jaewul

[jaewul]

fitz and the fool :)

[jaewul]

in the spirit of diy or die I'd like to remind yall that there's people, usually small local businesses whose is literally fix clothing

I had a pair of boots that i wore religiously almost every day for five years; had the soles fixed twice by a shoesmaker for less than half of what a new pair would've cost

almost alm of my zippers have broken at least once, local seamstress fixes them for like 10 bucks

yes, making your clothes yourself is good - both in spirit and economically speaking - but you can still pay people for fixes you can't do yourself. it's still punk af to support small traders

[jaewul]

The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.

That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...

More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.

There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024

[jaewul]

Tumblr did not “Goncharov” Poob. Poob is Glupp Shittoing Tubi/Pluto/Roku Channel/Hulu/etc.

[jaewul]

We need to bring back free the nipple

[jaewul]

Vincent Price at the opening of The Tingler (1959)

[jaewul]

[jaewul]

A good rule of thumb for AI is "would you trust a trained pigeon to do this?"

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

"We trained a pigeon to recognise good CV:s and left it in charge of sorting through all our job applications" uh perhaps consider not doing that.

[jaewul]

[jaewul]

Celerity from RotE ! I have a soft spot for this little duchess 'v'

[jaewul]

Trying to go for a cool, elegant style just will not work when you have no spatial awareness. Like being short is one thing, I could emphasise it to a kind of Delicate Elfin Fae Creature vibe, but that's not going to work with my skill of inexplicably somehow always managing to get in the way and stand in the most inconvenient possible place. I instinctively always try to dodge people into a place where I'm is even more in the way than I was before. I have a knack for bumping onto furniture and managing to knock things off tables with an almost implausible frequency.

Appearance-wise, I could go for a Eerie Graceful Dark Apparition aesthetic, but that shit will not work when I'm going about crashing into things like a gothic roomba.

[jaewul]

don't you think being suspended upside down by your ankles and beaten with steel pipes would feel pretty good for the first couple strikes

[jaewul]

before it gets bad I'm just gonna tell y'all certain rich people have literally only recently noticed Open Source software availability compromises the bottom line of their proprietary investments so if you see little chickadees on this website talking about the dangers of Open Source software all of a sudden it's cuz they accidentally sipped some koolaid mixed up by the far right yacht people to fuck with peoples software sovereignty and right to repair, modify, and redistribute robust codebases that become a problem when 30% of your portfolio is in, oh, say, adobe or openai.

This is your unfriendly neighborhood computer fucker telling you not to fall for it and to demand your right to digital sovereignty rather than trusting companies to make correct choices about what to do with the parts of your life they would very much like to have in the cloud to continue improving their products.

[jaewul]

I really don't want to even hear the words "recession indicator" again, but deliberately looking visibly unemployable, clearly on purpose, as a 30-something millenial is kind of a flex. Like peacock tail feathers - whatever the fuck I'm doing with my life, I manage to get by doing it while looking like this. Am I self-employed? Rich parents? Stealing catalytic converters? Have fun guessing.

[jaewul]

Another fantasy trope story:

A story where a prominent prophesy very clearly states that this specific important thing Must Be Done by the firstborn of one specific guy. So three young heroes head out to fix this: This Guy's official firstborn heir, his bastard he didn't even know about before getting married, and his unofficially adopted orphan kid who just started living with him at some point, who is the oldest of the three so technically speaking is still the one who was born first. And all three must go because while the meaning of the prophesy itself is very clear, it's an utter mystery to everyone which one of them counts as their father's firstborn.

[jaewul]