WittyShadow

"There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich. Either you are or you are not. And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that.

Everyone and their TV commercial wants you to believe that the key to a good life is a nicer job, or a more rugged car, or a prettier girlfriend, or a hot tub with an inflatable pool for the kids. The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Give a fuck about a new TV. Give a fuck about having a better vacation than your coworkers. Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament. Give a fuck about having the right kind of selfie stick. Why? My guess: because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business. And while there’s nothing wrong with good business, the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction.

The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important." Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

In addition to the print terminology stuff: the visual shorthand icons and ad graphics for something about writing are still often pen-nibs, fountain pens and typewriters…

…while graphics of a monitor, keyboard and mouse remain visual shorthand for computing…

…even though most writers now use monitor /  keyboard / mouse or even laptop / touchpad.

In addition, headers for “this blog / website is about writing” are often in one of the many imitation typewriter fonts complete with smudges, or just Courier.

The start and end call icons on most / all smartphones is still the handset of a classic desk telephone, and sometimes the open-app icon is a complete phone.

The term “hang up” for “end the call” refers to something even older - one of these…

And of course the Save icon is indeed a 3½ inch floppy disc.

Why it wasn’t a 5¼ floppy is a mystery. The icon version is just as distinctive.

Also, why various OP updates never changed “Save” to the graphic of a CD / DVD or flash drive is another mystery, and nowadays a Save icon should probably be a cartoon cloud.

A thing I often think about, when stuff like that happens, is how studies have shown that apes and monkeys in zoos spend nearly as much time picking bugs out of each other’s fur as their wild counterparts, even though the zoo ones have vastly fewer actual bugs.  

And conversation, for humans, fulfills many of the same roles as social grooming does for other primates.  

So, a while ago, some of my friends and fellow cast members of the @sansukhpodfic​ asked about how to make and edit podfic on their own. I created this tutorial for them, as a supplement to the resources already posted  by the Sansukh mods. In the wake of the most recent @auralphonic​ episode asking for technical advice on podficcing in Audacity, I thought I would polish this up and post it. This tutorial explains how, once you have permission to record a story, you go about turning it into a podfic using Audacity. It focuses on technical and logistical details, rather than artistic advice, and is cobbled together from my own experience, my knowledge of the mathematics behind signal analysis, and other people’s tutorials. There’s lots of communities and resources out there that give advice on the artistic side (Auralphonic, for example, has an episode for newbies), which I recommend checking out.

Disclaimer: There is no one standard method of doing this! This is the method I have found gives me the best results, personally, but there may be better ways to do this. I strongly recommend checking out other resources for comparison.

I’m sorry your week sucked, have some TURTLES.

Behold: one of nature’s best examples of min-maxing.

Armor plating isn’t uncommon in vertebrates. Pangolins, ankylosaurus, armadillos, and placoderms all share similar stat allocation to name a few.

Some, like pangolins, just throw all the keratin they can into their skin and end up with tough scales. That’s the same stuff fingernails and hair are made of, and also the stuff that makes our skin waterproof. Others, like ankylosaurs, also grow little bits of bone into their skin. A bunch do both. These are common, efficient, easy-to-evolve traits that occur multiple times in history.

Turtles said fuck all that.

I’m doing it my way.

(Well not ALL that, they do still have keratinized scaly skin on their limbs, but still)

They took their rib cage, sternum and spinal column- you know, things that normally go inside your body, and put ‘em on the outside instead. Shoulder blades and hip bones grow inside the rib cage, too. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, they covered the whole deal in keratin scales. Some turtles even have a hinge on their belly (plastron) that lets them close up completely. I promise, there’s a turtle in there.

What could go wrong reverse-engineering an exoskeleton onto a vertebrate?

Turns out, a lot.

Take a nice deep breath in, and exhale it out. Can you feel your ribs move? Feel them expand and contract, working with your diaphragm muscles to pull large quantities of air into your body?

Show-off.

