???

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

holy shit

No but I do miss one that fell into the ocean.

XKit Rewritten v1.3.6

This version was approved for distribution by Google on 2026-07-17, and by Mozilla on 2026-07-21. Please allow 24 hours for Firefox to pull the update, or see how to update add-ons manually.

Changed

Tag Replacer will now refuse to process posts that already have the maximum number of tags (30), to prevent unintentional remove-only operations.

Fixed

No Recommended → "Hide recommended blogs in the blog view sidebar" is working again.

AccessKit → "Pause GIFs until they are hovered over" no longer pauses GIFs permanently in one very obscure scenario.

Install XKit Rewritten: Get this extension for Firefox View on the Chrome Web Store

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

Anyways telling the kids to go collect their parental units at the end of an event is a) funny b) gender neutral and c) just refers to the person currently doing your parenting

LOGANAIR has purchased five all-electric aircraft to join its fleet, with the planes expected to enter service in 2029.

The company said it will become the first commercial airline in Europe to operate an electric fleet following successful trials in the Highlands and Islands in March of this year.

okay so i think i found the article op's (and me in my tags) talking about. being exposed to over 40 celsius (120 farenheit or so) for the whole day means youre sweating a LOT (the article says rashid- the farmer at the centre of the text- drinks around 17 liters a Day. humans usually only need 3, so i presume the rest is mostly used for sweat). so much so that the organizm reroutes water from other parts of itself to not die of heatstroke - salivary glands included, which means that 1. they have very little saliva in comparison to a healthy human being 2. what little their bodies DO produce is incredibly acidic, falling to ~5.5 ph from the ideal of 7ph. Teeth dissolve. Quickly. There's a mention of someone losing 8 teeth in two years

im not reading the whole article now (headache -_-), but later on the author of the article says about 30 million people (employed in agriculture) are at risk for extreme dental health problems. 30 million people at risk of not being able to eat solid food. 30 million people at risk of not being able to find work. being able to marry. being able to be part of their community. being able to speak clearly

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

I think what people have difficulty with is the idea that there are people out there who aren’t experiencing sexual attraction at all until a certain point, if ever, because we’re taught that sex, libido, and sexual attraction are all the same, both in and out of queer spaces.

And when you’re learning about asexuality and demisexuality, you may learn that people have romantic and aesthetic attraction separately from sexual attraction, and that sexual and romantic attraction aren’t necessarily intertwined, and that may challenge your worldview on sex.

But “I trust you enough to have sex with you” isn’t the same as “I’m not sexually attracted to anyone but you, and the reason I’m sexually attracted to you now after we’ve established this close bond is literally because of the bond of trust we’ve been able to form”.

It’s easy to see how those can get conflated. On the surface, if you’re unfamiliar with asexuality, they may sound the same. But it’s important to acknowledge the difference between “no sex until I trust you” and “no sexual attraction unless I trust you and maybe not even then”.

Demisexuality is housed under the asexuality spectrum. It’s part of the gray area between being allosexual and asexual. It’s part of why the definition for asexuality includes “little to no sexual attraction”. It’s a mostly asexual experience with an asterisk.

While being demisexual may have impacts on a persons sexual activity, even demisexuals have a varied relationship to the act of participating in sex. Libido and sexual attraction are not always intertwined either, which can make telling the difference tricky.

I think of sexual attraction as libido that has a compass. Since I rarely ever experience sexual attraction, but do have libido, it’s noticeable for me when that libido actually has a direction to go, rather than being a floating, nebulous, independent thing.

Remember, not everyone is demisexual. There’s a difference between waiting to have sex and not having sexual attraction at all until a certain point. This also inherently ties demisexuality to romantic attraction and relationships, and not all demisexuals are alloromantic.