[ID: A simple drawing of a stickman with a flat mouth and tiny, stressed eyes putting their arms onto a surface in front of them and leaning over it. Text placed behind the figure, occasionally being cut off by going behind their head, reads “I need to code I need to make my own website I need to animate I need to learn Blender I need to draw I need to paint I need to learn another language I need … utube channel I need to start … ed to make a game I need to make … ke a show I need to make a movie”
An arrow pointing at the figures head is captioned “Not doing any of this” / End ID]
when i say i like hiking, i don’t mean “eight mile backpacking trip with special gear and an emergency beacon” sort of hiking, i mean a three mile loop to go look at pretty things and then a huge brunch after.
this is in no way a slam on hardcore hiking, it’s very fun, but i mostly just need to lower people’s expectations when i say hiking is a hobby of mine
“No no, that’s ranger hiking. I like hobbit hiking.”
trying to figure out the funniest crackpot stance on who is the current Roman emperor, and accepting suggestions (tenuous historical justification required)
if you are depressed and feel life has no meaning / you feel like you have no identity and life is overwhelming - check if you have anchor points.
what are anchor points? they are what make us human, and allow us to perceive time and self. humans are not, alone, able to identify ourselves without building upon our surroundings and interactions. we are our reflection, not just ourselves. so, anchor points are any sort of routine that allows you to look forward to something and keep track of time. it is why stress comes with change and lack of schedule.
anchor points can be as little as keeping a calendar, doing a weekly thing for a certain day of the week, talking to people on certain days, any ritual of some sort to identify what day is which and give it some sort of meaning and routine.
if you feel like you were stable before a huge change that ruined your routine or sense of self, you are most likely lacking anchor points and struggling to look forward to things because of the uncertainty. You may become obsessed with finding things to occupy yourself in fear of nothing sticking and giving you the ongoing feeling of existing and having meaning to exist.
you do matter, you do exist, you never changed. you just need to regain your grasp of time and work your way back into routine. we are herd animals, always ready to find a buffalo.
if you are depressed and feel life has no meaning / you feel like you have no identity and life is overwhelming - check if you have anchor points.
what are anchor points? they are what make us human, and allow us to perceive time and self. humans are not, alone, able to identify ourselves without building upon our surroundings and interactions. we are our reflection, not just ourselves. so, anchor points are any sort of routine that allows you to look forward to something and keep track of time. it is why stress comes with change and lack of schedule.
anchor points can be as little as keeping a calendar, doing a weekly thing for a certain day of the week, talking to people on certain days, any ritual of some sort to identify what day is which and give it some sort of meaning and routine.
if you feel like you were stable before a huge change that ruined your routine or sense of self, you are most likely lacking anchor points and struggling to look forward to things because of the uncertainty. You may become obsessed with finding things to occupy yourself in fear of nothing sticking and giving you the ongoing feeling of existing and having meaning to exist.
you do matter, you do exist, you never changed. you just need to regain your grasp of time and work your way back into routine. we are herd animals, always ready to find a buffalo.
The first one is Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, AKA The Moonies. A Christian Church that believes Moon is the Messiah.
In the 70s they allied themselves politically with the Republican Party. They own the far-right newspaper The Washington Times. Here’s Moon with both Nixon and Reagan.
The second one is Li Hongzhi, founder of Falun Gong, a cult that believes that Hongzhi is the reincarnation of a divine being here to help humanity ascend.
They’re also allied with the Republican Party and the American right-wing. They own the far-right newspaper The Epoch Times (whose CEO was recently charged with money-laundering $67 million)
Shen Yun is a “traditional Chinese dance” that Falun Gong completely made up to promote and finance their cult. Exploiting the fact that western audiences don’t know any better.
They promote it as “authentic Chinese culture” and “China before Communism” even though it was created in 2006 (and Falun Gong itself was formed in 1992).
I know about the Moonies because of a Binding of Isaac mod, of all things, made by someone who got out. They have a post on their tumblr where they talk about the experiences that led them to make it. They have other posts where they talk about the group too.
Needless to say, it’s a mix of violence, worshipping the figurehead, and customs designed to isolate and degrade the members so that they stay dependant on the cult. Oh, and let’s not forget insisting everything bad that happens to you is the work of evil spirits and/or punishment for your sins (or maybe your ancestors’ sins. some of them probably sinned.) Not to mention the grifting. Why pray for the things you need when you can buy magic paper that will carry your wishes to heaven? Oh, but evil spirits might intercept your wish, so be sure to buy extra paper, just in case!
