HEY CALIFORNIA PEOPLE!

HURRICANE ADVICE FROM A FLORIDIAN!

Make sure you've got shelf-stable food and water for everyone in the house, including pets. The rule of thumb is a gallon per person per day. Freeze water bottles if you want cold water.

Make sure you have enough meds!

Make sure you have batteries, candles, flashlights, and a manual can opener. 

Make sure your electronics, including backup batteries, are charged. Unplug things you don't want fried in case of a power surge. 

Don't tape your windows, it doesn't help and you'll just be stuck scrubbing goo off of them later.

Put a mug of frozen water in it in your freezer with a quarter on top of it. If your freezer defrosts, the ice will melt and the quarter will sink and tell you you need to throw things out.

Get everything that's not nailed to a foundation out of your yard. That dead branch hanging on by a thread? Time to get it down (it was probably time to do that three days ago, but now’s better than never).

Park away from powerlines and trees if you can. Rain makes the ground soft and then trees fall over.

Have an evacuation plan to a shelter. Evacuate if they’re telling you to.

If you start to flood, don't go in your attic. You'll get trapped if the water rises too high and you can't hack through your roof. This happened to a lot of people in Texas and Louisiana. Get ON the roof.

Be safe, be well <3 

What the fuck?

???? WHAT???

Ngl, "tropical storm in death valley" was not on my 2023 bingo card.

Drainage on our roads is shitty in SoCal, don't attempt to drive through water deep enough to touch your bumpers and don't attempt to walk across moving water, water only as deep as your ankles can knock you down and sweep you away.

Predicted wind speeds are similar to strong Santa Anas, so lock things down like you would for that, though keep in mind that yeah the combination of heavy rain and wind leads to more felled trees than just wind.

Take photos of the inside of your home now; flood insurance fucking sucks here and if you're in a possible flood zone you want as much documentation of your home and belongings as possible in case you need to make a claim.

Freezing water bottles also means you've got a lot of ice in your freezer if power goes out, and safe potable water once it thaws, so freeze bottles of water to have something to keep your fridge and freezer cool and store more water regardless of if you want cold water.

me: wish games had choices that actually mattered

me when games have choices that actually matter:

The older you get the more you will realize that your friends are people who have made mistakes and bad decisions and even just fucked up and hurt people.

And obviously your boundaries with your friends are completely up to you but you do need to recognize that if you cut off everyone who has done something wrong, you’re going to end up with no friends (and you yourself will have also fucked up in your life, and not lived up to those impossible standards either).

I’ve found it’s much more constructive to learn how to say “hey dude, that was massively fucked up of you,” because most people are really willing to say “yeah, it was, I need to work on it/not do it again/apologize and make things right” ESPECIALLY if they are hearing it from you as their friend.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for another person is to tell them that they’ve done something wrong, help them fix it, and stay their friend because it’s what we would want from them if we did something wrong.

male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

When I found out Paramount+ was removing Star Trek: Prodigy I bought all 20 episodes of S1 from Amazon Video since that was the only way for me to watch all 20 at the time. On 6/27, I lost access to episodes 10-20. Amazon has done what they can, which isn't much.

All 20 were accessible when I paid for all 20. The full season is what I was buying. Now, I only have access to 9 of the episodes.

What is the point of buying digital content if they're just going to steal it back from you afterwards?! Is this not false advertisement?

Seems appropriate

People don’t seem to realize this. Digital purchases are great until the seller no longer has the rights to the media and suddenly its not yours anymore

It drives me insane how many people dont realise how often they break the law and that if the full force of it was ever applied life would basically be unliveable. Like between traffic violations, petty workplace theft, account sharing and piracy alongside how common it is to have been in posession of some illegal drug at some point in your life. People still manage to get away with thinking "criminals" are people who commit crimes not just populations that are surveilled enough to be routinely prosecuted

Every household appliance should follow the same philosophy as GNU software: one thing well.

A toaster should toast things, without breaking down due to thermal cycling.

It should not make a table of what was toasted and when.

A refrigerator should maintain a low temperature, without burning out its motor.

It should not build an inventory and communicate it to a corporation.

An oven should maintain a user-specified high temperature, without starting a fire.

It should not measure the weight of its contents and give dietary advice.

But most of all, none of these things should connect to the internet [of things]. They should be as dumb and robust as possible. They should be future proof by virtue of having no compatibility requirements beyond

1. energy source and
2. physical dimensions.

There's a sewing machine in front of me that was built in the mid fifties. Its only compatibility requirements are the physical dimensions of needle and bobbin, and a 230VAC power supply. It is perfectly reliable after more than sixty years and should still be in another sixty. It's solid metal and might well be operable for centuries with very little maintenance. I doubt that the same could be said of modern machines full of plastic and microprocessors.

tl;dr I'm a tech person and I endorse OP's message.

There’s a regular at the fabric superstore. She’s at least 80 years old, and she just got back into sewing after giving it up for 40 years. We’ll call her Irma.

I love Irma.

Irma is constantly surprised by the newfangled sewing gadgets our store sells. Today she bought some extra-fine glass-head pins and a magnetic pincushion. As I’m ringing her purchases up, she tells me very seriously, “did you know, if you’re careful, you can sew RIGHT OVER those pins? You don’t need to take them out!”

I told her that I liked that you can’t accidentally melt the head of the glass pins with your iron, and she nodded. “They used to all be like that, but times changed.”

I love old sewing machines and asked what kind of machine she has, and she goes, “Oh, it’s an old Singer Featherweight that my husband bought me when we were first married. It’s probably not worth anything anymore, but the thing sews fine. Have you seen the ones those girls over there–” indicating the sewing machine sub-store in my location “–have? Those things go in every direction and the needle always comes to the top when you stop sewing! Imagine how handy that is!”

I mention that I used to sew on my grandmother’s Featherweight but now there’s a intra-family war about who owns Grandma’s Featherweight and so no one gets to use it. It’s genuinely the best portable straight-stitch machine I’ve ever used.

I warn her to never let anyone tell her that Featherweight isn’t worth something. “I know, I miss my husband and it’s always going to have a place in my heart, just like your grandma’s.”

“I mean, Irma, there’s that, but they’re also worth a really notable amount of money. The Singer Featherweight is really financially valuable. I almost never see them for sale around here for less than about $400, and that’s in bad condition.”

“It’s a good thing my husband’s dead, honey, because if you told him that he managed to buy a sewing machine that’s worth more in 2021 than he bought it for in 1950, well, he’d be so smug that I just wouldn’t be able to tolerate driving home with him.”

my mother has started using the phrase "gendie neutch" with abandon

yesterday she said my "birthday fit" was very "gendie neutch" and i felt like i was in an episode of black mirror

I GOT A FUCKING RAISE THE POTATO WORKED WTF

This potato works. Every. Fucking. Time.

Reblogging because it’s a damn potato and I want to encourage people to assume potatoes are magical.

w-what if potato is actually lucky