The Disney Princesses don't get much in the way of happy endings, despite what you may think you see on screen.
I make sure they get to that happy ending.
Ask me anything
I JUST REMEMBERED HEARING AN ELON MUSK QUOTE WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT HOW HE BELIEVES CHESS IS “TOO SIMPLE” OR WHATEVER AND HE SAID HIS FAVORITE GAME WAS A GAME CALLED “POLYTOPIA”
I JUST REMEMBERED THAT IVE PLAYED POLYTOPIA
It being Elon’s favorite game (or at least one so important to him that his biographer dedicates a lot of time to it) is…..really really funny.
Basically, imagine Civilization, but as a mobile game. So like if Civilization Revolution was even more dumbed down (that’s a Civilization insult. That’s devastating. It’s devastated right now). For what it’s worth, it’s not a bad game. On the contrary, from what I could tell in the little bit of time I played it, it’s a perfectly competent game with good design. But it’s not a deep game by any means. I played through it once, won easily on my first go, then saw that the other playable characters had barely any differences between them.
Like, not to imply you can judge a book by its cover, but here’s what it looks like
I came across an article by Dave Karpf discussing this exact thing, and I think it describes it wonderfully
people will design soap dispensers and dish racks and go like it’s okay if this is capable of getting rusty, right. that’s an acceptable weak point for an item whose sole immutable destiny is to get wet every time it’s used, right
JSTOR launched in 1995 with a radical idea: digitize academic journals to free up shelf space and expand access to knowledge.
A year later, our visual identity took shape. Designer Michael Mabry’s floral “J,” inspired by Renaissance-era typography, gave a face to the mission: rooted in print culture, built for the digital age.
In our new blog post, we’re reflecting on 30 years of JSTOR, including the design that helped define us and the origin story that brought it all to life.
when they get shaved the new fur grows in darker than it would normally be cuz they’re colder in that area!
you can (slowly) toast a siamese cat with a razor
Gradient creature who regrew the wrong color!!!
Our bathroom sink had a drip. This wasn’t an issue until my mother’s Ragdoll spent so much time sitting in the sink getting dripped on that he developed a single dark spot exactly where the water fell.
If we lived in an imagined idyllic age of days gone by, Sony would be running TV ads featuring a guy with frosted tips in a sports car saying shit like “switch 2? Try switching 2 Playstation instead” and he’d drive off and you see his car is full of beautiful women and twinks (it’s woke) but they’d never do that these days
“oh why are the boys there why is it woke” I’m projecting cherry-picked pieces of modernity I personally find palatable onto my imagined idyllic past that’s what makes it imagined and idyllic dipshit
“High along the peaks and ridges of the mountains in Ecuador, a 25-year-long conservation program is bearing succulent fruit in the form of cleaner water and abundant wildlife.
Established in the year 2000, Quito’s fund for the protection of water has allowed a critical South American ecosystem unique to the world and vital to both plants and animals to reclaim vast tracts of its former landscape, and people are noticing the difference.
“Before the water fund, the páramo in Antisana was very degraded. The only thing you would see was sheep.” Silvia Benitez, the Nature Conservancy’s Director of Freshwater for Latin America, said in a statement. “The change has been amazing. Vegetation is back. The wetlands are restored.”
“Now people see groups of deer. They see puma. I saw a fox. I had never before seen a fox in this area.”
The story of this quarter-century success began when the United States nonprofit the Nature Conservancy partnered with Quito’s water utility company, known as EPMAPS. The second-highest capital city on Earth by altitude, Quito is surrounded by a famous ecosystem called the páramo, a biodiversity hotspot where masses of mosses, lichen, high-altitude palms, and endemic grasses create a mountain environment unlike any other.
The páramo covers slopes above 10,000 feet in elevation all over the Andes Mountains, and acts like a giant sponge absorbing and condensing moisture from the lower ground before releasing it in streams and rivers further down. The Nature Conservancy estimates that in Colombia, where páramos cover just 2% of land area, this hydrological service provides 70% of all municipal water. It’s estimated that páramo sequesters 6 times more carbon than tropical rainforest.
EPMAPS and the Nature Conservancy organized $21,000 in seed money to kick-start a trust fund that would charge downstream users of water from the páramos around Quito for the conservation measures needed to protect them.
Called the Fund for the Protection of Water, or FONAG, it’s accumulated $2.5 million in annual contributions over the last 25 years, and as a result, páramos are retaking ranchland that once displaced them, and the wildlife like whitetail deer, Andean bears, Mountain tapirs, and condors are returning as well.
