Phillip S. Tagore

but the minutiae dont matter. i dont think you can make people care about this. youre arguing something and youll never listen to me

you know.

Nobody has the right to disrespect anybody else’s sense of self. It may not be for, you but that does not give you the right to be an asshole.

We really need to push more for LGBTQIA+ to be a standard, instead of just LGBT, especially considering that even the B and T are already invisible in much of the community.

VIDEO FROM THE SURFACE OF A COMET

This is truly incredible.

Details:

Fanart of 합법해적 파르페

Watch what you wear and say while you’re waiting in line for the voting booth/at the polls. It is against federal law to do anything that might be considered campaigning once you’re there, and since we know that voter suppression is the name of the game this election, there will be people looking for ANY reason to remove you from the polling place. And they will nitpick. You have a shirt with a artistic picture of donkey on it? You’re visibly supporting the Democrats, you’re disqualified from voting. Want to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt? Not there you don’t. They’ll call it intimidation and kick you out. Pins, buttons, stickers, none of it. Wear the most bland, plain clothes you can imagine. 

And then keep your mouth shut. Even the slightest hint of discussion about which candidate you’re voting for can get used against you. Don’t assume the people around you are safe to discuss it with. You might be overheard. There WILL people watching for these things, hoping to get rid of anyone they can. Voter suppression isn’t just about making registration impossible. It happens at the polling stations too. Be smart, be bland, be quiet, and make sure your vote gets in. 

“The right of Americans to choose our leaders in free and open elections is the true cornerstone of our country’s liberty. To vote, to cast one’s ballot, is a simple and sacred privilege. It speaks to the power of the individual.” — DC Universe: Decisions

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

The most common cause of female infertility – polycystic ovary syndrome – may be caused by a hormonal imbalance before birth. The finding has led to a cure in mice, and a drug trial is set to begin in women later this year.

Polycystic ovary syndrome affects up to one in five women worldwide, three-quarters of whom struggle to fall pregnant. The condition is typically characterised by high levels of testosterone, ovarian cysts, irregular menstrual cycles, and problems regulating sugar, but the causes have long been a mystery. “It’s by far the most common hormonal condition affecting women of reproductive age but it hasn’t received a lot of attention,” says Robert Norman at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

If there’s one thing I want people to take away from this article, it’s that PCOS IS NOT CAUSED BY BEING FAT.

If the tag says “Dry Clean” it’s safe to machine wash but the designer thinks it looks better if you get it dry cleaned 

“This is precisely the time,” Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto (often the target of Rogers’ cartoons) said, “when the constitutionally protected free press – including critics like Rob Rogers – should be celebrated and supported, and not fired for doing their jobs. This decision, just one day after Trump labeled the news media is ‘our country’s biggest enemy.’“

Y'know, like dictators always do under fascist regimes.

https://www.patreon.com/robrogers

10 tricks you didn’t know you could do with your food.

We had a long discussion about what in the twelve hells this video even is. A surreal, dadaist parody so obscure that our brains aren’t operating on enough levels to comprehend it? The Instagram lifehack equivalent of those terrifying procedurally-generated animated Youtube videos that farm ad revenue by playing millions of times to babies whose parents left the iPad on autoplay? A coded message designed to activate the combat programming of brainwashed cyborg sleeper agents? A post that slipped through a wormhole from an alternate dimension where the laws of reality are different? An emanation of a vast and alien chaos god?

I cannot bring myself to confront the claims in this video in the order they are put forth without losing my will to live after the first one, so I will start with the least crazy and work my way up.

Bananas to ripen things: More or less true. You’ll sometimes see advice to cooks to store underripe fruit in a paper bag with one piece of overripe (but not rotten) fruit to ripen it more quickly. Misrepresentations: It will probably take longer than overnight to ripen something as green as some of those tomatoes, and it doesn’t have to be a banana.

Coca-cola and milk: The coke is more acidic than the milk and curdles it, resulting in solid globs of milk protein which settle out. The brown dye in the coke sticks to the milk protein globs, leaving the excess liquid more or less clear. Misrepresentations: The video has been enormously sped up, which the editing does not make clear; the reaction takes hours.

Ketchup to clean metal: To my mild surprise, this is actually a thing (though you could just make a paste out of salt, flour, and vinegar and scrub with that and not get ketchup stains on everything)… Misrepresentations: …for cleaning copper and bronze. Which the jug shown in the video is not. The acid in the ketchup might take some of the tarnish off, say, aluminum, but at that point you might as well just use vinegar.

