sketchysounds

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Reblogging to save lives. Be careful who you get your VPN services from!

here's the story. i know expressvpn has been recommended in some 🏴‍☠️ how-to posts but it is not trustworthy. the parent company, kape technologies, not only used to distribute malate but has ties to multiple state surveillance agencies. and be careful where you look for info about good vpns, because kape technologies owns a bunch of "vpn review" sites too

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This is worryingly accurate.

Oh boy, I feel that ban-hammer approaching.

This movie's super charming, though. It must be a culture thing, but I think the only romantic comedies I enjoy are made by the Brits. It must be the extra bite in their witty sense of humor. Or maybe it's because Hugh Grant is in almost all of the good ones, really.

I like Hugh Grant a lot.

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Blessed content

lol, lmao.

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I can't add anything to the above, because it's easily one of the most brilliant essays on morality, justice, and the constructs of society I've ever seen, and I agree with it completely. Please take the time to read through it, and take heart that there are people in the world who see it for what it is, and would like to make things better.

Watching the “you will excel at what you measure” trap devour basic moral practice in real time is fascinating in a terrible kind of way

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BUY MY WIFE'S ART thank you

Hiya All, I put up a small amount of prints over on the etsy store I share with @awthredestim / @askmovieslate .

I'm not sure if tumblr will get uppity at the link to an external site but I wanted to share regardless!

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I reblogged this on the wrong blog, haha.

I'll re-state what I said though: this is very true. We are very much not all in the same boat, because that would imply that we're all equally equipped and prepared to deal with the stormy seas we're travelling through, whilst nothing could be further from the truth.

Also, things change over time as well. One day you're cruising in a yacht, but all it takes is one or two changes to happen (which might not even be your fault) for that yacht to get whisked away and replaced with a canoe or a dinghy or even just a life ring - or nothing.

The sea doesn't change though. It's still just as stormy.

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"Benefits that may be entirely speculative" sure, that's why the Safe Water Drinking Act (1974) exists, because of speculation, right? It's always alarming and upsetting when lawmakers decide to weigh in on legislation for things they have no fucking clue about, especially in this context where they're trying to make an argument against something with scientifically proven benefits purely because "oh no it'll cost money!".

One wonders if perhaps Mr Kobach grew up in a neighbourhood with lead pipes himself, though (without looking it up) I would not be at all surprised if he grew up (and probably lives) in some affluent majority-White neighbourhood. That tends to be just as effective (or even moreso) at poisoning the mind as lead.

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Just in case you needed any reminder that carbon footprinting was created by one of the oil companies in the first place to try and shirk their responsibilities onto everyone else.

Also, fucking hell I did not realise that circle would be that size. Can we please stop drilling for oil now?

Sorry for the bad photo quality, Tumblr doesn't like posts this long.

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Honestly yes, I completely agree with all this. Like, on my modern day PC, I have a few emulated instances of a couple of versions of RISC OS, and it continues to astound me that the entire operating system occupies less than a gigabyte of space on my machine. Furthermore, even with such limited resources as it runs on, it can do a lot. I can browse the internet (although admittedly a fair bit of it doesn't work as it should), I can watch movies, I can compose music, even play games - all things I do on my modern day machine which has exponentially more resources available to it than the emulated little beast from the 90s.

Heck, there are also some astounding examples of this in the retro gaming scene. Seeing some of what is possible to be pulled off on the Mega Drive, for example, is quite impressive - and there's also the fact that the Dreamcast still has a thriving development scene in the year 2024, long after its demise.

It's true though. We need to better optimise programs, games, etcetera. After all, just because we can have loads of memory and such available to us doesn't mean that we should, and nor should we depend upon or expect end users to have that much available.

Oh and on a tangent to that, we could really optimise things nicely by doing away with all the telemetry that's built into modern software. Yes I'm looking at you, Microsoft. I see you over there, Apple, and you as well, Google - and don't go thinking I missed you skulking in the corner there, Adobe. After all, if our software spends less time spying on us, it can spend more time on doing the actual function it was built to do: serving the end user.

we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better

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..."Decent" Candles? Are you sure about that?

Hey tumblr???? Hey fucking tumblr?????

