OP of the original post turned off reblogs but as of 3 hours ago 3/3/24 Deux Face is still alive and doing well!! According to the farm’s Facebook she is starting to try to stand and getting better at holding up her head. The farm has been very clear that they’re going to care for her and do their best to meet her needs, they are not planning to sell her or show her off to the media. They also haven’t mentioned any other noticeable deformities inside or out and have noted that both heads connect at the same throat, and she’s lived for about 5.5 days at this point which is shockingly long for an animal with this level of deformities. Go Deux Face!
Deux Face update 3/6!!
She is continuing to make “very slow but positive progress” to stand, managing to stand for a couple seconds a few times since the last update.
They also confirmed some fun facts: she breathes out of both noses at once and can see with all four eyes! There really are twice as many stars for little Deux Face.
The Worcester library is getting some local press coverage for its March late fee forgiveness program, which is called “March Meowness”. In short: if you have lost/damaged fees, come to the library with a picture of a cat, any cat (drawings are ok) and they’ll waive any outstanding fines on your library card.
Fav quote: “Even if you don’t have a cat in your life, you can still draw one,” said library Executive Director Jason Homer. “Even if it’s one of the big cats, like a tiger or a lion, and we’ll be excited to see those.”
Official Post of Massachusetts
How can you post this and not show the official announcement image?? Bask in its gloriousness.
OK. This is very cute. I hope it’s a step in the library choosing to eliminate fines.
Great news! Worcester Public Library does not have late fees! This program is SPECIFICALLY aimed at providing amnesty for people with missing or damaged items, and the library has said that so far it’s allowed more than 400 accounts to be unblocked. They called special attention to children’s accounts with missing items from the beginning of the pandemic, suspecting many of these were lost or accidentally discarded during unexpected school closures.
I forgot to return a book after my mother died. I was a mess. I was depressed. I was taking care of my dad. I found it years later buried in a closet and was so embarrassed of having ‘stolen’ a library book that it took me years MORE to go back with it. And I had the money to pay for it! I could’ve fixed this! But I didn’t, and it kept me from the library for YEARS, because I couldn’t handle the judgement.
This is the library saying, you can come back. It’s okay. We’re not mad. We want you to come back. Let us make it easy for you.
In an era dominated by broadband and wireless cellular networks, it might come as a surprise to many that dial-up internet services still exist in the United States. This persistence is not a mere relic of nostalgia — but a testament to the diverse and uneven nature of internet infrastructure across the country.
Yes, dial-up internet, with those screechy, crackly tones, remains a useful tool in areas where modern, high-speed internet services are either unaffordable or unavailable. Subscriber numbers are tiny, but some plough on and access the Internet by the old ways, not the new.
The Old Ways
The resilience of dial-up internet in the U.S. market is underpinned by several factors that ensure its continued relevance. Primarily, it caters to rural and remote areas where the infrastructure for high-speed internet has not been fully developed.
AOL weirdly still hosts a dialer program on its dial-up page, but it doesn’t actually have any dial-up functionality in it.
Despite significant advancements in telecommunications technology, there are still many regions in the U.S. where geographical challenges and the high cost of infrastructure development make it difficult for service providers to offer typical broadband or wireless services. In these areas, dial-up internet becomes the only feasible option for connecting to the digital world. For context, in 2019, census figures suggested just 0.2% of households used dial-up internet, a number surely even smaller today.
If you’re trying to get on the internet via telephone line today, though, you’ll find your options are pretty limited. Some big players like EarthLink and AOL stuck with dial-up for longer than most, but the companies no longer offer sign-ups on their websites. Not surprising, given the take rate must have been near zero.
You can apparently get free dialup internet access from NetZero, though you will still be paying for phone calls made when you dial in.
Instead, you’ll need to look at a company like NetZero, which offers a dial-up service for $29.95 a month. For that money, you get unlimited internet access with no time limit, which is probably easy to offer when customer numbers are so low. The company also touts its service as “HiSpeed Accelerated Dial-Up,” but it’s just some basic compression or caching system that doesn’t actually net you any data rate increase over the usual 56 Kbps speed of traditional dialup connections. It also offers an ad-supported “Free ISP” service offering up to 10 hours of usage per month, including webmail.
Juno is another ISP operating in the dial-up space, similarly offering “accelerated” service with unlimited hours for $29.95 a month. Hilariously, DSLExtreme offers unlimited dial-up too, despite its name. On an annual contract, it’s as cheap as $9.95 a month, or $12.95 a month if you’re paying as you go.
