don't mind me just chilling

And there was a woman there who was some form of disability advocate (it was the 90s so her existence in the company was a minor miracle) and apparently she completely blew his mind on that project.

See, he'd imagined that this service was exclusively gonna be for deaf people. Obviously very useful for the very small number of people who couldn't hear their phone, but why would you even own a mobile phone if you couldn't hear?

But she described to him all the times he might want to read a message instead of listen to it. Maybe he was in a loud football crowd. Maybe there was important info that he needed to copy down that was spoken too fast. Maybe he was holding his sleeping newborn (me) and didn't want his phone to be loud and wake them up.

This doesn't feel as revolutionary as all that to those of us that have only ever known phones with the ability 'send text message', but given the timing and placement of this conversation I wonder if this woman and this project is *part of the reason text messaging exists*. The first text (SMS) message was sent by Vodafone UK in 1992 - where + when this conversation was happening - and then for a long time it was supported exclusively for 'messages from the carrier', and this project was an early potential extra use of the SMS protocol.

After seeing post like this 👇

And this gem 👇

As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how "inaccessible art" is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.

Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.

📺Here is my list:

Proko (Free, mostly teaches anatomy and how to draw people. But does have art talks and teaches the basics.)

Marc Brunet (Free but he does have other classes for a cheap price. Use to work for Blizzard and teaches you everything)

Aaron Rutten (free, tips about art, talks about art programs and the best products for digital art)

BoroCG (free, teaches a verity of art mediums from 3D modeling to digital painting. As well as some tips that can be used across styles)

Jesse J. Jones (free, talks about animating)

Jesus Conde (free, teaches digital painting and has classes in Spanish)

Mohammed Agbadi (free, he gives some advice in some videos and talks about art)

Ross Draws (free, he does have other classes for a good price. Mostly teaching character designs and simple backgrounds.)

SamDoesArts (free, gives good advice and critiques)

Drawfee Show (free, they do give some good advice and great inspiration)

The Art of Aaron Blaise ( useful tips for digital art and animation. Was an animator for Disney. Mostly nature art)

Bobby Chiu ( useful tips and interviews with artist who are in the industry or making a living as artist)

Sinix Design (has some tips on drawing people)

Winged canvas (art school for free on a verity of mediums)

Bob Ross (just a good time, learn how to paint, as well as how too relax when doing art. "there are no mistakes only happy accidents", this channel also provides tips from another artist)

Scott Christian Sava (Inspiration and provides tips and advice)

Pikat (art advice and critiques)

Drawbox (a suggested cheap online art school, made of a community of artist)

Skillshare (A cheap learning site that has art classes ranging from traditional to digital. As well as Animation and tutorials on art programs. All under one price, in the USA it's around $34 a month)

Human anatomy for artist (not a video or teacher but the site is full of awesome refs to practice and get better at anatomy)

Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.

📚Here is my list:

The "how to draw manga" series produced by Graphic-sha. These are for manga artist but they give great advice and information.

"Creating characters with personality" by Tom Bancroft. A great book that can help not just people who draw cartoons but also realistic ones. As it helps you with facial ques and how to make a character interesting.

"Albinus on anatomy" by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Great book to help someone learn basic anatomy.

"Artistic Anatomy" by Dr. Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. A good book if you want to go further in-depth with anatomy.

"Directing the story" by Francis Glebas. A good book if you want to Story board or make comics.

"Animal Anatomy for Artists" by Eliot Goldfinger. A good book for if you want to draw animals or creatures.

"Constructive Anatomy: with almost 500 illustrations" by George B. Bridgman. A great book to help you block out shadows in your figures and see them in a more 3 diamantine way.

"Dynamic Anatomy: Revised and expand" by Burne Hogarth. A book that shows how to block out shapes and easily understand what you are looking out. When it comes to human subjects.

"An Atlas of animal anatomy for artist" by W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich and H. Baum. This is another good one for people who want to draw animals or creatures.

Etherington Brothers, they make books and have a free blog with art tips.

📝As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. If you want to go fancy Michaels is always a good place for traditional supplies. They also get in some good sales and discounts. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are usually more expensive.

For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.

💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.

Clip Studio paint ( you can choose to pay once or sub and get updates. Galaxy, Windows, macOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, or Chromebook device. )

Procreate ( pay once for $9.99 usd, IPAD & IPHONE ONLY)

Blender (for 3D modules/sculpting, animation and more. Free)

PaintTool SAI (pay but has a 31 day free trail)

Krita (Free)

mypaint (free)

FireAlpaca (free)

Aseprite ($19.99 usd but has a free trail, for pixel art Windows & macOS)

Drawpile (free and for if you want to draw with others)

IbisPaint (free, phone app ONLY)

Medibang (free, IPAD, Android and PC)

NOTE: Some of these can work on almost any computer like Clip and Sai but others will require a bit stronger computer like Blender. Please check their sites for if your computer is compatible.

