SO APPARENTLY MY ENTIRE LIFE IS A LIE HOW HAS YOUR GUYS’ NIGHT BEEN
UPDATE: SO LATER THAT NIGHT WHEN MY BROTHER GOT HOME FROM WORK (HE IS 6+ YEARS OLDER, MORE PROFICIENT IN FARSI THAN I AM, AND ALSO OFTEN VISITS IRAN), I ASKED HIM WHAT HE THOUGHT THE PERSIAN WORD FOR “REMOTE CONTROL WAS” AND HE ALSO SAID THE WORD!!!!!! AND WHEN I TOLD HIM THAT IT WAS A FAKE FILLER WORD, HIS FIRST RESPONSE WAS “WOW, WHAT????? SO THEY LIED TO US?????? WHAT ELSE IS FAKE??????? ARE THEY EVEN OUR REAL PARENTS?????”
SO GOOD TO KNOW THAT I AM NOT ALONE IN THIS BETRAYAL.
truly wild how driving really does become like piloting a mech after a while. like it sounds so car-bro-y but the car genuinely does become like an extension of your body. your muscles are simply making the correct micro-movements to perfectly manouvre a giant piece of machinery through a constantly moving maze while your brain is busy singing karaoke. you can physically feel when a gap is too small for your car-sona to fit through, like a cat putting its whiskers into a crevice. your brain is suddenly able to do on-the-fly s=d/t calculations in a milisecond and tell you exactly how quickly you need to move to avoid an oncoming vehicle while turning across the road. why does driving unlock the unused 89% of my brain
What the hell.
Is that what driving is for most people? I looked in the notes expecting to see a bunch of bewildered reactions but everyone is agreeing with OP and it’s not that I don’t believe you, but like.
I drove for years and hated every second of it because I was constantly aware of the fact that I was in charge of a massive chunk of speeding steel and glass capable of causing death if I sneezed at the wrong moment. Not for a single second did the car feel like a part of me. Driving always felt deeply unnatural and highly dangerous. It is indeed Wild to think that the vast majority of people apparently smoothly mind-meld with their car.
No wonder I hate driving so much. Everyone else is having a fun Carsona drift experience while I’m strapped into the pilot seat of a complicated memory game whose penalty for losing is dismemberment.
How do you feel about your ukelele? are there any particular fingerings you know you need to be juuuuuuuust a little off-book to sound “right”?
you innately sense need to reduce your cook time by a minute and a half because you made your pizza crust just a bit thinner than usual.
you know the perfect angle to use your favorite spatula without thinking about it.
intimate familiarity with equipment isn’t just for cars.
haptic experience is knowing-without-looking where the controls are, how much you need to press the throttle to cause the downshift you’re going to need to pass someone, and your ears can tell you what the tires are doing in addition to what your hands on the steering wheel and your ass in the seat are saying, and you can feather the gas, brake, or steering without much conscious thought.
and, unless you’re actively driving-driving (hooning, taking twelve laps of a roundabout just for fun, whatever), you just get this acclimated to a machine you use all the time and it does become a semi-extension of your tactile self.
for some, possibly most, motorists, this is never something they think about, even (and especially) if they do it all the time.
some folks are in The Anxiety Box the whole time. that sounds like it sucks.
i can tell you about the handling dynamics of every car i’ve owned, a couple of weekend rentals, and some that i’ve only driven once, often in a fair bit of detail.
cars are large, expensive, and dangerous, but they can also be a lot of fun.
We just took back two cats an older friend had taken because she is moving back to Mexico because of all the BS going on. We were always supposed to take them when she retired, but that was over 5 yrs away. We picked em up on Sunday (twas heartbreaking)
One of the people who I rehomed some of my smaller pets to is asking if I can take one back because she bites, and I also found out she’s been keeping Daffy, one of the snakes I gave her, in a tub and rack system instead of the larger enclosure he came with. Naturally she wants to keep him and won’t give him back because he’s friendly.
I wish I hadn’t rehomed either of them to her now.
One of the books I recommend everybody to read is Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It rewired my brain and I mean that in a really physical, tactile way.
One of the main topics of the book is Indigenous Australian information technologies. Indigenous Australians don’t use written language. They have different information technologies. Not inferior. Different. Yunkaporta demonstrates the very basics of how these technologies work, and you immediately feel your brain do something you had no idea it could do.
It feels like he’s walking inside your house, gesturing to a wall that was always there, and then walking right through it, demonstrating that the wall was never there in the first place.
In a written-language-based society, children grow up learning to communicate by written language, and it shapes the way their thoughts and memories work. But there are other information technologies that work very, very differently than how written language works. The very idea of ideas is fundamentally different.
