AnasAbdin
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Product Placement
d e v o n
@theartofmadeline
Andulka
Show & Tell
Cosimo Galluzzi
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
trying on a metaphor
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
One Nice Bug Per Day
JBB: An Artblog!
Sweet Seals For You, Always
★
wallacepolsom
🪼
Origami Around
Cosmic Funnies
seen from United States
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@vwalker
a party of adventurers that are all equally convinced that they are in completely different forms of media
the mage keeps giving smug glances in the direction they assume a camera is in. the fighter keeps getting indignant about missing attacks because of "bad dice rolls." the rogue is doubtful that a villain is gone for good because "nobody ever stays dead in comics." the paladin attributes fortune to "good rng." none of them have even considered that "tumblr post" was an option
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vK: I'm officially a preteen now! I can be So Sassy! 😃😚🤗😏😌😼
Me: What do I do professionally?
vK: ....I dunno...teacher stuff...
Me: I manage preteens. How long have I been managing preteens?
vK: ....I dunno...
Me: 17 years. So, if you're ready to engage preteen mode, I get to engage managing-preteen mode.
vK: Nevermind! *runs away*
I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.
Oh! Then I know the EXACT person you should be mad at! Michael O'Rielly! He's the one that gutted the Children's Programming Rules, which covered internet as well as television.
HELLO?
#so the death of the Saturday morning cartoon is THIS motherfuckers fault?????
Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.
If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!
While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).
And a side note: Things like KOSA and SCREEN and all those other censorship bills that use "think of the children" are not going to protect children at all; if you want to protect kids online, there is already a way to do that it's called the Kid Vid Rules and the FCC is the one that can update and change them to keep up with the times! It doesn't need a congress vote, it already got voted on in 1990!
vK: "Awww 🥺🥺..............can we get a rabbit now?"
vK2: "So it was like this?" *crawls under my blanket, makes happy squeak noises, then "blech!" and rolls over 'dead'* "Okay, that's a good way to die."
*Both move on to breakfast and playing and arguing about next pet*
Unsure if my children are well-adjusted or emotionally stunted. 😅😅
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
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i've been phasing the phrase 'google it' out of my vocabulary and going back to 'look it up'. fuck you youve lost your generic trademark privileges
There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices - it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.
“Ma’am, I really must insist that you pay for the room and board I’ve been giving you! It’s been a week!”
“Fine, fine,” I grumble. “I have a few options for payment: I could give you paper money, cheap gaudy jewelry, chocolate coins, spiders, some pretty seashells-”
“Spiders????” he repeats, baffled.
“Spiders it is, then,” I agree equitably, and with a wave of my hand the bed I’ve been sleeping in for the last week turns into a writhing mass of various spiders.
Worth it.
—
“Stop right there! You’re under arrest for fraud, destruction of property, and-!”
I yawn. “Didn’t ask, don’t care.” A few gestures, and the guards’ swords are all transmuted into spiders, and then they’re too busy to worry about little ol’ me.
—
“You have insulted my honor and humiliated me in front of my children! I demand satisfaction! I demand a wizard’s duel!”
Shrugging, I say, “Sure, okay, whatever. Right here and now okay?”
The pompous wizard-noble blinks. “I- you don’t want to prepare? Get your wizard’s staff or anything?”
“Nah, I’m pretty good with somatic gestures.”
“Well, if you’re sure… here and now then! Have at you!” He slams his staff down on the ground dramatically, a small shockwave of fire radiating out from the impact.
So of course, I turn his staff into spiders.
“AHHHH WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK”
“So if you’re too busy screaming to cast spells, does that mean I win?”
“AUGH ONE OF THEM BIT ME”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
—
After that, they start coming at me in waves, with cheap wands and staves and swords and bows bought in bulk, hoping to exhaust my magical reserves so they can get close enough to put a magic inhibitor on me.
They did not expect my reserves to be as vast as they were, not did they expect me to be able to transmute the inhibitors themselves into spiders.
“Didn’t you take Magic Basics in wizard college?” I yell at the panicking mages. “Inhibitors aren’t immune to magic until the moment they activate! Serious weak point in the design, tell your magitechnicians to fix that!”
—
So of course they try assassins next.
Poison fails, because I transmute any food and drink I get into spiders and then transmute them back. Pretty easy way to get rid of poison.
So then they try knives in dark alleys. The knives bruise through my full-body spider-silk outfit, but do not penetrate, and they only get one shot before they have bigger problems.