So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.

I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn't take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don't have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.

Hope this was helpful and have a great day.

All the photos on this tumblr ad the animal photo reference site I run is another resource available for artists to use!

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

- A donor with a scrotum the size of my head. When we opened it up, we discovered it was a MASSIVE inguinal hernia and a good 1.5 ft of intestine were trapped down there.

- A donor with situs inversus totalis, whose organs were a mirror image of what we normally see (ie their heart pointed right and their liver was on the left, just for starters)

- A donor whose right common carotid artery branched off the aorta waaay over on the left hand side of the body and crossed alllll the way back across the thorax to get where it needed to be.

- A donor with 4 lobes for their right lung (should only be 3). We named the 4th lobe the Lisa Loeb, but all of the students were too young to appreciate our sparkling wit.

- A shocking variety of penile and breast implants. Y'all would not believe the number of different ways science has come up to counteract gravity.

- A couple of cases of ectopic kidneys, where a kidney didn't rise to its typical position just deep to the lowest ribs and instead stayed in the pelvis.

My contribution: client co pinched nerve in L side of neck. I asked about health hx; she said, “I've got some extra ribs on that side.”

me: “some?” (!!!!!??!?!??!???)

Nami's gaydar is unmatched. She knew the second her eyes landed on him at the Baratie. No need to search for more.

Luffy could just...read people like this. It wasn't that hard for him to figure it out.

Ace told Luffy who told Usopp who told Chopper about the steamy moments they shared during the short time he sailed with them.

He's actually the one who told Robin. He didn't hide it, never tried to, so when the archeologist randomly asked about his love life, he said he couldn't wait to find a beautiful wife to spoil, or a husband he could teach some of his reciepes to. Even though he'd prefer a wife, of course.

Franky could tell this man swung both ways, as he had a few of those back in the Franky Family. When he asked and got confirmation, he let out one of his iconic SUUUUPPEERRRRR!! accentuated by a tap on Sanji's shoulder, which made him a little embarrassed.

Brook overheard their conversation, and it was good seeing that the youth could still be honest with itself.

And then there's Zoro. He never got the hint. Yes, he saw Sanji as more than just a woman-obsessed man, but he was still a woman-obsessed man. So to think he would even so of bat an eye the other way? Ah! He'd had a better chance of fighting with his hands first.

So he never shot his shot. What would be the point anyway? Inflate the stupid cook's ego by admiting he liked him? And give him the priviledge to reject him on top of that? Never.

It'd be an awful understatement to say he was surprised when after 3 whole years of knowing each others, and almost the same amount of time of pining for the cook, he found out he liked boys.

This in the least dramatic way ever, like Sanji telling someone else how some guys he saw on an island while grocery shopping was just his type. Zoro thought he heard it badly, until the cook when on to describe the guy. Oh. It was a guy indeed, and the blond was well aware of it.

Zoro was so stunned by the revelation that he didn't even pick up on the fact that the description sounded oddly similar to him. Usopp, who was the one Sanji was talking to, noticed him, and was really thankful the swordman didn't hear the "Even tho a touch of green was missing" at the end of his monologue.

18+ Minors dni.

"Luffy!" You giggle, gently pushing the curious captains head from your chest. His tradenark straw-hat is laid on the barrel beside your cot, set aside after you complained it was itchy on your neck and cheeks. "What are you doing?"

"You smell nice, like that fruit parfait Sanji made." Luffy shrugs, pulling away just a bit to meet your gaze. "Can I taste you?"

You flush, coughing for a second as your face goes a shade of scarlet. Of course, to your dear captain this is a perfectly normal sounding question. Luffy was always seeking some sort of flavor or texture. You always joked he had an oral fixation, always chewing or sucking on something while deep in thought. You always thought maybe it was a coping mechanism, the way your typically uncovered stretchy friend dealt with the stress of the high seas. Still... you can't be bothered to apply this context now.

"Luffy, you can't just ask people that!" You whisper, eyes wide as you try to calm down and explain. "It's not-"

"I don't have any germs." He says, head tilted not unlike a confused pup.

"Eh- what?"