The author re-iterates that writing these things down into a book mutilates the idea because writing makes you think and understand a certain way.
I think everyone should read this book because basically everyone is brainwashed nowadays to believe that human cultures follow a linear progression from being dirty cave men in the woods, to settled agriculture, cities and written language, to smelting iron and writing on paper…and it’s totally wrong.
Some cultures used writing, others didn’t. Writing is not a “later stage” of “advancement,” it is just a different technology, and it has advantages and disadvantages.
Same with agriculture. Yunkaporta explains that there were indigenous Australian people that tried settled agriculture in the distant past, but that culture collapsed. The ecosystem just isn’t good for settled agriculture.
Same with metal working. Something that pisses me off is people calling indigenous North American cultures “stone age.” First of all, they made plenty of things out of copper. Second of all, they didn’t NEED bronze or iron. Mining is back breaking, dangerous work, and smelting involves so many unhealthy fumes. Maybe the labor and impact upon society and the environment just wasn’t worth it for them.
Colonization has made a monoculture of thought. Monoculture is in the essence of colonialism. Not only does colonialism literally replace diverse agricultural ecosystems with sameness, it also replaces human diversity with sameness.
And replacing human diversity with sameness, enforces sameness upon the ecosystem, because everyone is forced into using the same machines, consuming the same resources, valuing the same aesthetics, eating the same foods, playing the same sports, raising the same animals, wearing the same clothes, living in the same houses.
Just think about it. If two cultures live next to each other and have different cultural foods and clothes, for example one eats fish and berries and wears wool and the other eats chickens and roots and wears linen, their foraging and agricultural practices are different, so more biodiversity can exist, and they aren’t using the same resources, so the resources are more sustainable. If EVERY culture eats the same food and wears the same clothes, they are all putting strain on the same resources, and every area will have the same agro-ecosystem, eliminating biodiversity.
Something really violent about eating a burrito. Biting a hole in that thing. A sandwich or a taco is different, it’s already open, but a well-wrapped burrito is like a complete living thing in your hand, the taut skin protecting a complex network if internal organs. And you put a hole in it, maul it for sustenance, like a wolf on the open plain tearing the throat from a living gazelle. Or perhaps like a guy living in an infested apartment catching a white rat in his hands and just biting into it.
This post would not be gaining this much traction on a normal website
What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?
My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually
Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire
very very slowly.
What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.
I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.
okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.
Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).
We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.
The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).
This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.
OH HOW I LOVE THIS POST. It makes me so much happier about being alive. I AM BURNING VERY SLOWLY. *hugs it*
And once again, the internet makes learning history and science a thousand times more interesting than school ever did.
I love shit like this.
I was totally having thoughts along these lines and along comes tumblr to pretty much sum it all up. Bravo~
Ultimately, she spent 20 hours redoing the copy from scratch — and with her $100-per-hour rate, that meant her client was shelling out $2,000 for copy that likely would have ended up being far cheaper had a human just written it in the first place.
You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit
If people knew what a fucking atom is and how molecules are defined, at least a quarter of all health related cults like movements and scams wouldn’t work.
“Ohh it’s a different sugar than refined sugar” it’s the same molecule.
“Ohhh my water filtering apparatus making beauty water and cleaning water and alkaline water” Water is H20. What you’re doing is reverse osmosis, and if it’s alkaline then there is a substance that’s not water in there to make it alkaline. You can’t purify water to a pH of 12, because pure water molecules have, by definition of how the pH system works and several phyics rules, a pH of exactly 7.
“Ooohh it has ~different~ sodium atoms.” That’s called an isotope and sodium isotopes aren’t created by magic woowoo, and the magical ability of most isotopes is radioactivity.
“Low toxin” what toxin. Tell me their names. What are they doing. “They are endocrine disruptors” what part of the endocrine system? How? Do you have a source that doesn’t try to sell you something?
“Just mix vinegar and baking soda to cleanse all the toxins of your fruits” you just created water molecules and CO2, and some calcium and acetate which don’t have much chemical property. That’s a science fair vulcano. And doesn’t have acidic or alkaline properties to chemically influence anything. Just use tap water at this point. “My wood cutting board soaked in an alkaline solution from baking soda to clear out the toxins leaves a nasty looking soup” yeah because you were dissolving the wood with an alkaline solution. Congratulations.
