[ID: an edited Calvin and Hobbes panel where Calvin sits, smiling, at a lemonade stand with a sign taped to the front of the table. It reads: It’s time to retire that other meme and replace it with this template. Change my mind. Next image is the same meme but the sign reads: Steven Crowder does not deserve a meme format. Change my mind. /end]
the gimmick blogs are like tumblr’s rogue gallery. yes we’ve got some heroes, yes we’ve got some villains, but more importantly if you look over here you will see some freak who devotes all their time to counting the number of “t’s” in a post
T Count: 15
Letter Count: 198
Your T Percentage: 7.58%
Average T Percentage: 6.95%
You used the letter T 1.09 times as much as average!
YOU EXIST???
Sometimes you create a guy and it turns out they already exist
Kerbal Space Program was once afflicted by a bug the fans dubbed the “Deep Space Kraken”, whereby if you travelled far enough from the origin of the game’s coordinate system, floating point rounding errors would cause your spacecraft’s components to become misaligned and/or clip into each other, resulting in the craft falling apart or exploding for no obvious reason.
The bug was later fixed by defining the active spacecraft itself as the origin of the game’s coordinate system. In effect, the spacecraft no longer moves; instead, the spacecraft remains stationary and the entire universe moves around it. Owing to how relativity works, to the player this is indistinguishable from the spacecraft moving about within a fixed coordinate system, and it ensures that the body of the craft and its components will always be modelled with maximal precision.
While elegant, this solution introduced a new problem: it was now possible, by doing certain stupid tricks with relativistic velocities, to introduce floating point rounding errors to everything except the active spacecraft. In extreme cases, this could result in the destruction of the entire observable universe.
Some might call this one of those situations where the solution proves to be worse than the problem. I call it a perfect expression of what Kerbal Space Program is truly about.
And the stories they produce are, like, work projects or whatever you use tools for
D&D is like a really specialized tool that marketing has convinced a bunch of people is a do-everything multi-tool
It’s like a potato peeler
It can peel potatos really good
You can also peel an apple with it too if you want
Or a few other things
But people are creating unpaid full-time jobs for themselves trying to carve a wooden chair, tighten a loose bolt, or pound a nail with their really overpriced brand-name potato peeler and getting offended when you try to hand them a chisel or a wrench or a hammer.
“You think I can afford to spend $200 on another tool???”
“N-no, this hammer is like ten–sorry, HOW MUCH did you say you spent on that potato peeler???”
Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don’t need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it’s enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn’t do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it’s a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.
This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say “I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report” and you bring me just a first aid kit, it’s so much more efficient to say “thanks now can you bring me an accident report” than “I asked you to bring an accident report why didn’t you bring me one”.
Once you’ve internalized “a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument” you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing
In the town where I grew up, there was a large statue in one of the parks, of a famous historical white colonizer. I’m not going to say who specifically, suffice it to say that it was someone who wasn’t worth memorializing for their deeds. And as you can imagine, this statue was a frequent target of vandalism, with paint or toilet paper or eggs on multiple occasions. Now, the local council was generally pretty lax when it came to repairing potholes or other public damage in the town, but every time, 24 hours after this particular statue was hit, the same person would always appear in a Hi-Vis vest, hat, mask and sunglasses, carrying a bucket of water, and wash it clean. They would do it as quickly as possible, but always made sure the face and the name carved at the bottom were generously scrubbed. This only encouraged people to do it again, and so it became a vicious cycle.
Within a year, the statue had sustained so much damage that it was unrecognizable and the lettering unreadable, so eventually the council came and took it down. Also apparently, the person in the Hi-Vis vest didn’t even work for the council. They were supposedly just some ‘good samaritan’ who cleaned it, often before the council even discovered it needed cleaning, so they just let them do it and ignored the problem. They didn’t bother putting the statue up again.
Much later, we found out that the anonymous 'samaritan’ had been deliberately washing the statue with a bucket of saltwater, which had dramatically corroded it, causing irreversible accumulative damage far worse than spray paint ever would have done. It’s even theorized that they were also often the one spray-painting it, just so that they had an excuse to come back after a day to wash it.
Just a PSA, desecrating a Torah is not the same as burning a Bible.
Torahs are not mass produced, and cannot be mass produced due to how specific and strict the rules are for construction. They have to be handmade in a very specific process with specific materials (the scroll must be made of calf skin instead of paper, for example) A rabbi can reasonably spend about a year making a single torah. It must be written by hand in ink, and if a mistake is made on a page, the page must be thrown out and started from scratch. Because of this, torahs are often extremely expensive and delicate, and we have rules for how they are to be held and interacted with so as not to damage them. One of the most important rules is that you cannot touch the parchment of the scroll with your fingers, you have to use a pointer called a yad. This rule is for religious reasons, but also practical ones because the oils on your hands can damage the parchment very easily if touched regularly. That is how fragile these objects are.