Steven Hassan is a cult expert and former member of the Moonies who writes books about how cults work and how to combat cult mind control. He also has a podcast called The Influence Continuum about the topic.
He coined the BITE Method, a mnemonic device of the different methods cults use to try to control and brainwash you. It stands for: Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, and Emotion control.
finding out that ‘da vinci’ isnt even leonardo da vincis real last name and that it just means 'from vinci’ was so shocking to me. its like saying sans undertale
as a white person i can confirm that cheese is basically like god and life to me. i can be baited with cheese 100% of the time. i will tunnelvision a wedge of sharp cheddar from the other side of the room in any and every setting
The reason endermen don’t like it when you look at them is because they communicate telepathically with one another by locking eyes! Humans are absolutely not designed to do this so when we look at them we are accidentally projecting all of our thoughts into them at the same time and it hurts :(
But like, since the player is not of the Minecraft world, the player is just what the use to explore it, what if it’s like:
Biological sex is not and has never been a binary. The complexity of the natural world cannot be contained in neat little societal boxes. Stop using science to justify your bigotry.
You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.
For everyone in the comments asking how flamingos are extremophiles:
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
Don’t fuck with flamingos
….. Didn’t know most of that
Huh… so that’s why zoos don’t put them somewhere warm during winter.
Oh yeah, this leaves out what I *did* know about them–they can also survive hypersalinity. That is, water so salty it kills practically everything else–water so salty it burns your skin.
American flamingos just drink that shit
(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:
Some species of flamingo actually subsist almost entirely on a diet of bacteria! In other words, there is a species of dinosaur that eats only bacteria and lives in lakes so toxic they would kill almost anything else—and it is best known to the average person as a kitschy lawn decoration.
requested by anonymous:
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.
Source: ‘Flamingos have very specialised diets. And their food is responsible for their famous pink colouration. The two species in Planet Earth II eat a lot of floating microscopic algae, which contains carotenoid pigments, the same types of chemical that make carrots orange. These pigments turn their feathers pink, orange and red – without them, flamingos would be white.’
I have to watch 45 minutes of video for an assignment in my “diversity in education” class and… they don’t have captions. The videos are from a digital textbook about inclusion and diversity. The chapter is focused on EALD speakers.
Where’s that post that’s like “I can’t buy expensive things like plane tickets on my phone, I have to use my laptop, big purchases are for the big screen”
Because apparently this is a literal actual thing that retailers hate cuz you think more before spending a lot of money, they want you to spend a lot without thinking about it so much
Where’s that post that’s like “I can’t buy expensive things like plane tickets on my phone, I have to use my laptop, big purchases are for the big screen”
Because apparently this is a literal actual thing that retailers hate cuz you think more before spending a lot of money, they want you to spend a lot without thinking about it so much
Getting really sick of all the “There’s No Place Like Chrome” ads on youtube. There’s Firefox. Firefox saves your passwords. Firefox autofills things if you want. Firefox also does things that Chrome doesn’t like allow adblockers, and it does not mine your data and sell your information for advertising purposes. Google is really trying to push people to use Chrome so they can take as much data from users as possible in order to make as much money as possible and it’s borderline sinister.
Anyway, download Firefox.
The irony of this is because of the ad blockers on my Firefox, I’ve never seen any such ad.
Firefox best browser, I only keep chrome because some stupid websites refuse to support the second-most-used browser that doesn’t come preinstalled on new computers
For cases where Firefox doesn’t work, I use Chromium on pc and kiwi browser on mobile which is chromium based and supports extensions, albeit since Google doesn’t exactly require or encourage Devs to make extensions mobile friendly so some don’t work well.
My browsing history will not be uploaded to some Google server if I have anything to say about it.
I often despair at the state of politics in my country but one thing I Just Don't Get - why are Labour like this? Maybe this is just my ignorance showing but wasn't the whole point of them being different from the Tories? What's the point if they're just gonna do the same shit? What the hell is going on? How did this happen?
An aggressively cynical view would be that the Labour Party previously existed to manage the working class as a voting bloc. I don’t think it’s 100% the case, but I can see why folk would think it.
People will point Tony Blair being elected as the paradigm shift. It was the point when Labour went full on neoliberal where instead of opposing the conservative economic worldview, they accepted that thats how the world works.