“There is effective microorganisms in this ceramic bead and it can cleanse your laundry and dishes and prevent mold in your fridge and it works for years” what microorganisms exactly? How did you discover them? What are they eating? Are they resistant to 60 degrees and steam? Do they procreate in the fridge? Are they spreading out on all surfaces to prevent the mold or is it an air filtration system that works without airflow or is it just magic? “Put them in your flowers, they can reverse cavities, put them in your walls” what are they eating in my walls? What kind of microorganisms are they? Did you test the safety of those things in human bodies? Are they native to my biotope? How do they survive in those fucking ceramic beads?
“Just use vinegar it’s magic” it’s a mild acid. Like, cool, sure, it works for several things, but it doesn’t have magic properties. It’s just a mild acid. Lemon juice is too. And once again, if you mix it with baking soda, they neutralise each other and you get water. Which cleans a lot of things but you dont need to do *all that* to get your hands on some plain water.
do not get me started on how bad people are about basic electrical principles, especially this abomination
I would absolutely download a dragon, and I’ve already shared this with my D&D group. We’re gonna have some adventures! Thank you to everyone who made this possible!
Photographing wild animals has certain risks. But often, the potential hazards are worth it—something photographer Barbara Jensen Vorster
can attest to first hand. In July 2018, she was snapping pictures of a
lion pride in Botswana, until a local lioness stole Vorster’s Canon 7D
after she accidentally dropped it on the ground. (The “thud” piqued the
big cat’s interest.) Luckily, Vorster had another camera on hand and
captured what happened next.
Once the camera dropped, the lioness
mother growled and approached Voster’s group. They withdrew to their
vehicle and watched the drama unfold. “The camera fell with the lens
looking up,” Voster recalled,
“she gently flipped the camera on its side and picked it up by the
barrel of the lens.” The lioness then brought it to her cubs who started
to playfully pounce on it. “They dragged it through the dirt, chewed on
the lens hood and then, fortunately, like most kids, soon grew tired
with their new toy.”
Eventually, Voster was able to fetch her
abandoned camera. She found that it still functioned fine, but the
lioness left her signature. “There are two huge teeth marks on the
rubber focus rings of the lens and small teeth marks on the plastic lens
hood, both of which I decided not to replace.” She spent roughly £200
getting the camera fixed, but the cost was worth the photos she snapped
that day. Calling it a “priceless experience,” she also puts it into
perspective: “What photographer can boast that their lens had been in a
lion’s mouth?”
HSI/ICE vs. hungry Mexican restaurant customers - WHO YA GOT?
“Did you not realize what this would be, being f*cking Gestapo, being Nazis? You didn’t realize what this would be like. You should quit! Quit now, quit! Now, you Nazi f*ck. Quit your job. It’s gonna be like this every f*cking day you’re coming. Every day, anytime you try to kidnap people, we are gonna be here!” A rapid responder yelled at fleeing ICE agents in Kansas.
As ICE and HSI raided two El Toro Loco locations in Lenexa and Kansas City, Kansas on Wednesday, rapid responders mobilized to both locations. In Lenexa, they chased HSI out of the restaurant, documenting on video the agents’ faces, vehicles, failure to show a warrant, and more.
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He’d spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He’d seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn’t consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to “better” or “more important” things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he’d trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this… and it wasn’t just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
“When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?”
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
“This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don’t have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it’s done every single time? You can’t do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you’ll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you’ll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you’re going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i’m ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress.”
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he’d spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out… The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn’t stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn’t really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I’ve thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
Post on my dash about medical debt reminded me of the time tumblr saved me two grand. I don’t think I told y'all about it because I am out of the habit of posting everything I do on tumblr lol
So. Last December, I had a bad cavity filled, and about a week later, I woke up with half of my face paralyzed. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, freaked me the fuck out. Fortunately I had some level-headed Discord friends who a) told me what Bell’s palsy was so I could look it up and b) reminded me to call my dentist for an emergency appointment. Dentist was also pretty sure it was Bell’s palsy, but urged me to go to the emergency room to get checked out, because one-sided facial paralysis is also a possible indicator of a stroke. And you don’t fuck around with strokes.
Bell’s palsy, if you, like me of 6 months ago, don’t know, is a harmless paralysis/muscle weakness on one side of the face that can be caused by a variety of things. It usually goes away on its own after a few weeks but also you can speed up the process with steroids.
I was pretty sure I was not having a stroke, because I’m Red Cross first aid certified and I know the symptoms of a stroke, and while one-sided facial paralysis is one of them, I didn’t have any of the others. Also, I had quit my shitty job in October, which meant I had a shiny new marketplace health insurance plan and hadn’t even touched my deductible. But I called my parents from the car and they urged me to get checked out and promised to help me pay off the emergency room bill if I needed it, because they’re good people and they love me even if they drive me crazy sometimes. So off I went to the nearest emergency room.
