memory, but instead, they only ignited rebellious smoke. Valko deserves the right to exist, and we will not let him be erased in silence.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Attempt no. 2 after studying his face a bit more. Main reason why I don’t make lads art that much is because the characters are so pretty, I have a hard time getting it right 😔🙏🏽
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.
Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.
In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.
From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.
It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.
Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.
Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.
So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.
So this was mentioned in the notes (and I mentioned it there, too), but I know that sometimes those just don't get read. So here I will mention other natural fabrics.
Alpaca- my all time favorite. It is both warmer and lighter than wool, and if you have allergic reactions to wool, as I do, this is a great substitute. Alpaca socks are so great.
Cotton- the common fabric. Good for shirts, underthings, socks, pants, you name it. Good at wicking moisture and letting skin breathe, but can also be woven into warmer items such as sweaters. Good all around fabric. Can be strong and used for heavy duty clothing as well as delicate clothes.
Linen- the original warm weather fabric. The more it is washed, the softer it gets. Fabulous in the heat. Use it for bed sheets in the summer and you will never be hot in bed again. It can be used to make shirts, pants, shorts, and underthings.
Silk- great for warm and cool weather. Cool in the heat, warm in the cold, and beautiful no matter what. Can be made as a washable fabric, but usually hand wash or dry clean. Will wear like iron. If you treat it right, you can have silk for 20 years or more. Gloves, socks, underthings, shirts, pants, dresses, jackets, you name it.
Hemp- less well known but a great fabric. Resists mold like you would not believe! Used to make sails for sailing ships, as well as ropes during the age of sail. It was stronger than cotton when wet and would last longer due to the no molding thing. Less water intensive to grow than cotton, with many of the same properties of both linen and cotton. Can be used to make bed sheets, bath towels, shirts, underthings, pants, socks, pretty much anything.
Cashmere- Super luxurious! It is the shed hair of the Cashmere and pashmina goats. Usually made into sweaters, scarves, hats, gloves , and shawls. Super warm and soft. Hand wash or dry clean.
Angora- Also super luxurious. The shed fur of the angora rabbit. Can be used to make sweaters, hats, gloves, shawls, socks, and shawls. Warm, soft, and fluffy.
Mohair- The fur/hair from angora or mohair goats. Used to make sweaters, socks, gloves, hats, scarves, and shawls. Soft and warm.
There are also natural blends. These include (but are not limited to, and are not a complete list): cotton/wool, cotton/linen, cotton/silk, linen/silk, wool/silk, alpaca/wool, cashmere/wool, mohair/wool, etc.
Other natural fibers can include camel, yak, and other animal hair that is shed or clipped and then spun into yarn. Some are more available in certain areas of the world than others. I did not include bamboo due to the massive amount of chemical processing that it takes to extract the fibers. I also did not include lotus silk, byssus silk (sea silk), or any other experimental animal silk (such as the golden orb weaver spider silk) that has been made/created.
Natural fibers cost more to harvest, process, spin, and weave. They can be more difficult to color evenly, because like any natural material they have flaws and variations. This makes them more expensive to work with, which makes the clothing more expensive to produce and sell. But the items produced will last longer (theoretically), will feel better against the skin, and will be better for you in the long run for both you and the planet than clothing yourself in plastic. Microplastics will rub off on your skin, washing away in the washing machines and getting into the water supply. As the fabrics break down, they will become not only rougher against the skin, but also more difficult to mend and patch, limiting their wear life. But because they are plastics, they won't decompose and break down, continuing to pollute the environment unless they can be recycled.
Natural fabrics, in comparison, will become softer over time. They can be repaired more easily as they get holes or tears because the fabric will not have pieces break off like plastic will. It can be easily recycled, and will eventually decompose (which is why archaeologists rarely find clothing and textiles at dig sites), causing little to no damage to the environment. Rarely will a person be allergic to a natural fabric (WOOL! Argh!!!), and when they are, there is usually a protein, emollient, or fabric composition which can be a factor and can (usually) be mitigated, unlike with a synthetic fiber.
Don't get me wrong, synthetic fibers have their place and they have become very useful for certain things. But, we live in a time of fast fashion and high consumerism fueled by synthetic fabrics and exploited labor. Being conscientious of what your clothing is made of, what natural fabrics can do, how long they can last, and why and when you should wear them is a good way to start cutting down on waste while helping your body feel better. And you may find that by limiting the amount of synthetic materials you put on or near your body, that certain things might start to clear up (acne, rashes, etc.).
I know there is much more about fashion and fabrics out there, and I am 100% certain that there is someone out there MUCH more knowledgeable than me. But this is just some information I had and info dumped.
I'm a fiber nerd for similar reasons to you, headspace. If you'll humor me, I have a few unsolicited suggestions for looking for natural fibers in thrift stores (other than looking at the tags, naturally, but also since I don't always trust the tags, since fabric fraud or mislabeling isn't uncommon, and tags can be missing or hard to find).
Bast fibers like linen and hemp usually have a fair number of slubs and are usually woven for durability, because lightweight knits tend to unravel near the slubs just around the same time that the wear level starts to get Perfect.