In addition, if one is damaged, it is no longer considered kosher and must be replaced. There is obviously a spiritual reason for not wanting a torah to be harmed, but it’s also because they are extremely expensive, often very old heirlooms or artifacts, and handmade art pieces. Desecrating a torah is not just a symbolic gesture of disrespect to Judaism, it is destroying an expensive, old, and culturally significant art piece.
The Christian equivalent would be more along the lines of smashing stained glass windows in a historic church. Bible burnings as a form of protest are almost always done with copies you can buy for $15 at Barnes and noble. It is certainly meant to be disrespectful to the Christian faith, but it is not the same in terms of level of harm caused.
Bible burning vs torah desecration is a comparison made in bad faith I see occasionally to be like “why is antisemitism bad but being mean to Christians is fine?” But I’ve met a lot of well meaning gentiles who don’t fully know the cultural context or significance of the Torah and genuinely don’t understand the gravity of desecrating one.
Also even Jewish texts…..Jewish books and Sifrei Torah have been burned as a form of violence for years. It wasn’t just Nazis, it was the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, Pogroms….. Literature is extremely important in Jewish culture. It was Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquistion who introduced the printing press to the Ottoman Empire. The Hebrew Language is commonly referred to as “Lashon HaKodesh”, the holy language. Jewish texts aren’t even supposed to be thrown out when they get damaged, they’re supposed to be buried just as a living being would. Many synagogues have a geniza pile, a pile of damaged Jewish texts that await mass burial. Archeologists have been able to learn a lot from preserved geniza piles.
Even now when many Jewish book are printed en mass, they are still holy and there’s a lot of care put into binding them and taking care of them. Many Jews have collections of Jewish texts, sometimes family or community heirlooms of old books.
Burning Jewish books is a form of antisemitic violence, one that’s been going throughout history. There are many Rabbinic texts that have been virtually lost because of mass-burning campaigns for thousands of years. It’s not just physical violence, it’s cultural erasure.
And personally, I don’t think Christian Bibles should be burned in protest either. Book burning has been used as a form of violence against non-white Christians too, especially Black people in the US. Black Churches have been burned, still get burned, by violent racists. I don’t think it’s radical nor helpful to burn Bibles, even if you were harmed by Christianity.
Because I’m Jewish, I believe that written words are inherently deserving of respect and dignity. I don’t believe in the Christian Bible, and I find many messages in it harmful, but it’s extremely important to many marginalized people, and I respect that. I know the pain and trauma that comes from book burning.
Maybe burning a bible gives you a fleeting feeling of revenge, but it doesn’t really do anything. Bibles will still get printed everywhere, and it’s not deconstructing or combatting the Christian hegemony to be edgy online burning a cheap Bible. And it worst, it’s causing real life harm to Christians of marginalized identities.
this might be a hot take but i think we should still be required to wear masks on airplanes
we need to start hounding people into wearing masks again. why aren’t you wearing a mask on public transit? why aren’t you wearing a mask in the crowded grocery store? why aren’t you wearing a mask in the literal hospital? if you’re half as progressive as you claim to be you’d require masks at your busy events. you’re not a progressive if you’re leaving out the immunocompromised. plus covid can still fuck you up even if you’re perfectly healthy and had your vaccines. wouldn’t you rather be unnecessarily cautious than risk getting yourself or someone else sick? put your mask back on in the crowded mall. coward
“please buy crabs so that Tumblr doesn’t have to implement changes we hate to become profitable” right, let me explain something about capitalism.
Tumblr didn’t change course because they need the cash and are down on their luck. they did it because corporations want growth.
and that desire for growth is gonna be the same whether they have negative infinity money or positive infinity money. a corporation seeks money and growth.
if Tumblr suddenly became profitable after announcing these changes, it’s not even that it would send the wrong message, although it would.
it’s that Tumblr wouldn’t be taking care of us better if only it weren’t for the cruel realities of the world. it’s a subsidiary of a corporation. it doesn’t care.
it’s still going to keep the changes that it thinks are profitable, and ignore changes it thinks won’t be. Tumblr is not our friend, it is a website we use, and it wants to profit from us regardless of if that’s in our best interest and regardless of if it has “enough” money. that is the relationship. don’t get it twisted.
“yeah but Tumblr needs the money 🥺”
what part of corporations aren’t our friends isn’t fucking clicking
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