its robin hoot :)

I lost a needle I liked in my pincushion so I decided to get a strong magnet and see if I could pull it back out.

I pulled out 68.

I very rarely sew.

Except this was actually really fun and I might put them back in from time to time just for enrichment.

Eldritch High by Gwen Marshall, is a game of Transgressive Puberty. You are teens who are experiencing both the strange and alien changes of puberty, as well as feeling something eldritch take hold. Will you conform or transform?

Lesbian Werewolf Crimefighters, by Dusty Hill, is a game about crimefighters that must keep their identities as both superheroes and werewolves secret. Incredibly queer, I see no reason not to make it more so!

Turn, by Beau Jágr Sheldon, is a game about rural shapeshifters in a community you create together. You can also pick up Towns Like Ours if you want a pre-made community to get started in!

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

🚨⚠️ATTENTION FELLOW WRITERS⚠️🚨

If you use Google Docs for your writing, I highly encourage you to download your work, delete it from Google Docs, and transfer it to a different program/site, unless you want AI to start leeching off your hard work!!!

I personally have switched to Libre Office, but there are many different options. I recommend checking out r/degoogle for options.

Here’s a source:

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

close latching -- how much time should I give between when you stop talking and when I start? Very close latching can feature a lot of overlaps.

participatory listening -- how do I signal to you that I’m engaged with what you’re saying and paying attention? Do I make any noise at all, or do I limit myself to minimal “backchannel” noises (mm-hmm, ah, yeah), or do I fully verbalize my reactions as you’re going? Maybe even chime in along with you, if I anticipate what you’re about to say, to show how well we’re vibing?

support request -- this can shade into interruption as a form of sealioning, but if someone interjects a request like “I didn’t catch that” or “What’s that mean?” it’s not really an interruption, because they’re not trying to end/take my turn away, they’re inviting me to keep going with clarification/adaptation.

asides -- if there’s more than two people involved in a conversation, a certain amount of cross-talk is probably inevitable.

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

norms about turn latching: someone who’s not used to close-latching conversation might feel interrupted or stepped on when talking to someone who is. The converse is that someone who’s expecting close-latching might feel the absence of it as awkward silence, withdrawal, coldness, etc.

norms about backchannel: if you’re not expecting me to provide running commentary on your story or finish your sentences (or if I’m doing it wrong) then you might feel interrupted. But if you’re expecting that level of feedback you might feel ignored.

neurodivergence: If I have auditory processing problems, I might take longer to respond to you than you’re expecting. If I have impulse control problems, I might blurt something out as soon as I think of it, but I don’t necessarily want you to stop. If I have trouble with nonverbal or paralinguistic cues, I might not latch my turns the way you expect, or my backchannel might be timed in a way you don’t expect.

Non-native speakers of a language may need more time to process speech; may speak more slowly and with pauses in different places than native speakers; may not pick up the same cues about turn-latching and backchannel, resulting in a timing difference; may need to make more requests for support. 

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

So it turns out that ChatGPT not only uses a ton shit of energy, but also a ton shit of water. This is according to a new study by a group of researchers from the University of Colorado Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington, Futurism reports.

Which sounds INSANE but also makes sense when you think of it. You know what happens to, for example, your computer when it’s doing a LOT of work and processing. You gotta cool those machines.

And what’s worrying about this is that water shortages are already an issue almost everywhere, and over this summer, and the next summers, will become more and more of a problem with the rising temperatures all over the world. So it’s important to have this in mind and share the info. Big part of how we ended up where we are with the climate crisis is that for a long time politicians KNEW about the science, but the large public didn’t have all the facts. We didn’t have access to it. KNOWING about things and sharing that info can be a real game-changer. Because then we know up to what point we, as individuals, can have effective actions in our daily lives and what we need to be asking our legislators for.

On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) -- these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.

Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.

Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: ".zip" and ".mov".

This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it's in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.

What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.

Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.

This is what we're seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.

What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you're on, don't enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.

I'm seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company's internet, and that's probably wise.

A malicious actor sets up a page with an auto-downloader squatting on a domain name that matches a common zip file name like photos DOT zip. This website is set up to start an auto downloader upon being visited, downloading a zip file with the same name as the URL which contains malicious software (virus, worm, keylogger, etc).

Scenario.

Someone you know well sends you an email or text with promised photos attached. The email even reads something like this.

Because .zip is now a TLD, that plain text is automatically formatted into a link to malicious actor's website without them having to send you anything.

Folk with family with iPhones or iPads that are sent multiple photos in one go might be familiar with iCloud's tendency to automatically compile them into zip file for the sender and less savvy tech users have trouble NOT doing that.

These same less savvy users, or even just someone just not thinking in the moment, will click that .zip link, not realizing it isn't the the same as clicking on the promised attachment.

They download a file that matches the name they expected. They open it because they were expecting that file and it's from a trusted source. Except the file they downloaded isn't the one that was sent by their trusted source and now they have malware.

Another Scenario.

An IT person tries to send you an email with instructions on how to resolve a problem with a commonly used filename like install-repair DOT zip or to install new software like microsoft-office DOT zip.

The email may start with instructions of where to go get the legitimate file to do the install or repair, but now a line later in the instructions is also has a link to a .zip URL. A user, already frazzled by IT problems, may click it to ensure they have the right file. Again, they download malicious code from a squatting website or it prompts them with a fake login and now the squatting website has stolen their login credentials for a legitimate site. All due to an expected email from a trusted source.

Above you can see microsoft-office DOT zip is already out there with a fake Microsoft login screen waiting to steal your credentials.

These risks are already out there now because the TLD has been activated.

Plain text on old post are already being resolved into links to the new websites.

Here you can see a tweet from 2021, long before .zip was a domain name, now resolves that plan text into a clickable link. You'll start seeing this everywhere, and malicious actors do not have to lift a finger to send it to you.

Yes, a lot of users aren't going to click that, but a lot of folk will. Whomever is squatting on photos DOT zip domain name has made a one time payment to have access to anyone that ever sees that file name typed out.

In an example of an existing squatter site, clientdocs DOT zip is exactly one such pre-setup .zip domain name that initiates an automatic download. This one may be harmless, but the set ups are already out there and waiting to catch folk.

It's an unnecessary and risky can of worms that's been opened up.