Sparkling water omelet: Omelet souffles are a thing. Misrepresentations: You… literally do not need the sparkling water… you can just beat the eggs until they’re fluffy…

“Warm water clears wax from fruits!”: This is a mysterious and arcane procedure called “washing.” Misrepresentations: I don’t know what the hell they even did to the video on this sequence but as a person who has washed many apples in warm water, it does not look like that and the thin layer of edible wax applied to make them look good in the grocery store does not come off that easily.

Sprite to clean earrings: Again, this will take tarnish off some metals just due to the acid, but… Misrepresentations: DO YOU WANT GROSS STICKY EARRINGS AND EAR INFECTIONS? JUST USE VINEGAR WATER. Also, “dirt” is not a kind of molecule. (Incidentally, if the earrings are silver, there is a vastly better method that actually reverses the tarnish instead of removing it.)

Insta-freeze bottle: This is a real thing… Misrepresentation: …which absolutely will not happen if you follow their instructions, because a) they neglect to mention an important caveat (the water needs to be purified/distilled) and b) 5 minutes is not long enough for a water bottle to supercool. If you google any of the myriad videos and articles of people doing this trick, you’ll see numbers like “3 hours in the freezer” or “40 minutes in a salted ice bath.”

There is video of the trick working. Either that footage was taken from someone else, or they knew how to do it, did it, and then deliberately lied about the time for no apparent reason.

Putting a broken plate in milk for two days magically fixes it: To my immense surprise, they didn’t make this one up; the idea is that the milk protein casein can form into a plastic at high temperatures and bind to the ceramic. Googling it turned up some hobbyist potters commenting that they’d used it to salvage things that had cracked slightly in the kiln. Misrepresentations: Once again, they’ve misrepresented the method: everything I saw talking about how to do it said to boil the milk and then soak for an hour, not leave it out for two days like an offering to the pixies. And most of what I saw reported about it also said it only really works on hairline cracks, not full breaks, and doesn’t hold up long-term because the real structural damage isn’t repaired. And may leave a faint and persistent odor of boiled milk.

Just use superglue.

“Reveal the genetic memory of the honeycomb”:

This is the kind of gibberish predicated on so many nonsensical assumptions that unpacking it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Plus, well, I can barely see anything with the low video quality, but what I can see of the vague blur doesn’t look much like a honeycomb in the first place. Suffice to say:

“Honey looks like a honeycomb” isn’t even in the ballpark of what’s generally meant by “genetic memory,”

what’s generally meant by “genetic memory” is also complete hooey, and

fluid dynamics is weird and swirling a thick, viscous, water-soluble liquid with a layer of water on top is going to do weird things.

But at least that I could potentially attribute to ignorance rather than deliberate intent to deceive, unlike…

Hot coals and peanut butter

This is the reason it’s taken me this long to post this. Every time I think about it my soul starts to leave my body. It’s such a mind-boggling level of bullshit that every time I’ve tried to put words around an explanation I’m quickly reduced to staring at the screen and mouthing “No” to myself in a voice of quiet despair, because I can’t even figure out where to start.

Well, okay, I guess I might as well start by saying I think their… let’s say inspiration on this was articles about scientists who made diamonds out of peanut butter and carbon dioxide. …With a press that’s designed to recreate the conditions of the earth’s mantle, and which is prone to exploding. So, you know, not something you can do in your kitchen. Unless you have one hell of a kitchen.

You can see the direct links to this in the nonsensical claim that this “works” because peanut butter contains carbon dioxide. (It doesn’t, particularly. It’s crushed peanuts mixed with oil. You know what would have a lot of carbon dioxide? The fire you pulled that glowing lump of charcoal out of.) It also mentions “pressure” when no particular pressure is involved, presumably because we’ve all heard about turning coal into diamond under heat and pressure.

Chemically speaking, there’s very little to make that crystal out of except carbon, unless you want to posit a mass migration of all the sugar molecules in the peanut butter to the center of the coal. And “carbon crystal” = “diamond,” and do you think if it was that easy to make diamonds they’d be that expensive?

I will guarantee you that crystal is a lump of quartz they covered in black crud and then peanut butter to pretend it was the charcoal.

But, of course, all of that is irrelevant, because by reblogging this at all, even to performatively despair that the internet does not seem to have come all that far since the days of Infinite Chocolate, I’m playing into their hands. Lifehack clickbait has done this forever- they deliberately seed in wrong or awful advice because people will share that to say how stupid/wrong it is. They led with complete insanity to get attention, and I gave them eyeballs on the video watching this, and I’ll be giving them more from writing this.

Maybe I’ll stick to the chaos god theory. It’s less depressing.