My Wings Are On Wheels

who controls the netflix account and what have they dominated the suggestions with by watching

who snores

who has an embarrassing ringtone that the other calls them in public just to get to go off

who sleeps on the top bunk if given the chance

who plays the piano at 6 in the morning to wake up the other 

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Yet, the beautiful Josephine Baker continued to captivate the French capital.

Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906, she was an African American dancer and singer who had risen to stardom in Europe during the 1920s.  

To the Nazis, she appeared as little more than an entertaining celebrity, fixated on glamour, performances, and luxury.

This was a grave error on their part.

Baker deeply opposed the Nazis’ ideology of racial superiority, brutality, and discrimination, views shaped by her own experiences of racism in the United States.  

When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, she was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, France’s military intelligence agency, as an “honourable correspondent”. She agreed without hesitation, driven by loyalty to the country that had embraced her.

As part of the French Resistance, Baker operated openly rather than in secrecy. She frequented high-society gatherings at embassies and salons, mingling with Italian diplomats, Japanese officials, and German officers.  

These figures spoke candidly in her presence, sharing details of military strategies, troop positions, and alliances.

Baker committed this intelligence to memory, then relayed it to her contacts.

Smuggling the information posed significant risks, with borders tightly controlled and luggage routinely inspected. However, her status as an international star allowed her to travel extensively with trunks of costumes and stacks of sheet music.  

She concealed sensitive data by writing it in invisible ink on her sheet music, which appeared innocuous to inspectors. 

Her fame often spared her thorough searches; border guards frequently requested autographs instead.  In this way, she transported crucial intelligence across Europe and into North Africa, where she also entertained Allied troops, sometimes performing atop military vehicles in the desert while clad in elegant attire. 

During the war, Baker suffered a severe illness, likely peritonitis, which hospitalised her in Casablanca from 1941 to 1942.  Even then, she persisted, using her recovery period to host Resistance meetings.

After the war’s conclusion in 1945, France recognised her contributions. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance, and General Charles de Gaulle named her a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, the nation’s highest civilian honour.  

Baker passed away on 12 April 1975, at the age of 68, following a cerebral haemorrhage.  Her funeral at L’Église de la Madeleine in Paris drew over 20,000 mourners, and she received full French military honours, including a 21-gun salute.   

She was the first American-born woman to be accorded such a tribute. 

Josephine Baker’s story illustrates a profound truth: underestimation can prove to be a formidable adversary’s undoing.

Appeasing the Hockey Gods

sunshinedrift

https://archiveofourown.org/works/76181971

Summary:

Carter Vaughn believed in the Hockey Gods the way other people believed in weather forecasts. You didn’t have to like them. You didn’t have to understand them. But if you ignored them, if you scoffed or got careless, you were going to get soaked without an umbrella and then act surprised about it. Carter had been playing hockey long enough to know better. So when Scott Hunter goes on a hot streak after changing his pre-game routine he has to find out more.

Game changer book covers I did for a book rebind for a friend’s birthday. My cat absolutely mauled my copy of game changers.

I totally forgot to post about it

The assumer will see a social media post about someone's mushroom harvest, which clearly only contains exactly two distinct kinds of mushrooms, which the poster has identified and correctly named in the post itself, and the assumer will feel compelled to warn the forager to be careful out there! Some mushrooms are poisonous and they should be very careful to only pick ones they can identify! The assumer, who has ignored the fact that the poster did identify both of the mushroom species they had picked, and can most likely be trusted to do so in the future as well, has naturally assumed that the person showing off the results of their latest mushroom haul must have been obliviously picking them at random like an unsupervised toddler who is lucky to be alive.

If someone makes a post talking about how they just got a new job as a bus driver, the assumer might swoop in to warn them that driving a bus is extremely dangerous! It's so dangerous that it's literally illegal to do that unless you have a specific special training for doing that! Even a normal driver's license isn't good enough, you need a special license for it! And when the person who just got hired as a bus driver verifies that yes, they know that, they do have the license to drive a bus, and that they wouldn't have even hired someone who doesn't. The first question of the job interview was about making sure that they have a valid license for driving this type of vehicle.

You see this a lot in tech support. Everybody hates those basic questions like "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It feels ridiculous and condescending both to the person being asked and the person asking, and you honestly just want to skip it because surely nobody would bother calling tech support waiting without checking something so basic?

...and then you get that call. The one where you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting only to figure out that not only haven't they tried turning it on and off again, the device isn't even plugged in. After that, you always ask.

Somebody posts about picking mushrooms. Did they correctly identify the species? Or did they just get very, very lucky? Emergency rooms (and funeral homes) have seen a lot of people come through who were very confident in their mushroom identification skills.

I'm sure your bus driver example was intended to be an exaggerated strawman, because obviously nobody would hire someone to drive a bus without making sure they're qualified, right? You can totally just assume that from context clues.

The fact that someone, somewhere, has found a way to do things that make literally no sense, is not an argument for treating everybody like they're about to make the stupidest possible decision at all times.

The examples given were also very specifically about the explainers very clearly knowing less than the person they're talking to/at.

Not being able to discuss literally anything without being talked down to, leading to feeling the need to include giant paragraphs of asides that will get get ignored and/or picked apart, is *not fun*.

Sharing an experience in a social space is not a request for basic guidance on a topic you have in no way demonstrated any need for.

I think most people understand that if they responded that way irl chatting with someone they are vaguely friendly with, it would not go down well.

If you’re excited to share knowledge, then you can politely reach out your hand to share, rather than instantly assuming the other person is in need of correction or lecturing.

everything needs a disclaimer. everybody needs to set up buffers, all the time, against other people making silly or dangerous mistakes. its not necessarily directed at the OP and I think its even well meant most of the time.

like the mushroom example above, the Less Knowledgeable Corrector isn't only telling OP about the hazards of mushroom foraging but also all their own followers who see their reblog, and anyone who spots the reblog in the notes.

i think some of that is performative, ie people feel they need to demonstrate that Don't Worry, I Know The Risks, Don't @ Me. which is born from this practice becoming a norm - if you don't add the disclaimer ppl think you didn't know, bc the norm especially here on Tumblr is to tack on a bunch of disclaimers to Protect Your Naive Followers From Their Own Mistakes.