Next is killing me in my sleep. None live to report back that the human-shaped lump under the blankets is actually a mass of highly venomous spiders.
The kingdom throws everything it has at me, and I continue to walk away, heralded by the chittering of spiders and the screams of everyone else.
—
Finally, I stand before the king himself in his overly opulent throne room, and by now he is a broken shell of a man in the face of my unorthodox tactics.
Good.
“What do you want?” he practically sobs. “You’ve singlehandedly redirected the entire crown’s budget for the next three years into replacing every weapon you’ve turned into spiders. Much more and we’ll be invaded by our neighbors! We wouldn’t be able to resist being annexed! So what can I give you to make you stop doing this?!”
I pause and pretend to consider, tapping a finger against my chin thoughtfully. “You know, you sent my brother off to war a few years back. That conflict with the Yughs up north, I believe. He didn’t want to go, so your guards forced him at spearpoint. I haven’t seen him since.”
He seizes on that, as I expected. “Yes, yes, I’ll have him returned right away! Tell me his name and I’ll honorably release him from duty and have him escorted safely home!”
“Oh?” I raise one sardonic eyebrow. “Are you able to bring back the dead now, oh wise and glorious king?”
He pales, and it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in years.
“You have nothing I want,” I growl, letting the anger slip through for the first time in years. “You cannot bring him back, you cannot make up for my loss with all the riches in your kingdom. The only thing I want is to take everything from you, the way you did to me. Your kingdom will bleed out of resources, one of the neighboring countries you’ve been trying to conquer for decades now will take advantage and annex this place, and you will either be executed or forced to work for a living for the first time in your life.”
I glare at him, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “You will lose everything you ever cared about in your life. One spider at a time.”
I transmute his throne and crown into spiders (non-deadly; he doesn’t get to escape my wrath that easily), then turn and walk away, ignoring his screams and sobs.
—
And that’s why, when the Yughs finally annexed the kingdom I grew up in, they preemptively made Transarachnomancy a forbidden magical art. Not sure how they intend to enforce that, mind, but I’m not looking to challenge that. I’ve gotten what I wanted; if some other aspiring mage wants to try and follow in my footsteps, that’s not my problem.
Besides, in terms of magical skill, I’ve always been an outlier anyway. Most mages would be lucky to turn just one knife into a spider at a time; I can turn ten thousand with a few gestures. I doubt anyone will outdo my legacy.
But hey, if you want to try and surpass Georgia of the Spiders? Feel free. I’ll welcome the competition.
Amazing A+ no notes
Perfection.
Welp dead guinea pig was not on today's Bingo card.
vK's birthday is Soon and I'm very glad it isn't directly on the day. 😬
The GP was very old, so this isn't very tragic besides the timing. And dead-in-sleep is frankly preferred over the other one's 4 months of increasing paralysis then euthanasia. 😅 But I went to feed her tonight before bed as usual and I WAS NOT PREPARED.
But that will be un-fun parenting to handle in the morning when the offspring wake up. 🫠🙃
Morning alarm turned off. 😎
The green is minutes of exercise-level activity. 😅
1 - moved all my big furniture including metal teacher desk and full filing cabinets (with Hubs with a dolly lol).
2 - moved everything else remaining in my room
3 - roamed around yapping and killing time until admin could meet re: my horrid schedule and until leaving-room teacher was done moving out so I could store stuff for the summer.
4 - hour long meeting but Success! They put my sections back to the original shared-room-but-no-cart-period plan and flipped someone else to solve the schedule glitch that made them change mine to begin with, which also interrupted no preps and involved no carts. Boss immediately started off defensive like I was gonna have to suck it up and she was humoring me....then at the end was like "...this way does make more sense." 🤗
5 - spent 4 hours moving all my boxes to summer-storage spots (we're not allowed to leave anything on the floor...it has to all be stored/up...so they can remove all the big furniture to wax.) and cleaning out every single cupboard and drawer because leaving-teacher was just like "all that was here when I moved in and I didn't know what to do with it." Trash, man. You trash it. What do you mean you've been in here for 2 years with half the space unusable?! Anyway made a massive trash pile and put a sign on it:
Poor custodian walked by right before I left and was like 🤯😵😳 "that's ALL trash?" So sorry! Better now than August though.
I tired. But officially on summer break!
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What's your mom vs kid game for summer behavior you do?
We keep a little white board on the dining table and each team gets tallies. We agree on a win number/prize for whatever time frame. It varies from like 3 days of wins for ice cream to over a week of wins for like $20 toy of choice at the store, depending on their stamina vibes.
