Bug Bill Hell's

learning many things in the bathroom at the car mechanic

ghost flowers

It's so weird to me when people are like 'but that will cost the government money!' So what? They're the government, they're supposed to be spending money. What, you want them to take your tax dollars and then do nothing with it? Lock it all up in a big government vault and just look at it? Why are you so scared of giving a third grader lunch or a homeless person a house.

I'm trying to figure out a good way to say "you really should actually learn the basics of small talk" with sounding like I'm biased against autistic people.

So here's the thing:

I see a lot of neurodivergent people talk about small talk as this baffling and meaningless waste of time that neurotypicals do for some unknown reason, and as an autistic person in an industry that is extremely based on building relationships and engaging with others, I've actually found a few really key important pieces to small talk.

1. Small talk can make interactions feel less mercenary or transactional. Having even brief exchanges about something beyond the reason that you're interacting can make it feel less like the only goal of the interaction. Especially for relationships that are not fully transactional (e.g., coworkers), this can help build a relationship with them.

2. Small talk can be a way to find commonalities and help bridge cultural or power divides. Recently I was on a call with a couple of Indian colleagues, and while we were waiting for everyone else to join I asked them where they lived in India. They didn't expect that I had heard of it, but I knew it because my dad had traveled there for work every couple months for a year or so, so we could chat about it briefly. Even for a couple of minutes, we were able to connect on this unexpected commonality. If I hadn't had that connection, I would have been able to learn about somewhere, helping narrow the privilege gap of them being expected to know more about where I live than I am about where they live.

3. Small talk can show knowledge about a person, which both builds connections and indicates that you see their life as important enough to remember about. The stereotypical "How's the wife?/How are the kids?" shows that you know the person has a wife/kids and have enough interest in their life to even ask.

4. Small talk can ease tension and reduce pressure from others, especially in a professional setting if more junior members are expected to speak. Especially for junior staff members, it can be difficult to be the first person to talk and break the silence, so engaging in small talk beforehand allows for a lower-pressure transition from silence to whatever the presentation is about.

5. Small talk provides a low-risk way to identify commonalities. While conversations about religion, politics, etc. may lead to tension or discomfort, even if they bring out commonalities, small talk is specifically structured to minimize tension while still providing the opportunity to learn more about each other. A conversation about the weather can reveal that you both like hiking when it's nice out; a conversation about the weekend can reveal that you both have family in the same state.

Small talk in many cases is signaling, a way to indicate certain things to people. It's a more indirect version of it than many autistic people like, but it is one.

But, you cry, I don't know how to do small talk!

Small talk actually has some pretty clear guidelines, even if they are often unspoken.

HAPPY MAGGIE T DEATH DAY!!!!

April 8th moodboard!!

Honestly not being a killjoy, but do we have photos on what the protests were like in Republican territory? That seems more significant than the numbers in liberal zones like DC/NYC/Boston/Portland/Philly/etc.

This is a photo from the protest I attended at the KS Capitol building in Topeka as well as estimates from a local group as to the size of protests around the state.

Kansans were OUT

the rapid disintegration of rainbow capitalism pretty much encapsulates the problem with rainbow capitalism in the first place: it is and always was performative fair-weather allyship that evaporated in the face of any real political pressure

Problem? It was never a problem, unless you had unrealistic expectations for what it meant. It was a symptom, and a good one. — Be strategic and think about this deeper for a minute.

It was absolutely performative fair-weather allyship. But it was a bellwether that the pink dollar was worth taking over any hypothetical backlash a business might face for supporting the queers. For some, and at some times in the past, it was a reassurance that they would do business with you even if they knew you were gay, and that was a huge issue if you eg. wanted to buy a house or a car. And it helped make queerness both more visible and more normalised in society, instead of trying to sweep teh gays back into the closet.

You’re not going to get rid of cynical cash grabs so long as capitalism is around, so you might as well be clear-eyed about it and recognise that while rainbow merch is totally unreliable for actual support, it was a sign that the smart money was betting in your favour.

You can always trust a business to find a sort of middle space that's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and sit there avoiding all controversy in the absolute most craven and soulless way possible.

This means that a business is in fact a very good indicator of what's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and what counts as controversy.

