nighthawk star

Either people need to learn how to tell the difference between an “I’m sorry” that takes direct responsibility and an “I’m sorry” that signifies sympathy, or I’m gonna start responding to unfortunate information with a solemn nod and a “Sympies,” because I am tired of receiving a “Why? It wasn’t your fault” every time I try to vocalize compassion.

I'm forwarding all of you my next therapy bill.

Can I propose the XKCD method instead?

XCKD 945, ID in Alt

Always reblog

As a former zookeeper we would hear this a lot. “If you don’t study hard you’ll end up cleaning poop for a living.” It’s the one time we’re allowed to go off on the visitors. I once heard my boss rant for five minutes at a lady, in front of her kids, about how he had a Master’s degree, how people literally worked there for free, and how dare she judge people without bothering to know anything about them. Later that day his boss came by and said, roughly, “She told us what happened. Thanks for not throwing anything this time.”

I can count on one hand the amount of times I have gone off on people, but employment snobbery gives me the rage. I was showing the new kid how to use the fry scoop at McDonald’s “.. like this, and then just sort of hold it perpendicular and give it one tap..”

And the new kid sniggered “isn’t perpendicular a bit of a big word for McDonald’s?”

Something in me was just so annoyed by this 16yr old who was learning to work right next to me and somehow felt above us? Fuck that shit. I pointed at the people just on the floor and went off, “she’s a 4th year law student, she’s the primary career for her terminally ill daughter, he raises 100,000 for charity every year, she manages 3 stores and more than £16mil in turnover a year. What the fuck do you do?”

He just sort of mumbled “I didn’t know”

“you shouldn’t have to know, you’re not better than us. So. You tap it once and then move it here to release…”

“I didn’t know.”

“You shouldn’t have to know,”

None of those things have anything to do with each other

vice news writers have not been to college

Me either, but I still know how to write an article

Reading comprehension quiz

1. Why has the author chosen to contrast these two ideas in one sentence? What is the effect this contrast has to the reader?

2. Can we determine the authors opinion on Zuckerberg from the work? What impression of Zukerberg is this work meant to evoke?

my first favorite hobby is yapping. second is being extremely quiet and not talking ever at all ever.

prima mea delicia est blaterare. secunda est valde silere nec umquam loqui in perpetuum.

There's a LATIN guy now??????

Num est iam LATINUS??????

"In one of Africa’s last great wildernesses, a remarkable thing has happened—the scimitar-horned oryx, once declared extinct in the wild, is now classified only as endangered.

It’s the first time the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest conservation organization, has ever moved a species on its Red List from ‘Extinct in the Wild’ to ‘Endangered.’

The recovery was down to the conservation work of zoos around the world, but also from game breeders in the Texas hill country, who kept the oryx alive while the governments of Abu Dhabi and Chad worked together on a reintroduction program.

Chad... ranks second-lowest on the UN Development Index. Nevertheless, it is within this North African country that can be found the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, a piece of protected desert and savannah the size of Scotland—around 30,000 square miles, or 10 times the size of Yellowstone.

At a workshop in Chad’s capital of N’Djamena, in 2012, Environment Abu Dhabi, the government of Chad, the Sahara Conservation Fund, and the Zoological Society of London, all secured the support of local landowners and nomadic herders for the reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx to the reserve.

Environment Abu Dhabi started the project, assembling captive animals from zoos and private collections the world over to ensure genetic diversity. In March 2016, the first 21 animals from this “world herd” were released over time into a fenced-off part of the reserve where they could acclimatize. Ranging over 30 miles, one female gave birth—the first oryx born into its once-native habitat in over three decades.

In late January 2017, 14 more animals were flown to the reserve in Chad from Abu Dhabi.

In 2022, the rewilded species was officially assessed by the IUCN’s Red List, and determined them to be just ‘Endangered,’ and not ‘Critically Endangered,’ with a population of between 140 and 160 individuals that was increasing, not decreasing.

It’s a tremendous achievement of international scientific and governmental collaboration and a sign that zoological efforts to breed endangered and even extinct animals in captivity can truly work if suitable habitat remains for them to return to."