It’s easy to imagine that for some, the cost factor could play a significant role, but it’s not really the case. Regular broadband connections can be had fairly cheaply, as can cellular service with Internet access bundled in. Ultimately, dial-up isn’t really a cheaper way to get online at all, especially when you consider you have to pay for regular telephone service as well. It really only makes sense if you’re far away from any wireless or wired broadband infrastructure and it’s the only way you can get online. In this way, it can prove a useful way for those in remote areas to do simple tasks like access email or process credit-card payments.
You won’t do much beyond that, though, because dial-up tech is firmly stuck in the 1990s as far as speeds are concerned. At best, you’ll get something approaching 56 Kbits/sec if you’ve got a nice V.92 modem and a great connection. In reality, if you’re calling your ISP from a great distance from a rural area, you might find that your speeds are somewhat lower if the connection isn’t crystal clear.
Classics Never Go Out of Style
At least getting yourself a modem is still fairly easy. US Robotics still maintains a small range of 56K modems, and states that most of them are compatible even with Windows 11.
If you want a high-quality modem these days, you might find buying a refurbished US Robotics unit to be your best bet. They were built to last and look like they’re still living in 1989.
The 5670 is a PCI soft modem if you like your operating system to do the heavy lifting, with an MSRP of just $14.99. You can also source a high-quality refurbished USR3453C if you have a demanding business-grade application.
Other options include the 5686G external modem with an RS232 interface, or the 5639 soft-modem if you simply have to have a USB interface. StarTech does actually sell a hardware USB modem, however, if you’re looking for modern connectivity and a more reliable experience. Ultimately, though, much of what you’ll find for sale online is cheap new USB soft-modems, whereas most hardware modems for sale are used units from the early 2000s and before.
For most of us, it’s hard to imagine using dial-up internet in this era for anything other than pure historical interest. It’s too slow to reasonably load most regular websites, which have all been designed for the higher speeds of modern broadband connections. However, if you’re doing something that needs connectivity on the end of some dusty old rural phone line, you might find yourself getting familiar with the screechy kind of Internet once more.
A sixth-grade girls' basketball team from northern Kentucky was banned from a boys' basketball league after romping through the regular season to reach the championship.
The squad from Next Level Girls Basketball notched a 7-1 record in a city-wide basketball league run by Southwestern Ohio Basketball and was preparing for the championship when league president Tom Sunderman notified the athletic academy that it would be too risky to let them play for the title, reported WVXU-FM.
"Doing this for 28 years, what we have worried about is a boys team losing to a girls team (especially in the year end tourney), they may get frustrated and retaliate against a girl," Sunderman said in a statement. "Then we have liability issues."
Sunderman said he coached against a team of boys from Next Level in the first game, and he said the team's gender was listed as male in it registration, but he said the rest of the games were played by girls.
"We entered them into the league assuming they were a boys' team as conveniently no roster was ever provided," Sunderman said in his statement.
"Subsequently, their first game was filled in by a boys 6th grade Next Level team ... It wasn't until late January/early February that several teams from the 6th grade division started traveling down to Kentucky to play their scheduled games, that it became apparent that the Next Level team was, in fact, a girls team."
Next Level director Larry McGraw said he never felt the girls were in danger, but he said they faced gender-based scorn during the season.
"They got giggles, they got laughs, and people talked about them... you know, the looks," McGraw said. "There's a lot of that and I think this was a great opportunity for them to say, 'Yeah, we're pretty darn good and you should respect us.'"
The league offered the team a chance to pay in another year-end tournament for girls, but the club turned that down and removed all of its other teams from the league's tournaments in protest.
Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.
Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says “There’s no consensus about the origins of skydoves” when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that’s uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they’re an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT’S AN OPEN ISSUE.
Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won’t work, and you can’t call it a “theoretical exercise” just to cover up the fact that you’ve not been able to cast it. You can’t combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that’s just not how magic works, in all due respect.
Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.
Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.
Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student… You keep getting called to go on “quests” which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor’s project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor’s project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.
If you go through the video frame by frame you can see the outside of the plane.
Then I looked up a list of planes commonly used for skydiving and this was the only one that matched the description of a single-engine, low-wing plane with fixed landing gear and a slight mid-span bend in the wings.
Mega devout US Christian lady who believes the earth is like 5000yrs old dug a 10000yo site with us, had lived in a complete cognitive dissonance with us for an entire month lmao
Dude who's ass was like a metal detector for scorpion nests. Every single spot he sat on turned out to be a scorpion nest. I have never seen a person have so many scorpions on them without fucking noticing it.