Don't think of them as allies. They aren't people. They can't be. Think of them as a barometer. If the barometer is up, you've probably got sunny skies. When the barometer starts dropping, prepare for heavy weather moving in.

Speaking of porn logistics, another personal favourite bit of fuckery is when an artist draws a picture containing multiple dicks, then produces a separate alt for every possible ejaculatory configuration, like there are four dicks and sixteen alts such that there's a version where only dick A is jizzing, a version where only dick B is jizzing, a version where dicks A and B but not C are jizzing, and so forth. I'm imagining some high-class dick connoisseur with exquisitely rarefied tastes out there like "yes, I want to see this character getting jizzed on, but only by the dick on the far left – the other dicks can wait their turn".

Some day I'm going to write a spy thriller where it turns out that the conspirators are sending coded messages via those E-Hentai galleries full of endless microscopically differing jizz alts, where each image contains four dicks and each dick serves as a one-bit component of a hexadecimal encoding.

Brb gotta encode national secrets into my hentai art

Hey fun facts that are fun together :

* as a reverse engineer, I have worked on extracting these sorts of arts from hentai games.

* the game art does this sort of thing so that the story can toggle between different versions. Maybe you didn't get enough Friendship Points with Tgirl Jessica, so she's not ejaculating in this picture.

* the games are often smarter about this than the galleries: instead of storing every combination of ejaculating/not-ejaculating, they store 1 base image, then separate per-dick ejaculatory overlays. So if you've got 4 dicks, this means they have 5 images instead of all 16 possibilities. But this makes no sense in an image gallery, so you have to compose the images together. You'd think all-off and all-on are the only options you need, but some people are content maximalists. (it's possible site policies regarding quotas and stuff is encouraging this behavior).

* around the same time I was working on tools to extract images from hentai games, I also was working on tools to steganographically hide files inside images, in several ways. This was in part because I was working with 4chan at the time and helping them catch files hidden inside images, because channers were turning 4chan into an arbitrary file sharing site (is it a jpeg or a neutral milk hotel album? It's both!), using it to bypass filtering/moderation (you put an image inside an image and now you can't see the internal image unless you extract it. Maybe it breaks the rules. Breaking the rules on /b/ is very bad), or hiding viruses in there (viruses that then post themselves back to 4chan and the cycle continues!)

* This is also when I worked for the US government

So all those facts put together, I'll just say that IF it turns out secret government agents were hiding confidential information encoded into the images of hentai game ejaculations galleries, then... it was me, and I did it back in 2009.

Foone Turing, the trans Ian Fleming for the digital age.

Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

To be clear, I don't have any news about any impending doom. But I've heard a bit more about what's going on with staff after the layoff of last week, and there are even less people than I thought still working here.

I don't think even the current staff know what's going to happen, but honestly, I don't see how the high ups could even pretend to intend to keep this place open while virtually unstaffed.

And of course, if the most despicable thing happens, you can find me at @javi@goblin.band from any fediverse platform 🤷

for reference, OP is a former employee of Tumblr who tries to keep up to date with tumblr’s inner workings. please back your blogs up.

In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you've been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr's built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you've added a comment count as a post you created, to be clear).

To use it:

now in the window that opens it should show the current path, and you can type "py -2 .\tumblr_backup.py [your options] [your blog name]" and hit enter. Example:

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I'm currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you'd even want to do this if you don't already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i'll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I'll also be sharing an update via my personal site's RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Tarot, Major Arcana.

I ❤️ CHILDISH AND MALADAPTIVE SHIRLEY JACKSON NARRATORS!!!

idk where all of this weed-smoke discourse erupted from, but “weed is fine and you shouldn’t be a snitch about it” and “don’t burn plant matter in public spaces where someone you don’t know might have, like, a lung condition” are two sentiments that can and do coexist. i have asthma and i hang out with stoners pretty much constantly. i’ve never felt the urge to snitch and no one has ever blatantly disrespected my avoidance of smoke. they’re always eager to help keep it away from me when needed, which isn’t difficult to do. i hate to say this, but my only takeaway from a hypothetical scenario in which a stoner is blasting weed smoke in public like a dragon and an asthmatic feels the need to involve the cops is that both individuals are unpleasant and i don’t want to be around either of them lmao

The back of an embroidered piece is the same creature as the code of a website btw