So their whole argument shifted to ‘We can just manage the economy better than the conservatives (but in accordance to how they think things should work)’
I don’t think it was purely Tony Blair that started the shift though, I think it started when Labour started to appoint members to the House of Lords.
There’s also a shift in view, from the idea that the party exists to enact the will of its membership to the idea that the membership exists to enable the party.
If you believe that the important thing is the party, then stances on issues are no longer important. (Incidentally, corruption is also unimportant, as long as it doesn’t get punished. Preferably not punished because it isn’t discovered, but the important thing is the punishment.) And that means the party will perform what is called “triangulation” — it will base its positions not on what its membership/voters want to see enacted, but on what it believes will get it the most votes in the general election, which is not always the same thing — if the party’s voters don’t care very much about a contentious issue, it may be better to take a position contrary to their preference if it will bring in votes from outside the party.
The UK government is effectively 2-party; there has not been a government which was not led — usually controlled outright — by Labour or the Tories since the end of the second world war, and the government during that war was basically a coalition of Labour and the Tories; ignoring that, the two parties led every government back to the end of the first world war, when — in essence — Labour picked up the mantle dropped by the Liberal party, which disintegrated because of the war. Before that, every government was led by the Liberals or the Tories back to 1858, when the Liberals were formed as a coalition including the former Whig party; until that time, all governments were led by either the Whigs or the Tories all the way back to when the government was first put into this form. When one or both parties in such a system starts triangulating, very strange — and undesirable, usually — things happen. This is metaphorically illustrated by ice cream carts on a beach.
Imagine a mile-long beach where there are two ice cream sellers, and the people on the beach are more or less randomly distributed. The best arrangement of ice cream sellers for the people on the beach in such a situation is for there to be one a quarter mile from each end — nobody will have to walk more than a quarter of a mile to reach the nearest ice cream seller. But suppose that all customers always go to the nearest ice cream seller, and one of the sellers is in a stand with a fixed position, but the other one is a cart. The cart can maximize the number of customers it gets by moving to be right next to the stand, on whichever side has more of the beach on it. Since the people on the beach go to the nearest supplier, the cart will get everyone on that side of the stand. If the stand is a quarter mile from one end of the beach, the cart will be just barely further in — and every single person on the second half of the beach has to walk more than a quarter mile to get ice cream.
Well, when there are two parties, one of them usually has very fixed positions on most issues, because it will be the party of the rich, devoted to policy beneficial to the rich. As soon as the other party starts triangulating, it will gravitate to positions as close as possible to those of the party of the rich without exceeding them, assuming that the majority of the population will (metaphorically speaking) buy their ice cream from the nearest cart, rather than go to the trouble of building and stocking another one on the other half of the beach. In practice, what this means is that a lot of people on the other half of the beach stop buying ice cream. The Tories have basically entrenched all their positions by trying to enact and then enthusiatically defend Brexit, which influences nearly everything, and Labour is triangulating its way into being a party of unenthusiastic defenders of Brexit, because that’s what “just this side of the ice cream stand” looks like in context.
Where’s that post that’s like “I can’t buy expensive things like plane tickets on my phone, I have to use my laptop, big purchases are for the big screen”
Because apparently this is a literal actual thing that retailers hate cuz you think more before spending a lot of money, they want you to spend a lot without thinking about it so much
I often despair at the state of politics in my country but one thing I Just Don't Get - why are Labour like this? Maybe this is just my ignorance showing but wasn't the whole point of them being different from the Tories? What's the point if they're just gonna do the same shit? What the hell is going on? How did this happen?
An aggressively cynical view would be that the Labour Party previously existed to manage the working class as a voting bloc. I don’t think it’s 100% the case, but I can see why folk would think it.
People will point Tony Blair being elected as the paradigm shift. It was the point when Labour went full on neoliberal where instead of opposing the conservative economic worldview, they accepted that thats how the world works.
So their whole argument shifted to ‘We can just manage the economy better than the conservatives (but in accordance to how they think things should work)’
I don’t think it was purely Tony Blair that started the shift though, I think it started when Labour started to appoint members to the House of Lords.
There’s also a shift in view, from the idea that the party exists to enact the will of its membership to the idea that the membership exists to enable the party.