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LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE AT THE BACK THERE

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Please, please read this article which has been presented in full above. It is an amazing and encouraging read from a man who knows what he's talking about. Recommended!

awesome

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By far and away one of the most entertaining reads I've had in a while about the everyday strangeness that happens at airports. Honestly wouldn't have felt out of place in a @neil-gaiman story ^^

At the gate for my flight home from visiting friends and there's a woman here with a service Shiba Inu. No pics because he has a Do Not Disturb vest and taking pics of strangers is illegal but I need to stress how ON DUTY this animal is. Ears up. Eyes doing Lazer scans of everything. Examining everyone who passes within 10ft like a security guard. Ass planted on her feet. I have never seen a dog with such intense chivalric guardian energy before. He has tiny eyebrows and they are FURROWED with concentration.

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apply for jobs you’re not qualified for! audit upper-level classes! get drunk with your TAs! see that poster advertising that lecture series? go there take notes and ask questions! thank the presenter for talking about this topic you love! if the class is full before you register, email the professor and ask if they can squeeze you in! RAISE YOUR HAND! tell the disability accomodation office to do their goddamn job! ask for help! file complaints! go to class in your pajamas and destroy the reading! you got this! you KNOW you got this! be arrogant enough to learn EVERYTHING! take your meds! punch a velociraptor in the dick! fear is useless and temporary! glory is forever! shed your skin and erupt angel wings! help out! spread your sun! i had a really good morning! you deserve a really good morning! kill anyone who says you don’t and build a throne from their bones!

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This! This, so much! You see it all the time in basically any example of great literature from the past century.

Tolkien doesn't go into minute detail about what the mines of Moria or the gently rolling hills of the Shire or the dreaded lands of Mordor actually look like, but I guarantee you everyone who has read The Lord of the Rings just knows what those places look like - and I also guarantee you every one of those readers has their own mental image of those places, and no two are precisely alike.

There is actually a fantastic example of acknowledgement of this phenomenon in one of the late and great Sir Terry Pratchett's novels, Only You Can Save Mankind. In that book, the main character Johnny ends up face-to-face with a species of aliens who need his help. He has his own perception and idea of how they should look, and because his encounter with them takes place on the plane of the subconscious, his idea of how they should look is how they end up looking to him. Where it gets interesting is that, later on in the book, he has an encounter with them at the same time as another person he has met who has also been contacted by said alien species. Because of that, the other person's perception of how the aliens should look and how their ship and technology should look starts bleeding into his own, around the edges.

I'd say it was when I read that myself that it really hit home with me that no two people have ever read the same story - or to put that a bit more clearly, everyone can read the same book, but the way they interpret the writing won't be the exact same for us all. I should add that this is totally fine: as writers, it isn't our job to fill in all the blanks for the reader. After all, if you give too much information about what's going on, you aren't getting your reader to engage with the material by using their imagination - and that is, after all, the most delightful part of fiction and story-telling. It is, ultimately, more fun to read a book that gives you just enough information for you to enjoy a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs than it is to read one that is basically a boring bus ride from A to B.

Leaving Holes

Your story is 50% reader. It’s that mixture of reader and writer that makes the magic.

Which means your story needs to have holes for the reader to fill in. You need that negative space for the puzzle pieces to fit.

I’m not talking about plot holes, I’m talking about giving one sentence the power of two. A book that means what it says is a mediocre book. A book that means more than what it says is a great book.

Don’t over-develop your characters, having them analyze every feeling, or spelling out what every character in a scene is thinking. Don’t follow up a powerful line with an explanation with what makes that line powerful.

Let your words imply as much as they state.

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I got 64%. I’m not sure whether to be proud, scared, or both.

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J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman are such a funny contrast to me, like Rowling: Oh, and by the way, I put gay characters in my books. People: Is there anything... showing that? Rowling: No. Also trans women don't deserve respect People: wtf Gaiman: Here are some immortals that transcend all human concepts of gender and attraction who use a variety of pronouns, and also some clearly canon human queers. People: Are the immortals queer? Gaiman: That is an entirely valid way to view them. Other people: Ugh, pushing a modern woke agenda. It used to be- Gaiman: Fuck you