For anyone who's needed a laugh/smile as much as I have lately, I give you this sweet little guy.

This could save your life.

BOOST.

Absolutely vital information to have if you live where the waters freeze over.

I especially appreciate this guy's commitment to actually showing the steps himself. That cold-shock response is a bitch and willingly subjecting himself to it couldn't have been fun.

Higgledy-piggledy unparliamentary green parrots quarrel outside in the trees

Squawking out epithets uncomplimentary Squads of unmannerly Oversized peas.

i loved this poem so much that i memorized it and to this day i sometimes mutter it under my breath to keep my welding tempo even

I love how these are from an Unreality subreddit but to my eye they just read like regular Tumblr shitposts. Did we cross-pollinate or something

And, #1 is why I'm proud that my great grandparents came from Russia.

Got his ass together in three words

Okay but frog genitalia are internal whereas male rats have among the largest proportionate ballsacks of any animal.

Never was there a tale of more woe than that of Juliet and her Romeo

Never was there a tale of more strife than that of Macbeth and his stabby knife

Never was there a tale of more sad than that of Hamlet and his spooky dad

oh no my pornography is turning into an angst-filled character study

Oh no my angst-filled character study is turning into pornography

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

The Kids are indeed Alright.

We must teach them the Lore of things,

like piracy, and how to find stuff at the Library, and Unions, and what it's not legal for job applications to ask you.

when i hear complaints about the boomers, i say "was it not boomers getting shot by cops while protesting against the war in vietnam? Were not boomers the ones who insisted that banks would no longer require a cosign from a husband or father for a woman to open an account or have a credit card? Did they not literally take us to the moon?"

When i hear complaints about gen x i say " did not gen x bear the brunt of AIDS and the creation of the 'inner city'? wasn't it gen-x marching for queer rights and women's body autonomy and a change in corrupt banking policies in some of the largest protests in the country's history?"

when i hear complaints about millennials, i say "have not millennials fought against and lived through so many 'once in a generation' disasters they should by all rights have given up by now? Are not millennials those who rally against the status quo? the industry killers, the cop protesters, they who live through unending hardship as the economic noose tightens, leading the charge for sustainability and socio-economic reform?"

when i hear complaints about gen-z i say "hasn't gen-z gotten involved younger, and been involved stronger, in the continuance of these noble traditions? Are they not living without even the broken pieces of the promise given to the generations that came before? haven't they had their childhoods derailed by the imminence of consequences for actions they were never even present for?"

when i hear complaints about generation alpha i say "HOW DARE YOU. How dare you malign these souls who will have to fix so much that they did not have a hand in ruining... or else die of these mistakes made before they were born. How dare you do the work of our shared oppressors and alienate our fresh blood. You are not to mistreat and mock the youngest soldiers in this fight, no! you point out to them the best targets, you share your rations, you show them how to stay alive, because anyone in the trenches with us is our brethren, our sistren. Our safety and our strength."

don't let the worst kind of stand up comedian tell you other generations are terrible. Don't let the worst kind of headline convince you each generation is against the other. Don't let the worst kind of oppressive force keep us divided along lines that mean nothing real. Because that is how they win.

This was said so much better than I ever could. Generational Hate is how we all die slow.

A series of events:

1. I put in an Annual Leave request form almost 3 weeks ago and my boss has not approved it yet

2. I went into my office today and replaced every single writing utensil with crayons in preparation for April Fools Day on Monday

3. Whilst searching for pens to remove, I found my unsigned Annual Leave form in my boss’s drawer

4. I placed my unsigned Annual Leave form in a photo frame and put it on his desk

5. The frame I used was from a photo of his kids that I deemed less important than my Leave form

6. My boss sometimes goes into the office on Saturdays to work

7.

Happy 2 year anniversary to the post that my old boss allegedly now has framed in his office, next to the recovered photo of his children.

Me: I'm going to look at horse forums, I bet the drama there is so funny

Me after 4 hours of horse forums: Damn....those people really love and care about their horses...

See, I think horse people are Like That because you can't do anything with a horse without entering into The Mind of the Horse. Like yeah, to ride a horse you need an intimate understanding of how its body moves and how your body is in contact with it and everything it is seeing and hearing and feeling in its own body and how your body responding to the horse's movement and reactions creates feedbacks upon the horse's response—which in itself is borderline spiritually merging yourself with the horse consciousness —but you can't even clean a horse's feet or lead it into a pasture without some power to understand What It Is Like To Be A Horse, because a horse is a Giant Beast with strong instincts that can drive it to kill or maim in a heartbeat, and it's the horse's trust and confidence in you and by extension your trust and confidence in the horse that keeps you both safe.

So being a horse person seems to be 90% stuff like standing in the stall trying to telepathically Enter The Consciousness of the Horse to try to unlock why the horse is fucking scared shitless of mops

and subsequently to Understand the Deep Psychological Foundation of Horse Self-Confidence so as to create a Scenario where the horse can encounter a mop and feel empowered and strong rather than Murderously Terrified

@osedaxworm yeah i think the "why" comes into play when they're trying to figure out what the common thread is in the set of related things that make the horse freak out

A lot of the people I was reading about had horses that came from previous owners and it seems like a long string of bad training practices in the past can leave the owner of a rescued horse with a LOT of work

The most wild thing about horse training to me is that the horses start to try and do it back if you telepathically Enter The Consciousness of the Horse correctly.