If you believe that the important thing is the party, then stances on issues are no longer important. (Incidentally, corruption is also unimportant, as long as it doesn’t get punished. Preferably not punished because it isn’t discovered, but the important thing is the punishment.) And that means the party will perform what is called “triangulation” — it will base its positions not on what its membership/voters want to see enacted, but on what it believes will get it the most votes in the general election, which is not always the same thing — if the party’s voters don’t care very much about a contentious issue, it may be better to take a position contrary to their preference if it will bring in votes from outside the party.
The UK government is effectively 2-party; there has not been a government which was not led — usually controlled outright — by Labour or the Tories since the end of the second world war, and the government during that war was basically a coalition of Labour and the Tories; ignoring that, the two parties led every government back to the end of the first world war, when — in essence — Labour picked up the mantle dropped by the Liberal party, which disintegrated because of the war. Before that, every government was led by the Liberals or the Tories back to 1858, when the Liberals were formed as a coalition including the former Whig party; until that time, all governments were led by either the Whigs or the Tories all the way back to when the government was first put into this form. When one or both parties in such a system starts triangulating, very strange — and undesirable, usually — things happen. This is metaphorically illustrated by ice cream carts on a beach.
Imagine a mile-long beach where there are two ice cream sellers, and the people on the beach are more or less randomly distributed. The best arrangement of ice cream sellers for the people on the beach in such a situation is for there to be one a quarter mile from each end — nobody will have to walk more than a quarter of a mile to reach the nearest ice cream seller. But suppose that all customers always go to the nearest ice cream seller, and one of the sellers is in a stand with a fixed position, but the other one is a cart. The cart can maximize the number of customers it gets by moving to be right next to the stand, on whichever side has more of the beach on it. Since the people on the beach go to the nearest supplier, the cart will get everyone on that side of the stand. If the stand is a quarter mile from one end of the beach, the cart will be just barely further in — and every single person on the second half of the beach has to walk more than a quarter mile to get ice cream.
Well, when there are two parties, one of them usually has very fixed positions on most issues, because it will be the party of the rich, devoted to policy beneficial to the rich. As soon as the other party starts triangulating, it will gravitate to positions as close as possible to those of the party of the rich without exceeding them, assuming that the majority of the population will (metaphorically speaking) buy their ice cream from the nearest cart, rather than go to the trouble of building and stocking another one on the other half of the beach. In practice, what this means is that a lot of people on the other half of the beach stop buying ice cream. The Tories have basically entrenched all their positions by trying to enact and then enthusiatically defend Brexit, which influences nearly everything, and Labour is triangulating its way into being a party of unenthusiastic defenders of Brexit, because that’s what “just this side of the ice cream stand” looks like in context.
It enrages me everytime it dawns on me that there is no graduating class in Gaza this year.
How maddening it is to think that just last summer I watched as Al-Shaima Akram celebrated received the news that she got the highest score in all of Palestine in her high school examination, not knowing that come October, Israel will kill her and her family and all the joy that was left.
No tawjihi celebration videos will come out of Gaza this year and that is devastating.
Since October, Israel had destroyed every university in Gaza and destroyed 80% of schools, killing hundreds of teachers and professor and thousands of students in its deliberate attempt to destroy Gaza’s education system along with everything else.
In the words of Gazan poet Khaled Juma “the school year that never started in Gaza has come to an end”. No last day of school bells, no kids celebrating the last day of school. All these joyful sounds have been drowned out by the sounds of bombs. No deadline extension requests for final projects, missiles had their final say.
No graduation ceremonies when parents are instead burying their children. No plans are made for the summer either, when everyone is busy counting the days and the dead.
I say this with a lot of frustration because you cannot mistake how deliberate this is, knowing how important education is for Palestinians. It’s the one thing we know that even if Israel tries to kill us off, you cannot kill our ideas.
This is why Palestinians in Gaza have opened temporary schools and got innovative with prioritising education while trying to survive, like Noor’s moving school initiative and many many makeshift schools that have been set up in displacement camps.
me: *googling what kind of bike helmet i should get*
search result 1, AI-generated article: Since the dawn of time, humans have wondered what kind of bike helmet is best for protecting their cranium and lower intestine. In the event that you find yourself with a bike helmet, you must find a way to save your family. Therefore, we have compiled a list of qualities to look for. First, sodium content is of great importance when biking your helmet.
search results 2, 3, and 4: sponsored ads for bike helmets on amazon
search result 5, reddit thread: bikeaholic363736: hey guys, do any of you have experience with the windslapper 30g helmet from spronklegear?