Yeah, when all your ribs are fused into one big dome it turns out you lose a lot of lung function. The good news? With your body fully enclosed and stabilized in bone, it’s not like your abs and obliques are doing anything now. Might as well put them to work pumping your lungs. Except, not directly. Some muscles pull on the liver, which attaches to the right lung. Other muscles pull on the stomach, which pulls on the left lung. It’s pretty inefficient all around, so you may not get enough oxygen exchange to be a marathon runner, but as long as you don’t have to worry about predators you know what they say about slow and steady.

However that’s not always enough. What if, say, you did have to worry about predators a little. What if, hypothetically, you took a few points away from pure defense and gained a little more swim speed and mobility? You, like many semi-aquatic turtles, would need a backup source of oxygen. A breathing plan B.

In turtles, plan “B” stands for Butt. Some turtles (lots of freshwater semi-aquatic ones) can pump water in and out of their cloaca, which is sometimes enlarged and lined with specialized membranes that maximize surface area for gas exchange. Basically, improving any part of this fucked-up breathing apparatus is so difficult that it’s evolutionarily better to evolve proto-gills in the ass.

I was going to make a different joke here but these turtles are literally called “Northern Red-Bellied Cooters” and I really can’t top that

Turtles are cold-blooded, which of course means they don’t do shit in the winter. Turtles who are unfortunate enough to live in places that get winters bury themselves in the mud in a type of hibernation called ‘brumation’. You may wonder, how do they breathe THEN?

Easy, they don’t. They slow down their metabolism a crazy amount and spend the winter months doing anaerobic respiration. We can do this too, it’s why your muscles burn after working out. If your body doesn’t get oxygen, your cells can still burn fuel much less efficiently and produce a lot of lactic acid as a byproduct. Turtles can counteract the extreme acidity, buffering it and sequestering it with the bone in their shell. Literally, they leach calcium and magnesium out of their bones to prevent their acidic blood from killing them over the winter.

Just waking up from the winter, chock-full of acid and ready to snap.

I got a very pretty prosthetic that looks pretty much real, plus the drilling and cleaning, in two sessions, for under USD$40.

The exact same treatment costs between $200 and $4,500 in the US according to Google. If your insurance doesn't cover it, and it often doesn't, depending on where you live it's cheaper to fly to Mexico, get your tooth fixed here, and fly back after a week's stay than it is to get it at your local dentist.

Let me repeat in case it didn't register:

It is cheaper to fly to a country with national healthcare and back than it is to go to your dentist.

It is the circle of the bears cause of ursa major and ursa minor, and the circle without bears cause ya'know opposite part of the sky.

Cheating isn’t bad because you had sex with someone else. Cheating is bad because you violated the terms of your relationship. Cheating is bad because you violated your partner’s trust. That’s why things other than sex can be cheating- it’s why there’s emotional cheating.

Cheating is bad because it is violating your partner’s trust. It is bad because you and your partner(s) decided on something, trusted one another, and you said “fuck them and their trust”. THAT is why it is bad.

Polyamory is not cheating. In polyamory, everyone knows about everything and everyone. Everyone consents. There is communication. If not everyone is aware and consents, then it’s fucking cheating. There’s a damn difference.

There’s also the “Polyamory is bad because you’re having sex with someone who isn’t your one true love” which… I could go on all day about how fucking stupid that is, but same principle.

A) I’m queer, I already don’t give a fuck about society’s opinions

and

Some people are autistic. They spend their entire lives comparing being touched in ways they hate to being in pain, because people refuse to understand any other way. The world is hard to live in for them, because the feelings that hurt them are not categorized as Bad, and therefore what is torturous is not understood as torture.

Kink really unnerves a lot of people because it upends a lot of assumptions about how brains feel things. How can you want to experience something in the Bad category?

But I think kink better understands and allows for the actual complexity and reality of how brains feel things.

It’s actually more like this: There are very few, if any, actually inherently Bad stimuli. Instead, everything has a threshold at which it is unpleasant, even unbearable, and a threshold at which it is neutral or even good. Those are not necessarily opposite ends of the spectrum and can in fact overlap in weird ways. The intensity of a stimulus, or how much it pushes the limits of your processing, is not necessarily the same as “how much” stimulus, either.

Everyone is different in where their thresholds lie. There is a ton of diversity. This is…okay.