-via Good News Network, December 13, 2023

Look how beautiful they are!

Are you fucking kidding me Joanne

if you had asked me as a child what colour the sky was, i would have confidently said blue and yellow. because i grew up on the baltic coast next to one of the most travelled ship routes of the world, and the unfiltered sulfur pouring out of the exhausts of nearly a hundred cargo ships every day turned into a thick layer of sickly yellow laying over the horizon. especially on sunny summer days, it settled of the sea like the cheap imitation of a sunset, out of place during the bright daylight.

then, from one summer to the next, the yellow slowly but surely faded away. because a new legislation passed - one which heavily penalised airborne ship emissions in the area. and while the silhouettes of ships across the passage never became less frequent, their backdrop was now such a pure blue that its hard to imagine that it was ever different.

i think about this everytime someone tells me that climate legislation doesn't work, everytime a new media story declaring our helplessness in the face of certain environmental doom makes the rounds. don't get me wrong - the situation we are facing in terms of climate change and environmental destruction is certainly terrifying. but everyday, people are working tirelessly to implement law and policy that could change that fact. and because of those people, a newly bright blue sky touches down over the baltic sea. and that has to count for something, i think.

I don't like the term horseshoe theory because [extremely long list of reasons] but there's gotta be some term out there to describe how like. you can go from a conservative upbringing where people are weird and/or outright racist about interracial relationships, and then you wind up in some stupid pocket of leftism where people look at a mixed race couple and are like "hm :/ but is he um. fetishizing your race?" and sure it's done in a way that is, yes, tangibly different than outright conservatism, but it still leads to the same isolating effect of "alright we're being judged for our relationship, and these people kind of suck"

the same thing happens to trans people honestly where you wind up in some anarchoqueer leftist space where people like, expect gender ambiguity from binary trans people -- like they want the trans men to be comfortable wearing nail polish and trans women to not care if they have facial hair -- ignoring the fact that some people just aren't comfortable presenting themselves that way (and some of us just want to be...some girl or some guy?) -- and it gets turned around into this weird thing of "you're enforcing gender stereotypes if you conform too much to your gender identity" like. can we be real for a second. you and my shitbag grandmother are both clamoring for me to put on a dress again so please tell me the difference between you and her. after a certain point your intentions stop mattering because you've created the same alienating space.

yeah that second part hits really hard..

Embassy Suites Hotel (built in 1985), interior landscape in the atrium. Located in La Jolla, California. Designed by Steve McCurdy, 1995.

Scan

It's possible, encouraged even, to praise Delicious In Dungeon without the smug undercurrent of "...unlike those other manga".

Guy reading primarily pulp fantasy: It sucks how fantasy novels always go for such lowbrow fanservice tbh...

Full circle rainbow was captured over Cottesloe Beach near Perth, Australia in 2013 by Colin Leonhardt of Birdseye View

image above is fake (probably ai generated? not sure) but as several in the notes pointed out, there does exist a real photo by this description found here :) https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140930.html

Thanks to the previous reply for digging up the real image.

This why linking to sources is important. This is why going to sources is important, to verify something is a photograph of a real event.

If you can't find a source for an image, check two things:

1 . Go to Google Image Search. Click the "Search by Image" option on the right of the search bar. Search for the image URL, then click "Find Image Source" above the main result. You will get a list of results that includes the date. If you only see social media results or clickbait websites, consider it deeply suspicious.

2. Go to TinEye, do the same process. TinEye and Google Reverse Image Search work slightly differently, and TinEye lets you sort results by when they were posted online. Neither are comprehensive, but between them, you have a good chance of finding the original source.

I'm going to break down what I found when I did this under the fold. TL;DR, It took me 15 seconds to gather enough information to determine the top image was fake, but 30 minutes to identify the original point of spread on the English-language internet.

I don't blame people who get suckered by this stuff. We want to trust each other. When others have already been circulating an image and have provided a story for it, it makes it seem more real.

If you don't know the facts, and especially if you're viewing an AI-generated image on a phone, where potential giveaways are harder to spot, it can be easy to believe it.