spokejunkie666: it’s probably the best helmet on the market right now. if you’re not using the windslapper you might as well just be riding your bike into a woodchipper
handlebar_hamburglar: idiot. we’ve had this thread a hundred times. don’t the mods enforce the repost ban anymore? OP, don’t listen to spokejunkie. the windslapper is the leading cause of death in the netherlands
Getting really sick of all the “There’s No Place Like Chrome” ads on youtube. There’s Firefox. Firefox saves your passwords. Firefox autofills things if you want. Firefox also does things that Chrome doesn’t like allow adblockers, and it does not mine your data and sell your information for advertising purposes. Google is really trying to push people to use Chrome so they can take as much data from users as possible in order to make as much money as possible and it’s borderline sinister.
Anyway, download Firefox.
The irony of this is because of the ad blockers on my Firefox, I’ve never seen any such ad.
Getting really sick of all the “There’s No Place Like Chrome” ads on youtube. There’s Firefox. Firefox saves your passwords. Firefox autofills things if you want. Firefox also does things that Chrome doesn’t like allow adblockers, and it does not mine your data and sell your information for advertising purposes. Google is really trying to push people to use Chrome so they can take as much data from users as possible in order to make as much money as possible and it’s borderline sinister.
Anyway, download Firefox.
The irony of this is because of the ad blockers on my Firefox, I’ve never seen any such ad.
Always be vague. Say I think they’re in today or not until later. If they press say it’s company policy not to give out the schedule. Most companies do have this and even if they don’t how would a stranger know. Don’t give out specifics, they can get people injured or even killed.
At my last job someone came up and asked when “Sarah” was working next. I didn’t tell him and then texted her a description, turns out he was an abusive ex who had been stalking her. Don’t do this shit please.
Do NOT say anything along the lines of “they’re not in today” or “not until later” because you are confirming that this is somewhere the person in question can be found. NEVER confirm anything!
My old boss told us a story of how, years before when she was a fairly new manager (I’m talking decades, she’s 64 right now), there was a man who came in and asked for an employee by name and said he was her uncle. She told him the employee’s shift started in a coule hours. He waited the entire time for her, and when she came in, he assaulted her and bashed her face into the counter. My boss saw everything. She can’t recall what he said, but he kept screaming until someone threatened to call the police.
She told me that story after a man came in and asked for when an employee, who recently quit, would be coming in. I told him she doesn’t work here anymore and he said to me “Okay, well I’m her dad so if you see her tell her I’ll be across the street at the gas station.” He left and my boss IMMEDIATELY came out and scolded me for it, then told me that story.
She gave me some advice on what to say or do in that situation:
Don’t just deny knowing anything, deny the person asking. Example, “When is ____ coming in?” “You can’t know that information.” or “Can you tell me when ____’s shift is?” “Schedules are only for employees.” Additionally, saying “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” can usually work, it may piss them off but it can work.
Continue on with the customer service. “I can’t help you with that, do you need help (with clothes, finding a product, ordering)?” or “Can I take your order?/Can I help you find (a product)?”
If they persist, insist they leave the store. “If you’re not going to order, please leave the building.” or “I can’t help you, have a nice day.” and, if you can, leave. If you can’t leave, call for or help the next customer.
If they still persist (by now they may be aggressive), threaten to call the police on the basis of them becoming aggressive and refusing to leave the premises. Some people will leave at that point, others stay. When the police get there, explain the situation but still do NOT confirm the existence of the employee they’re looking for to the police until they have been escorted out of the area.
Regardless of if the customer know the employee’s name, description, or daily (not hourly) schedule, even if they look like the same race and claim to be family, you NEVER confirm the employee’s existence.
The only exceptions are if the employee tells you themself they’re expecting someone to come in for them (ASK FOR A DESCRIPTION OF THE PERSON), and if you personally know who they are in relation to the employee. When anyone I know has to come in because I asked them to come in, I describe what they look like and what they usually wear. I go into deep descriptions, even including how they walk.
You could literally save a life, guys. Don’t blindly trust your gut either and think “But they LOOK innocent” or “But they said ______” because that can result in someone getting severely hurt, or killed.
I know I joked on this post before but seriously
If youre in the US it is against federal law to give out anyones personal information (this includes numbers, names, and schedules) without writen and signed permission.
Just say its against federal law and you cant give out that info without risk of termination - this will get 99% off your back the first time