Furthermore, your thresholds are not fixed. You can adjust them a lot based on circumstances, such as how predictable the stimulus is, how much control you have over it, how much control you have over the rest of your environment, the amount of things you’re simultaneously processing, and so on.

In other words, if you experience something in an environment that is controlled, planned, and has low levels of unpredictability and extraneous stimuli, in a way that is curated to your ability to process it, that can cause a dramatic shift in whether you experience that thing as pleasurable or horrible.

I see posts written by people who believe that doing a thing categorized as Bad in a sexual context is inherently going to cause harm, regardless of consent. The implication, though, in singling out “kink,” is that there is a “normal, natural” form of sex that is not “inherently harmful,” that lacks the characteristics that make pain, for example, harmful.

These people are regarding “normal” sexual activities, certain forms of touch or stimulation, to be inherently “safer” and less hurtful.

But to an autistic person, a touch may feel much worse than pain, no matter how gentle it appears to be. To an autistic person, many “vanilla” and innocuous acts might feel unbearable. But they don’t get treated with suspicion, because the people for whom they are Bad are not Normal.

When you are autistic, agency over your own perception is one of the biggest things you have to fight for in order to heal and be healthy. “This hurts me because *i* say it hurts me” is…basic. Because people don’t believe you when your hurts are non-normative.

sound familiar?

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

Wrong, you just need to get more creative. So buckle up fandom members and tired writers, let’s talk love triangle alternatives.

The Classic Love Triangle, aka the Love V

This is your Bella/Edward/Jacob, your Katniss/Peeta/Gale. It’s been done and overdone. Person A has two people interested in them, and they have to pick which one they like best. Boring!! Let’s spice it up.

The True Love Triangle

To make a REAL love triangle, we need to close the last side. Now all 3 people involved are part of their own classic love triangle. If two people end up together, the third will be double crushed because they just lost both of their potential love interests to each other. Now we’re talking.

This is like Harry/Cedric/Cho, Luna/Neville/Ginny (although not quite since it’s not all at the same time)

The Rivalry Turned Romance

Person A is just minding their own business, uninterested in both person B and person C. Person B and C both like person A though, and somewhere along the way, their rivalry turns into a romance. Think about when Alya and Nino got trapped in the panther cage and fell for each other because they had so much (their mutual crush on Marinette) in common. This is the superior love triangle, tbh.

The Double Love Triangle

We’re back to classic love triangle land, but we’re spicing it up by adding another one!! One of the people in the classic love triangle is in another classic love triangle. Percy has to choose between Annabeth and Rachel, Annabeth has to choose between Percy and Luke (*gags at mention of luke*). This can end in two couples or in one couple and two lonely people.

The True Double Love Triangle

Ooh what’s this? It’s Miraculous Ladybug, of course. Person A (Marinette) likes Person C (Adrien), but she also likes Person B (Luka). Person C (Adrien) likes Person A (Marinette) and D (Kagami). BUT!! If we add in Marigami and Lukadrien, there’s our true love triangles coming out. Of course this chaos is in Miraculous because not a single character in this show this love triangle is straight.

The Bachelor

I honestly can’t think of a good example in any fandoms I’m in for this scenario, but it’s pretty simple: person A has a plethora of potential love interests to choose between.

The Bachelor With Internal Love Triangles

The love interests got tired of waiting for person A to choose one of them and started showing interest in each other.

The Bi Panic/Irene Adler/I am just overall frustrated that these two people are dating or into each other

Person B and C are into each other, maybe already in a relationship, and person A likes both of them (unreciprocated). This is kind of like Irene Adler having an affair with both people in a marriage, except they would have both been into her too. A better example is when my crush in 7th grade started dating the girl that I didn’t know I had a crush on because I still thought I was straight.

The Plus One, aka the Johnlock

Person A and B are in a confirmed and committed relationship (John & Mary Watson), but one of them is not so secretly in love with Person C (Sherlock).

The Awkward Plus One

This is a similar situation to the plus one, but it’s just person C having an unrequited crush on someone in a relationship. For example, Nico having a crush on Percy, who is with Annabeth. Briseis loving Patroclus who is with his soulmate Achilles.