mostly Melbourne (at the moment)

Curious pebble (1/?)

Link to the gay porn library of Alexandria.

twenty-five (!) years later I came out as a trans man.

now. the important thing to know about my ex-husband is that he loves nothing more than 1) horrible puns, preferably bilingual ones; 2) terrible dad jokes; and 3) committing to the bit until the end of time. he absolutely lives for Shenanigans and Japery. i do not know how his long-suffering wife puts up with him, but they've been married for more than 20 years so presumably she manages.

so, to break the news to my ex, i texted him. the exchange went something like this:

me: "great news, i'm a trans guy now"

him: "oh, congrats!"

me: "thank you. now for the better news: I insist you refer to me henceforth only as your ex-husband. do you accept this challenge?"

and my cis, straight-as-an-arrow, lives-in-the-midwest, married-to-a-minister ex-husband was like

The media (owned by rich people) are currently going "WOW? SO CONFUSING! BAD LABOR BUDGET BAD! MASSIVE TAX HIKES!" but what actually is happening?

Negative gearing ISN'T being abolished. Literally everyone who already benefited from it on their investment portfolios continues to have it. Anyone complaining and saying they're going to raise the rent because it's made things less profitable for them is lying and a scumbag.

The change is going forward any ADDITIONAL properties an investor wants to get tax breaks on can only be applied to NEW builds, thus encouraging investors to build new properties (instead of buying all the currently existing ones and driving prices up). So who is negatively impacted by this? Literally no one. Who does this benefit? Anyone who wants to live in a house because it increases housing supply and makes the housing market less competitive for investors vs home owners.

Really simple.

What about capital gains tax discount? Basically, in the 90s John Howard made it so that when you sold a house you'd get a 50% discount where half of the profit wasn't taxed. Investors went woohoo! Bought up all the affordable houses to drive prices up and make a big profit. It fueled the housing crisis for the past 30 years. But Labor went "actually, what if we just tax it at 30% instead with no discount?" So instead of half of the money being tax free, it's all taxed. You know... like how making money normally works???

30% is still actually lower than the top two income tax brackets so rich people will still manage to make lots of money without having to work BUT... they'll just have to pay a little tax. BUT only on profit. If a property makes a loss it's not taxed. The amount of tax is also adjusted down relative to inflation so a $100,000 profit isn't taxed $30,000 but actually less depending on how much inflation happened during the time the asset was held.

Also capital gains tax doesn't apply to the home you live in so unless you're a property investor YOU'RE NOT GETTING TAXED! THE VAST MAJORITY OF AUSTRALIANS ARE NOT BEING AFFECTED HERE AND YET WE'RE SEEING WIDE PUBLIC OUTRAGE OVER A TAX DESIGNED TO MAKE THE HOUSING MARKET LESS COMPETITIVE AND THUS EASIER FOR HOME OWNERS TO ENTER IT.

This budget literally mostly just slightly inconveniences the 1% of investors who own a WHOPPING 25% OF INVESTMENT PROPERTIES IN AUSTRALIA.

The capital gains tax discount was never for working Australians! It was never for you! It was always just a tax perk for investors to encourage them to buy up houses away from those who needed them and hike up rents. Labor fixed that.

No wonder the rich media moguls and politicians who make most of their money off property investments like Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor are mad about it and want YOU to be mad too. They don't want to pay taxes! Booo! The problem is: if we can't get the uber-wealthy to pay a little bit of tax then YOU will NEVER own a home!

So the changes are really simple. They're mild. And yet the right is outraged over how it even slightly benefits working and ordinary Australians.

And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.

So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.

The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.

Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138

Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

Dude is launching city-run grocery stores, got funding to start setting up free daycare, is taxing the idle rich to fund social programs, has gotten thousands of potholes fixed that have languished for years, housed the homeless and hired anyone who could do the work to shovel snow when a blizzard hit, and is generally doing whatever he can to make city government serve the people. And he's doing it despite death threats, smear campaigns, and opposition from the GOP and his OWN party, the Dems, along with the capitalist class, their bootlickers, and the POTUS and his MAGAt cult. And he's made it clear that this is just the beginning.

What the fuck more do you expect in his first hundred days in office?

[ID 2: World map with Peru the only country highlighted in red. Text reads: map of all the countries where the president fucking sent a resignation letter via fax /.End ID]

[ID 3: World map with Argentina the only country highlighted in red. Text reads: map of all the countries where the president escaped using a helicopter from the government house during a protest and no one wanted to be president so there were Five different presidents in like a week /.End ID]

[ID 4: Tumblr tag reading: add the Netherlands and that time we ate our prime minister or something /.End ID]

[ID 5: Text reading: De Witt controlled the Dutch political system from around 1650 until shortly before his murder and cannibalisation by a pro-monarch mob in 1672. /End ID]

how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem

what common file types are

some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)

how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private

how to understand terms of service (hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)

what a cookie actually is

internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl

basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)

common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)

how to not get a virus while pirating something

what a temporary email is and when to use one

red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)

an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous

a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps

a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)