lucientheartisticfox

[lucientheartisticfox]

Average Surge Generations experience

[lucientheartisticfox]

it is SO FUNNY when you’re watching a show with horses in it and within the plot of the show the horses are “”””upset””” but the way they communicate this is by placing a nervous nickering sound bite over what is clearly a calm horse placidly performing a practiced trick

[lucientheartisticfox]

If Toby Fox had never made that one fateful videogame we would all be living life sans undertale

[lucientheartisticfox]

young dragoness moving out of her mother’s cave and finding a cave of her own. she needs to start a hoard but she doesn’t really have any money to buy anything nice and she doesn’t want to steal things because all the humans in the area are pretty poor

so she’s just gonna start a big garden. she just has one single mint plant but someday it’ll be big. it’s not much right now but she’s proud of it. now she just has to go hunting

[lucientheartisticfox]

You know that feeling when you eat a lot of candy on Halloween and suddenly you crave carrots because your body is telling you that it needs nutrients not in the candy? That is no different than when you eat a lot of carrots and crave a Snickers bar.

Your body knows what it needs. Your body uses cravings to tell you to eat the nutrients you're in low supply of. You crave sugar all the time? It's because you are restricting sugar and not actually listening to your body. Cravings are not evil. They're literally how your body is designed to maintain a balanced food intake.

Please for the love of god (nontheistic), learn about intuitive eating and finally end the grip that diet culture has on you and your wallet. And in case this is one of my posts that somehow leaves fat activism circles, fatness is not evil either. You will never escape diet culture until you end your fear and hatred of fatness. Period.

[lucientheartisticfox]

WHAT is even the point of mind controlling a hero if it doesn't feel good. if you can't make them like it. if they don't learn to want it.

[lucientheartisticfox]

You know how piss became a meme then a bunch of memers turned out to be into piss

Then vore became a meme and then a bunch of memers turned out to be into vore

I’m just saying, every time one of yall jokes about cock and ball torture I’m lookin at you like this

[lucientheartisticfox]

being so staunchly anti generative ai while everyone around you is "i used chatgpt" and "i asked grok" and google search is useless and every company is implementing ai and every single celeb is taking ai money and partnering with ai is like... it's so jarring. why can't you see the harm like i can? why are you so lazy? why are we making society this stupid? can we please stop? it's killing people does that not matter to you?

[lucientheartisticfox]

thought too hard about MRI machines today and had this come to me in a vision

[lucientheartisticfox]

[lucientheartisticfox]

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

[lucientheartisticfox]

One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

[lucientheartisticfox]

jetpens just started stocking a product that will be an ergonomic game-changer for a lot of folks!

this is the kutsuwa punyu spiral pencil grip. unlike most pencil grips that are solid tubes and have a fixed maximum diameter they can wrap around,

the punyu is a spiral! it wraps like spaghetti.

this means that, unlike almost every other grip on the market, this grip can be added to almost every pen or pencil! and that includes fountain pens and gel pens. you can see it here being used on a pilot metropolitan fountain pen and a sakura gelly roll gel pen.

(not an affiliate link, not sponsored, you can buy from wherever you want if interested, jetpens has a lot of specs of their products that I appreciate)

a jetpens review even mentions someone using these on the lamy safari line of fountain pens. the ones with a really sharp triangle grip. these grips seem really really versatile, especially if you are about to sit down and take notes for hours on end!

if you do use this with a fountain pen, I recommend making sure the fountain pen is not prone to hard starts or drying out, has a good flow (whether that flow is from a wet nib or a wet feed or both), and/or that you use a relatively wet ink. because the goal is to have the fountain pen continue to write even if you put it down for a few minutes, so you do not have to keep removing the grip, capping the pen, uncapping the pen, or reapplying the spiral grip!

over the years some folks have asked me if I know of anything like this, and well, now we both do! if you get this let me know what kinds of pens and pencils you use it with and how well it works! this is a really exciting pencil grip!

[lucientheartisticfox]

I just got a new loft bed after having the same kid's one for like, over 10 years, and the new one's much taller, and the sound of my phone falling off is so much more dramatic.

Like, on my old bed it was basically just "*clang* *thunk*" but on the NEW one it's "*CLANG* *CLANG* *BANG* *CLINK* *CLUNK*"

Like my phone fell off this morning and I was like, "IS MY NEW BED FALLING APART ALREADY?!?!" but NOPE it was just my phone!

[lucientheartisticfox]

[lucientheartisticfox]

kisses from grandma

[lucientheartisticfox]

Flowey based on this tweet