Emergency room staff also didn’t think I was having a stroke, because I waited ALL AFTERNOON, periodically having a new person come up to me and ask me to smile, hold both arms out to the side, press down on their hands, and tell them what month and year it was. (They don’t ask who the president is anymore. Hmm, I wonder why.) One guy had me drink a cup of water while he watched. I cannot stress enough that I did not have any medical tests other than a physical examination: no CT scans or MRIs, no IV drugs or blood draws, nothing.
I get diagnosed with Bell’s palsy and given a prescription for Prednisone. And then they give me a phone number and tell me to talk to this person about administrative stuff. So I call, and the dude on the phone verifies my name and date of birth and insurance information, and then he says, “It looks like your copay today is going to be $2400. How would you like to pay?”
I am, to this day, kind of impressed that he didn’t even stutter over that number, but I assume working in a medical call center drains your entire soul. At this point, it’s about 7pm, and I’ve been in the hospital since 2pm, and I’m stressed because half my face doesn’t work, and I know that I can’t afford $2400 because I quit my shitty job with nothing lined up back in October. But, I still remember every tumblr post I’ve ever read about health insurance and the medical system and how you can negotiate down a bill. I am not looking forward to this process, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but the alternative is paying $2400, so I say the magic words: “Send me an itemized bill.”
I kinda expected the guy to try and get me to pay up front, but he just says “Ok” and finishes up the process. I get discharged, go to the only open pharmacy at that time of night to get my Prednisone, have the pharmacist tell me the prescription isn’t written right and he can’t fill it, go home, and have a screaming sobbing meltdown because I have used up every single milligram of cope in my entire body. (I got my steroids eventually, and the Bell’s palsy cleared up in a couple weeks.)
A few weeks later, I get the bill in the mail. I brace myself and open it…
$300.
Turns out, after going through insurance and processing and everything, they couldn’t actually find $2400 worth of stuff to charge me for. Shocking! Who could have predicted!
I might have been able to argue it down even more, but I was fed up with entire thing, so I paid the $300 just to be fucking done with it. Sometimes the cheapest way to pay is with money.
What if I had paid that $2400 up front? Do I think they would have been like, “Oh, oops!” and refunded me $2k? Well, possibly, but I am not optimistic.
So, thank you to everyone who has ever posted about navigating the US healthcare system on tumblr. Because of you, I knew how to handle this situation even when I was tired and stressed.
for those who are (rightfully!) concerned about animal welfare in tik toks: Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary is a true sanctuary and this animal is safe and happy!
Wildcat Ridge is not only an accredited sanctuary, they have a policy of not displaying their residents to the public. It is a retirement home for cats that should never have been pets or attractions. There is no pressure on the animals to be in front of people, they interact as they choose with the sanctuary staff and vets and that’s it.
well yeah i have a pet hydra and it only has one head. i’m not going to cut its head off just to make it look cooler, you asshole. that’s seriously unethical. and i’m not letting you cut its head off either. if you really want a hydra with multiple heads, you should go for a rescue- but if you want your pet to look cooler at the cost of its physical health, maybe you shouldn’t get any kind of pet at all. no, the hydra’s not for guarding my evil tower, it’s my pet. have you ever heard of a pet? like a puppy or a kitty? you think i can’t defend my evil tower by my self?
it's the largest freshwater lake on the planet by surface area, you could lose a couple of smaller countries in there and not even notice. (vs Europe)
on top of that, it's a Northern lake, so the water never really gets warmer than 50 F (10 C) even in the heat of summer, and it's famous for sudden violent storms that destroy ships and buildings alike. this thing has a MASSIVE body count because it's also a major shipping thoroughfare.
She is also over 1,300ft/400m deep at her deepest. Once she has eaten you, she will not give you back. Lake Superior doesn't give up her dead.
And when Bunjy says "the largest by surface are" what that means is: Lake Superior is a whopping 31,700 square miles (82,103 square km) of water. The only reason she is not an inland sea is because she is freshwater.
She has tides. She has rip currents, like an ocean does. You don't even have to go out on a boat to get got by her, all you have to do is step into her icy waters in the wrong spot. She has ice formations that aren't "icebergs" on the technicality that they didn't calve from glaciers, even though they look and act the same.
(photo by Paul Berger)
She LOOKS like an ocean when you are at her shores. This is from a location on the Minnesota side shore.
(photo by George Ilstrup)
She is huge, icy, and hungry. This makes her very dangerous. Not to be fucked around with, because you WILL find out.