Camel spider chased (yes. Chased) a girl for an entire 10 minutes across the site.
Having to take a shit in the middle of the desert at midnight in -1 degrees and wind piercing thru ur asshole while ur friend guards the bush ur shitting in with her life and a 19th century lantern.
(In an army firing zone) guy picks up unexploded mortar, shakes it violently, slams it unto the ground and runs. Not sure whether it was a suicide attempt or a mass murder attempt but at least it was funny.
Reading artifact tags of tombs, stumble upon a tag for the skeleton. "State of preservation" bracket (poor, good, etc) reads: "dead".
Accidentally stepping on multiple (fortunately incapacitated, in hindsight) old landmines one after the other while going "oh no no no no no".
Digging in a hidden cave, making unhinged monkey noises to scare tourists passing by.
First of all, this is genius and the sound must be on. I have a lot of comments. This was a LOT of work. Not just the animation… but the lovely and adorable handmade creatures themselves. The staging and gathering of the miniatures used, all of it. A labor of love. I am so happy to Reblog and I hope more enjoy it. Thank you so much for sharing, pretty much reset my day.
The deadly winter storm that swept across Texas and parts of the South knocked out power and water for millions. It also created a catastrophe for animals statewide — including for sea turtles prone to freezing in frigid waters.
Bellamy, an Army and Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and Haiti, spotted some turtles Tuesday with his son Jerome. But he needed help. He alerted Capt. Christopher Jason, the commander of Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in southeastern Texas, and his wife, Cheryl Jason. The commander grabbed his kayak, paddled into the cold waves and retrieved a lapful of cold-shocked turtles.
But the next day, on Bellamy’s turtle patrol, the situation became far more urgent, he said, and one that would require a lot more hands.
“It was like an apocalypse of turtles littered on the beach,” Bellamy told The Washington Post in a phone interview Thursday.
More than 1,100 turtles have since been plucked from Laguna Madre by a ragtag group of about 50 Navy pilots and flight students, military spouses, family members and military retirees, said Biji Pandisseril, the Navy installation’s environmental manager. More turtles are still coming in, he said, and some have died.
Green sea turtles, listed as a threatened species, feast on grasses found in the waters of Laguna Madre, but in winter weather, the chilling shallow water zaps strength from the coldblooded reptiles. They become immobile and unable to power their fins to warmer, deeper waters, putting them at risk of dying of predation or exposure, according to the National Park Service. Some wash ashore like driftwood.
Rescuing “cold-stunned” turtles has become an annual routine in Texas, with dozens or hundreds aided in a typical year, Sanjuana Zavala, a spokeswoman for the conservation group Sea Turtle Inc. told The Post.
But with the weather so much more severe, thousands of turtles have been rescued in the larger effort this week. Many could die if facilities that care for them don’t get power soon, the group has said.
Word spread in the military community, but the movement began with Bellamy flagging down motorists to help, he said. From there, the efforts mushroomed to a full-blown operation. Bellamy said one active duty Navy pilot trainee on scene called in other trainees with pickup trucks to haul the stunned turtles to heated storage facilities at the air station.
Jason kayaked out to distant turtles,while others used a more novel approach: wielding laundry baskets to corral them in shallow water.
The cold was a challenge for the humans, too, Bellamy said, but volunteers worked all day. One man waded into the surf with his blue jeans and cowboy boots, laser-focused on the rescue, he said.
The effort unfurled some challenges. Green sea turtles can grow to hundreds of pounds, and the bigger ones — coined “Big Bertha” — need two volunteers to handle. Arms and backs burned in the cold.
“These guys are a lot heavier than they look,” Bellamy said.
Back at the storage facility, the inevitable happened, Pandisseril said. The turtles, suddenly warmer, began moving — though, of course, a little slowly. The volunteers did their best to contain them for 24 hours, when they were handed off to Park Service officials, he said.
Pilot trainees started a rotating guard shift to watch over the turtles at night, Jason said.
The larger community at the air base has not been immune to the struggles millions of other Texans still face in the storm. Many of them had no heat or water in the past few days, Jason said.
“Most of these people didn’t have good conditions in their own homes,” he said. “But they came out to help.”
The hardships of the extreme weather, coupled with the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, compelled the volunteers to do something tangible and positive amid the bleakness, Bellamy said.
“Things have been rough over the past year. It’s fun to see people come together focused on recovering these turtles. People just need it.”
ALT