If you're running through the racks and find a nice hand, remember that synthetics tend to absorb water poorly. Holding the fabric for just a moment and then rubbing the fingers together usually tells me if the moisture was absorbed, or if my hands are still sticky. Fabric softener and dry cleaning can fool me sometimes.
Same as the above, synthetics tend to reflect heat. If a fabric feels soft to the hand, hold onto it a moment. Silk and wool warm up slowly, but synthetics feel "warm" almost immediately. Plant fibers also warm pretty quickly in the hand, but will still absorb water.
Silk and wool are HEAVY on the thread level. A tightly woven silk jacket is way heavier than a poly or nylon one of similar thread gauge.
And although your assessments are largely excellent, pyroteknich, I have a few nits to pick:
Cotton gets WET and holds 36x its own weight in water, compared to ~6x for bast fibers and a little more for wool and silk. When it's wet, the water clogs the gaps in the clothes and prevents airflow. I mention this because I live in a humid subtropical area and sweat basically doesn't evaporate. Cotton means a swampy underside, or all-over-side if you're working hard enough or get caught in the rain. A notable exception to this is very loose and billowy clothing like gauzy skirts. I generally avoid cotton entirely because of its water-holding capacity.
Silk does wear like iron unless it gets wet, then it's very weak and abrades easily. Normal activities in my area will cause sweat to build up and that moisture will shred silks. Again, the solution is loose and billowy, and being choosy about which fabrics during particular times of year. I tend toward bast fibers in the warmer months and silks in the cooler ones. Reconstituted cellulose fibers like "bamboo", ramie, rayon, and so on have similarly poor durability when wet. Silk also stains very easily and HATES being in the sun to dry or for too long period, as UV light breaks it down, just something to be aware of.
And also unsolicited, I would like to share a few tips I've picked up for keeping natural fibers in good shape so they can get to that delightful broken-in level. We have very, very soft water in my area, so your mileage may vary.
If not handwashing, a top-loading washer, filled up completely with cold water, is pretty close to handwashing, on delicate settings.
Most of the time, "dry clean only" is a bunch of nonsense, except with suits or dresses made with water-soluble interfacing. People washed these pieces for how many centuries before dry cleaning existed? Yeah. Unfortunately, I don't know an easy way to find out if interfacings are water-soluble, except to give the piece a wash. I've restored dozens of stinky natural-fiber pieces that were discarded because the original owner's dry cleaning didn't remove the water-soluble odors, and I "restored" them just by giving them a nice wash. Sometimes a pair of suit pants or a jacket will start poking out the plastic interfacing after the wash, so yknow. Caveat washor.
Even if handwashing, strongly alkaline detergents or high heat will cause protein-based fibers like wools and silks to denature and degrade rapidly during the abrasion of washing. Vinegar will help, and mild curd soaps are best. If only washing wools, a little liquid lanolin mixed well with hot water and curd soap prior to adding to the wash water will help restore the fibers, making the garment more water-repellent, stronger, and more durable. Small amounts of detergents can be used to boost the efficacy of the wash if there is a lot of oil in the laundry soils.
Inversely, plant fibers prefer hot water and can withstand alkaline detergents well, making washing soda and borax viable additions, but hot water will often cause stains to set. I like to help remove the alkalines from the fabric by using vinegar in the rinse. Machine drying, even on "air dry" settings, will still cause static buildup in the fibers, making them slightly water-repellent and for myself, an extremely unpleasant sensory experience. I try to line-dry everything, which is difficult when showers and storms are unpredictable and frequent, and the humidity is 70%+ most days during the hottest part of the day. Still worth it, and indoor line-dry is an option.
Wools and silks are magnets for carpet beetles and clothes moths. When I'm storing clothes for the season, I wash them, gently lanolize the wools, make sure they're 100% dry, then heat up an oven with a baking stone to 200F (90C), line a metal sheet pan with parchment paper, cut the oven, and then leave the clothes in the oven for 30min to kill any eggs. Then I wrap them tightly with plastic bags and put them in plastic bins for storage, and I've never had a problem with insects since. I got the idea from bedbug treatments.
I hope that fellow sufferers from fast fashion and the electrostatic nightmare that is synthetic clothing can get a little something out of the years I've been working on this. I have pieces I've been wearing regularly for 15 years using these techniques.
One of the things I love about Tumblr compared to other sites is that you can find a post about a certain topic, and then press Keep reading... And then keep reading... And then another person has more to add to it, and keep reading, and keep reading... And then before you know it you know a sizeable amount more about natural fabrics than the average person, even if that knowledge alone doesn't make you a professional. But then, unlike the few other platforms that somewhat incentivize long-form content, you need to press 'Keep Reading'. I keep reading because I'm interested, when I'm mindlessly scrolling and I bump into 'Keep Reading', I question whether or not I'm actually interested. If I'm not, I move on, without consuming an extra fifteen minutes of my time mindlessly reading without absorbing. And now here I am, derailing a thread about fabrics with a meta commentary on this slowly decaying former sanctuary from typical social media bullshit, and all the upsides that this hellsite still offers. I wish I'd actually listened when my old friends first told me I should really make a Tumblr account eight or so years ago.