“Since FONAG’s beginning, its priority has always been the protection of the water sources. But when you conserve water sources, it’s almost automatic that you have other co-benefits—biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and social benefits,” said Bert de Bievre, Technical Secretary of FONAG.
Local communities have become very involved in FONAG’s work. Two dozen have become páramo rangers, local ranchers have moved their animals to lower elevations, agriculturalists have worked with EPMAPS to switch to low-impact methods of cultivation away from watersheds, and the Nature Conservancy runs a nursery that grows many of the endemic páramo plants for use in reforestation.
The Quito-FONAG model is now being implemented across the northwestern areas of South America, and it shows how much can be achieved by simply letting rivers run free.
“Each year, the global water sector spends $700 billion on building and repairing pipes and reservoirs, using grey solutions to engineer themselves out of a problem created by deforestation, agriculture or other threats upstream,” said Brooke Atwell, Associate Director of the Nature Conservancy’s Resilient Watersheds strategy.
“If we were able to reallocate just 1% of that spending ($7 billion) toward protecting nature, it would eclipse all global philanthropic spending on conservation today.””
“nobody likes a complainer” you say, like an idiot, as if thriving ecosystems of friendships aren’t blossoming every day based solely on people vocally disliking the same things in similar ways
I know this is a joke but like, yeah. It is. I promise you.
See, I had graduated early from highschool and then got my associates in Zoology. But then, from ages 18-23, I was medicated with antipsychotics and (for those last two years) a deadly combo of sedatives due to misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis, and then a psychiatrist who was legitimately on drugs and just writing random shit that almost killed me.
Anyway, needless to say, my brain turned to mush and stopped working, and it took me 6 years to get some sort of bachelors degree (in fashion??) and I graduated at the bottom of my class.
And then I got properly diagnosed (the “psychosis” was just narcolepsy) and got off all those meds. And I was so afraid my brain was permanently fucked. And it is, cause of the narcolepsy part, but the narcolepsy doesn’t kill the parts of your brain where your smarts are.
But I went back to school. Got another bachelors studying sustainable tourism. Turns out my smarts hadn’t gone anywhere when my brain turned to mush. I graduated with a 3.98 GPA.
Now I’m getting my masters in biology studying the intersection of tourism and the conservation of the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon. And doing well. 🤷🏻♀️
Your brain is not a muscle in the literal sense, but it is a muscle in the sense that the more you use it, the better developed it becomes. Not using it might make its usefulness dip for a bit, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. You might have to work your way back up, start with easier exercises (puzzles, creative exercises, critical thinking questions) before jumping back into the stuff you used to do, but like a couch to 5k slowly ramp up the difficulty and you’ll get there in the end. No one’s brains are useless, you just gotta meet ‘em where they’re at.
An interesting facet of the whole US tariff situation from a tabletop publishing perspective is seeing exactly how many small-time US book printers who swore they were domestic manufacturers have been straight up lying to their clients and having their stuff printed overseas anyway, and are now caught in that lie.
I can think of about three ways to maintain the lie at least for a while longer, right off the top of my head.
1. “Our prices are rising due to input prices rising; paper is more expensive, so we have to pass that cost on to you.”
2. “We’re raising wages for our workers to enable then to cope with rising prices of consumer goods.”
Yeah, that’s why I’m not dropping specific names without independent verification. Being in publishing myself, I have a pretty good idea that certain outfits have been doing the “we had the pages printed and bound overseas and just glued the covers to the spines ourselves so we can legally claim that our books are technically made in the US” two-step, but it’s also possible to get screwed by tariffs for other reasons, and I’m not gonna be That Asshole who puts somebody on blast on the basis of having a “pretty good idea”.
This feels like a pertinent time to remind folks that I am also on Bluesky.
(Alternatively, if you’re just here for updates on my tabletop RPG projects and don’t care about the shitposting, following Penguin King Games on itch.io may be more the ticket!)
Automattic has apparently abruptly laid off a large part of Tumblr’s software engineering team – which is not encouraging, given that the site was reportedly operating with a skeleton crew to begin with!
Hey here’s a question what steps have you taken to increase your education and knowledge since graduating?
12 years is not nearly enough time to teach you everything to know about the world, especially when the starting point is “a says ah” and “1+1=2” and “rain comes from clouds.”
There are people who spend their whole lives in pursuit of knowledge and do not run out of stuff to learn. If you want to be well-informed and knowledgeable as an adult you have to actually make your continued education a priority. The library is free, thousands on online resources are accessible to all, and somewhere near you is an affordable museum or culture center or zoo or art display that can give you information you didn’t know.
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