—

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

Your move, rest of the media.

This is a good start. Keep going, decent people of the world. Leave that fascist pile of shit behind and watch it die.

PLAYER 3 START

Come on, Player Four! Who’s gonna be Player Four?

Good. Good.

—

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

Your move, rest of the media.

This is a good start. Keep going, decent people of the world. Leave that fascist pile of shit behind and watch it die.

PLAYER 3 START

Come on, Player Four! Who’s gonna be Player Four?

Good. Good.

Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

Nov 15, 2024. Ao3 is almost old enough to drive by itself!

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

Yup, these are actually *really* important. And a small bit of work helps, so it’s doable even if you’re snowed under with survival work or in too much pain to concentrate for longer periods.

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

It unexpectedly helped me with learning how to decipher premodern handwriting too, which proved really useful in my academic stuff. You *will* pick up valuable skills doing this. Put it on your CV.

Other places you can go to do citizen science, from the notes

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

In person

Also:

Even if you don't have time to spend, but do have some processor cycles to spare, check out the projects available at BOINC's Compute for Science: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Hey guys, these projects make a HUGE difference for science. For example, I run bplant.org and iNaturalist is the #1 source of images in ID guides and articles and other educational materials I develop. The plant observations are also helpful for assessing plant ranges and how these ranges are changing with climate change. And it also helps me identify local seed sources for use in restoration plantings. Use of iNaturalist, even casual use like a random person uploading pics of plants they see growing in their yard, or a random parking lot they were in, or a random vacant lot, those observations are MAJORLY helping in (1) education (2) science (3) conservation.

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

But yeah, go do citizen science, please!!!

I thought I'd go back and repost this because there are probably a lot of people out there who, like me, reallllyyyyyy need something to distract them right now

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

Unmute !

That’s the most “meow” meow I’ve ever heard

SHE’S SO MAD THAT WATER IS WET

@is-the-cat-video-cute this is probably fine, I’m just curious

Rating: Cute

this kitten is vocalizing its annoyance, and it is indeed vocalizing it AT the water, as if the water is going to take a hint and stop being wet and gross on its paw.

you WET miette? you wet her paw like the fish???? oh! oh! jail for water! jail for water for One Thousand Years!!!!

Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, the youngest MP in Aotearoa, starts a haka to protest the first vote on a bill reinterpreting the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi

Avalanche: Whatever you do, don't give the Black Materia to Sephiroth. Alright Cloud?

Cloud not even 5 minutes later:

Og picture below

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

THIS is the montage I’ve been waiting my life for.

Remembering how long it took me starting as a 14 year old to track down information on each movie referenced, in the days before videos (let alone DVDs or streaming movies or any way of watching things that wasn’t a festival at the Scala Cinema or late at night on BBC2…

This post is a public service

please god let this scene be in part 3 shot for shot PLEASE

This is pure pedantry, but please, folks: it's nepotism if the unfair advantage is because of your relatives. If it's because of your friends, it's cronyism.

Every photo of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan together looks like a a respectable mafia boss father named Giovanni and his weird son who bites sometimes

Yeahhhh, you're right

While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

Why do all the other languages get the cool and appropriate words

beastie boys music is funny as hell one of them will say a line and then the other two will say a completely unrelated line

"met with a girl and she sucked my COCK. sedimentary is a type of ROCK"

You can skip to the next post instnatly with the J key

... this was supposed to be a helpful tip on another post, now it looks like I'm being really aggressive about a random post about the beastie boys

Tumblr conversations are funny as hell one of them will say a line and then the other two will say a completely unrelated line