"Germs. Chopper says I'm all healthy." He sits up amd crosses his legs, sitting back and rocking a bit on the firm mattress of your cot. "So you won't get sick if I lick you. That's what your worried about, right? I wouldn't do something that would get you sick, silly." He punches your shoulder, oblivious to the confusion on your face. You cannot believe you are having this conversation right now, much more that you are going to have to explain what is actually freaking you out.

"No, Luffy. It's not just that- even though licking people is weird!" You decide that's a problem for another time. "Saying you want to taste someone is like a- it's intimate?"

His brows furrow, framing those big brown eyes. His naivety makes you smile despite the discomfort.

"Luffy- I mean that when people say that, it means they want to kiss, like, heavy." You explain. He just nods along, still not seeing the issue. "Or like a sex thing." You manage to squeak it out, getting annoyed at his lack of reaction. "How are you not more worked up about this? Do you not understand what I'm saying?"

"Yeah. That's okay." He sits up, tucking his knees under him in a kneeling like pose. "I mean, I'm okay kissing you, do you want to kiss me?"

You flush again, somehow the fact he understands what he's suggesting is worse. "I mean... maybe?" He just keep staring at you, and unable to give a solid response, you just nod. Hid face breaks into a grin, and he launches at you with a whoop.

He grips you by your cheeks, placing his lips on yours. He's by no means an expert, he kisses like you a cartoon character, with a puffy-lipped smooch. He pulls away; but just looks disappointed.

"I couldn't really taste you at all." He frowns, eyes squinting in that way he does when concentrated. "Can I just lick you?"

"No!" You both jolt at your outburst. You run a hand through your hair and swallow. "No, no. You just have to use your tongue, a bit. And go slower. Do you want me to show you?" You don't know how you ended up in this territory, but something keeps pulling you in. He nods eagerly. It's not too long before he's chest to chest with you, eagerly letting his tongue slip past your lips, biting gently on your lip each time you try to pull away.

You're both breathless when you pull away, despite Luffys whines. "I need a sec!" You can't help but giggle at his eagerness.

"You taste like Sanji's parfaits too!"

"Thanks." You just rub at your red hot face, trying to maintain some decorum as you bury your face against your pillow.

He flops down beside you, shoulder to shoulder, and whistles a happy tune for a moment. His brows furrow again, and he rolls over; propping his head up with one arm and just... staring.

"Use your words." You poke him gently, trying to get him to articulate what his problem is.

"Do you kiss Sanji? Or Zoro? Or Ussop? Or Nami-" He asks bluntly, the frown never leaving his face.

"No, Luffy. Geez." You cut him off. "I'm not smooching everyone on the ship. Just... you. Just now."

This seems to snap him right out of it. "Great! Then can we keep kissing, just us? It feels really good. And I care about you. More than just as crew or a friend. More like..." He trails off. It takes him an embarrassingly long time to come up with "A crewmmate I want to kiss."

You agree, but it doesn't take long for him to move from your cheeks, to your neck, to your shoulders. You feel him growing heavier and heavier on your body, till you're both flat on the cot. "Luffy?" You look over at him, only to find his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling gently. His lips are still pressed gently against your shoulder, but it's clear he's been lulled to sleep. "Luffy? Luffy-" You gently try and rouse him, but he doesn't move. You know the only thing worse than trying to move a conscious Luffy is an unconscious one. After it becomes clear he won't be leaving, you pull the blanket over the two of you, tucking him in as best you can. Your eyes drift to his hat, still sat in rhe barrel. It feels weird to see your beloved captain without his mentors hat. You pick it up by the scratchy straw brim, setting it on the dark curls of the devil-fruit user now laid in your bed. Hard to believe the highest bounty in the east blue belongs to such a goober.

Despite how odd it would have felt to share your bed with Luffy earlier today, you suppose you did just makeout with him. Not to mention, you could use a nap. Shuffling down into the blankets, you feel yourself sinking down into the mattress. Suddenly, there's a gently, comforting pressure on your scalp. Luffys hat, laid gently on your head...

Luffys hat?

That was something he was taught at the dojo, yes they were all here to learn to master the blade, but their swords weren't only weapons to be wield. They were extensions of the swordman using them.

So he was taught philosophy, and he kinda liked it. He was good at it, really good, but he didn't put his focus on that. Yes, his main goal was still to become the strongest no doubt, but it did not mean he had nothing else to work on when he was exhauted from training. He likes poems, what they could tell much more beautifully than raw words, if they were well thought through.

I mean, Zoro isn't completly illiterate. Yes, maybe we never saw him read anything, but it does not mean he was uneducated. And because everything I touch I must make about Zosan so HERE IT GOOEEESSSS.