This is a pretty harmless example of something that can be far more dangerous, when it's applied to more sensitive topics.

Be safe out there, everyone.

These days, testing if it's AI with Hive Moderation is my first stop before I even research anything.

Yep, it's Midjourney, moving on.

A good tool for spotting AI images! I never know how well those things are going to keep up with the results in the long term though, so I figure it's good to stay in practice with the other methods too.

Despite approximately 200,000 years of evolution, humans are still completely vulnerable while they sleep and lack any sort of defensive mechanism.

The defense mechanism is community you self centered prick

episode 1:

episode 30:

I'm reading the lord of the rings and I'm once again amazed at how... good most characters are. Like, they are genuinely good people. They are a bunch of kindhearted, gracious, caring people, coming together under adverse circumstances and trying to figure things out and find a solution and support each other through it all. Like Frodo and Sam meet Faramir and Faramir is a bit suspicious at first and kind of implies Frodo may be a spy, and then when he hears his story and he's like Frodo, I pressed you so hard at first. Forgive me! It was unwise in such an hour and place. And this blows.my.mind. He wasn't even particularly mean or threatening to him in the beginning, he's just such a kind, considerate man, recognizing the kindness and honesty of another man. And they're all like that. Even Gollum starts slowly changing (for a short while) when he encounters Frodo because that's the thing about kindness and humility and grace, they are contagious. They transform people, even a creature like Gollum cannot be immune to that. Like, you may consider all this simple and basic and I get it but, hear me out. It is quite rare to see that in modern media and it is also pretty difficult to pull off in a way that is not corny and simplistic. It is mind blowing that you actually don't have to present the entire palette of human cruelty and vice in order to tell a compelling story, contrary to popular belief. Lotr does the exact opposite, and it is just beautiful and it warms my heart. Especially taking into consideration tolkien's pretty grim growing-up experience, him being a double orphan without a home, raised between an orphanage and a priest and having no family apart from his brother and then the war and then he almost dies and then he's poor as hell and then a second war and it all makes sense somehow. He writes to his wife who is also an orphan two days before the marriage "the next few years will bring us joy and content and love and sweetness such as could not be if we hadn't first been two homeless children and had found one another after long waiting" and, yes, yes! The love and sweetness just radiate from his work, the entire lotr series is a little radiant bubble of hope and love and grace that he imagined in his head to deal with a dismal reality and then he just gave that to the world, and isn't that what imagination and art is all about after all?

I'm rereading it now too (only my 2nd time) and you are exactly right. It's such a beautiful, hopeful story. I'm really tired of the anti-hero and so many morally grey characters in so much of modern media. That can be interesting but too much of it can be depressing. It's nice to have a story where people are sincerely good.

guy who has chronic pain and fatigue: man why can't i do more stuff

guy who has chronic pain and fatigue: man i'm so tired today for some reason

I enjoy how Aztec gods have English epithets like "The Flayed Lord" but hes the god of agriculture.

Kinda gives you perspective as to what it musta been like for most cultures meeting Christians for the first time.

"Here is our god of compassion and forgiveness, depicted here being tortured to death."

Random Nahua farmer, already immersed in a religious culture that uses the imagery of bodily mutilation to convey the nuances of divinity: "Oh yeah makes total sense."

Nahua Farmer: "You see? He has been flayed to reveal the golden skin beneath, much like how maize is shucked to reveal the life-giving food beneath."

Spanish Catholic Priest 1510: "Man I could draw some really interesting parallels to St. Bartholomew here if I wasn't incredibly racist."

@saturno-sol Apologies if you don't want your tags out in public like this but I didn't know that that is very interesting!

Tbh there is some precedent for a disconnect between "gods as natural phenomena" and "gods as lesser components of some greater whole." Hellenistic deities were often seen as more akin to natural forces than the greco-judaic conception of gods.

Early Christians ran into similar problems. People woild just slot Christ into their existing pantheon and go on with life. Similar things happened in Muslim Africa. But the idea that mesoamericans saw Teotl and Christ as wholly distinct and non-overlapping is pretty fun. I'd be interested in knowing more!