The earning of the tallies is rather nebulous and adaptable lol. A main piece is that fighting with your teammate means the other team earns a tally (this brings them Great Joy to call out if like Hubs and I are bickering about dumb stuff.) But mainly lets me stem off a bunch of their tattling drama because they'll come in all whiny and I'll just start looking excited and glancing at the score board and they'll realize and run away hollering "nevermind we're fine!" Rofl.
But they also earn tallies for things like drama-free school hour, doing chores without fussing, etc. If I want an unusual task done, they'll haggle for how many tallies it's worth lol. Hubs and I will give ourselves tallies for extra productive house tasks. Dinner time involves a lot of tally counting.
Essentially days with a lot of fighting and nonsense and adults feeling fed up results in them losing, and normal days results in them winning. They win like 4/5 of the time and nearly always get the prize in the target time frame, but like $40 a week of whatever treat is absolutely worth their improved sibling dynamic and my sanity. 🤣
Boop.
Cosign.
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
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
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
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.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
Spent yesterday drafting monologues for tomorrow and emails to my boss's boss if this carting-to-other-room business doesn't get resolved. 😅
Told boss I would be meeting with her on Monday to discuss this in person as should have been done from the get go.
Today, because 1) I hate bringing forth issues without a recommended fix and 2) I had finally calmed down enough to think straight, I pulled up the master schedule and it took me less than 10 minutes to find THREE other possible schedule swaps that can solve the problem without putting me on a cart.
Sent recommended solutions to all parties.
Boss responded almost immediately that she will see me tomorrow and bring head counselor so they can get this fixed.
I don't think I've been so livid over work things in ages. Omg. Like I fully understand that we have a large influx coming so that affects the space available and no one gets a perfect schedule and blah blah blah. I Know. But also out of our department, I was slated to be the ONLY one teaching without a prep space AND on a cart AND with multiple grades of new content, and one of only two with a shared room and a mentee teacher to support and a new coteacher. 6 degrees of difficulty compared to everyone else's max of 2. Like. Share the love for Pete's sake.
I was reading bits of my drafts to Hubs yesterday and at some point he goes "Dang remind me to never get this far on your bad side. 😳" to which I was like "You aren't prone to making decisions which will make my life miserable for 10 months straight. 🙃"
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Top pics from peak classroom set up in April before I had to take down/cover stuff for testing season.
Bottom pics from today after 95% of my stuff is boxed and moved because I have to go to a new room next year. That is shared. And double-booked so I also have to cart to completely other not-at-all-mine rooms sometimes.
So.
I am having a lot of, mostly negative, feelings about the fact that I won't have *my* own space to curate again for who knows how many years.
Unsure if due to my own hybrid-schooled upbringing or my current teacher-ness, but we've landed on a routine of summer homeschooling that I'm pretty pleased with.
Haven't even fully wrapped up this school year but my brain is onto organizing the next season anyway lol. 🤷♀️😅
I end up with 30-45 min of "instructional time" with each kid per day, so it's mainly just for hitting their high need areas and reinforcing skills, combo of workbooks and games and just one-on-one time. (The "other kid" does their online Chinese or math program at the same time and then they flip-flop, so it's about an hour and a half out of our mornings.)
Anyway, target skills for this summer:
vK = reading/decoding fluency, overview of 4th grade math, multiplication fluency games, word part based vocab work, penmanship
vK2 = 2nd/3rd grade math, critical thinking/reasoning/puzzle solving stuff, games to build frustration tolerance, also word part vocab work
vk in particular seems to really benefit from pre-learning like a scaffold for new info before they do it at school where she's also managing all the classroom frustrations. vK2 just really likes math lol, but little dude cannot yet handle losing or being not-successful on something on the first go.
Word part/morphology is just a really weak area in our district's current LA sequence, though allegedly the new literacy curriculum that starts next year is supposed to improve that. They're coming across Latin/Greek root vocab naturally now on the regular though, so it's definitely worth making those connections more blatant.
Also returning this summer is the kids vs. parent tally board because that just worked So Well last year. Soft launched that tonight by teasing both offspring that Hubs and I will be winning all the prizes lol and their reactions were positive (by which I mean they both screeched "not that again!" but then talked about what the prizes could be and how they'll win vs. actual hatred of the concept lol.)
They both have more routine weekly activities than one-off camp weeks this summer, which feels much more chill on paper so we'll see how that pans out in reality. Gonna have to put on public-facing clothes and leave my house nearly everyday lol.