I acquired an abused and neglected horse a few months ago. She spent the earlier days of our interactions trying to bite me, kick me, run me over, and buck me off through any means necessary. I empathized with her. I was very gentle with her and showed her that I didn't plan on bringing her any additional harm. She started letting me introduce her to people, and she even started letting the vets I brought in help her instead of trying to fight them.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked her to jump over a scary obstacle for the first time. She was really uncertain and kept checking in to make sure I thought it was fine, and when she realized that I was sure, she did the horse equivalent of saying, "well, okay, we can give it a shot since it seems like you really want to". Lately when she's unsure if something is okay, or when she doesn't want to do something, she's taken to simply stopping instead of bucking. I think she's trying to take care of me. We still need to get through the stopping problem, but I'm beyond grateful to her for trying to keep me safe even when she's feeling strong emotions.

The past few days, she's spent a lot of time licking me from head to toe. Not even just my skin, but my clothes, too. This wouldn't be super significant, except that I have a dissociative disorder, and I've been in and out for the past few days. It seems like she's trying to keep me here.

If you try to understand the horses, they try to understand you. They're truly unlike any other kind of animal I've worked with in how deeply they try to understand their people.

*gently holds this post* hornse...

Horses are deeply perceptive animals and to some degree understand human emotion and empathize with it. They do start to see you as their herd mate, their friend, their protector, and in return they will protect you in their own way.

I can sit outside on the ground in my field with my horses, and if I'm feeling happy and relaxed, they think, "Oh, our human is resting here. We will stand vigil." And one will position themself over me. Others will stand watch. And the great thing is, if you take up the position of standing vigil among horses that trust you, they'll say, "My human is here watching over me. I can rest now too." And having a horse trust you enough to lie prone on the ground and sleep is a wonderful feeling.

Alternatively, they pick up when things are wrong too. If I am scared, you can believe they will be wary, which is why it's so unbelievably important to work through fear rather than expressing it uncontrolled when you're around a horse. They will respond how you do. They also can tell if I'm upset. Going back to the situation where I go out and sit in the field. I've done that a couple times while deeply upset. The horses that aren't mine, that I don't share as close of a bond with, are a little unnerved by it. They investigate, but ultimately are more worried. However, the horses that I do have a bond with have seen me and thought, "There's something wrong with my human. They're upset about something. I might be able to help." Now, their version of helping is standing over me, chewing on my hair, pulling on my shoelaces, and chasing off other horses who try to investigate, but those are behaviors that tie back into me being part of their herd. Grooming, play, and protection. And again, getting a bond like that isn't easy, but it is so worth it.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Hey friendly reminder to love and cherish Green Day

I have loved Green Day for over 30 years and I love them as much today as I did when all three of them came to check on me after their concert bc a dude in the pit was targeting girls (or "girls" in my case) & kicked me in the head.

They're fucking real ones.

Saw them on the Dookie tour in 1995 (?) and they stopped mid-song and made sure the idiot who set off a small firework was properly identified and kicked out. Made it clear the whole concert was over if that happened again.

hello google chrome refugees

don't use any of these browsers, they're also chrome

Here are my favorite firefox plugins for security/anti-tracking/anti-ad that I recommend you get

please get off chrome google is currently being investigated for being an Illegal Monopoly so get outta there okay love you bye

Also social fixer. Dark mode reader is one I use extensively and some version of xkit.

So I’ve never actually watched The Princess Bride with closed captioning. All the copies I own/have owned didn’t come with that option. Well, it’s on Disney+ now, and it DOES have captions. I decided to watch it tonight because apparently half of my coworkers haven’t seen it and that made me sad.

AND WHEN I TELL YOU I WAS APPARENTLY MISSING THINGS-

I now know ALL of Fezzik’s rhymes from the boat.

I know exactly what fighting moves Westly and Inigo were saying in that EPIC fight.

I can understand what Fezzik is saying when they break into the castle (I love Andre the Giant, but his accent is so hard for me to decipher)

AND

Apparently I have missed something in the twenty years I’ve been watching this movie. When Inigo is drunk in the Thieves’ Forest, a member of the Brute Squad comes around the corner of the building after Inigo proclaims this is where [he’ll] stay, that he will not be moved.

“Ho, there!” he says.

Now. I always assumed Inigo just repeated the man’s phrase.

Oh no. The closed captions read as follows:

“I do not budge. Keep your Joder.”

Because he’s a Spaniard, in the movie it is pronounced exactly like “Ho, there.”

THAT. IS. NOT. WHAT. THAT. MEANS.

Joder means fuck in Spanish.

So when the guy comes around the corner, I can only assume Inigo’s sloshed brain just heard him shout “fuck” at him, and THAT is how he responded.

NO ONE I KNOW realized this for nearly FORTY YEARS!!!!!

Closed captioning, y’all. It’s not just because you can’t make out what they’re saying. It’s also for recognizing jokes people were slipping into movies and past censors from before you were born.

thinking about Brad Dourif in "Istanbul" and the fact is Grima Wormtongue would have gotten away with it forever if they'd let him be hot. with better hair he could've run that horse girl country into the ground for decades. eomer would've been like "dang, seems like my uncle is a very bad king for no reason, oh well." pretty privilege grima wormtongue could have girlbossed middle earth into the flames of mordor

hot grima wormtongue: lmao look who's here. late is the hour in which this conjurer chooses to appear. láthspell i name him, ill news, and ill news is an ill guest

riders of rohan: i don't know he seems right for some reason. i just agree with him because his argument is so sound. gandalf you should leave

I really hate a lot of the advice on the Internet about taming birds.

So much of it is literally "isolate your birds so they bond to you instead of each other" or "clip your bird's wings so it can't get away from you when it feels nervous." I'm no expert, but that's fucked up, man.

My advice for winning over untamed birds:

I'm other news, my housemates and I are redoubling our efforts in Operation: Teach Cheese to Love.

I can verify that you are absolutely correct because that's pretty much exactly how two of my great-grandmothers tamed a shitload of wild-wild songbirds and a condor, respectively.

Gallus, hang on: a condor??? Please elaborate.