{{Title link: https://reason.com/archives/2016/11/28/the-secret-dangerous-world-of }}
In a country where cash has lost much of its value, and food and other necessities are dangerously scarce, bitcoins are providing many Venezuelans with a lifeline. The same socialist economics that caused the country’s meltdown has made the energy-intensive process of bitcoin mining wildly profitable—but also dangerous.
Tags:
#interesting #Venezuela #bitcoin
{{Title link: https://asexualcensus.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/take-the-2016-ace-community-census/ }}
The ace community census is an annual survey by the Asexual Visibility and Education Network which collects valuable information on the demographics and experiences of members of the ace community. It is the largest survey of ace communities and creates a valuable pool of data for future ace community activists and researchers.
The survey is open to anyone: ace, non-ace, or still questioning, as long as you are over the age of 13 we want to hear from you! We want to get a wide variety of responses from as many parts of the community as possible, so we encourage you to share this link with any other ace individuals you know or any ace communities you participate in.
Click here to take the 2016 Ace Community Census!
For answers to common questions about the survey, please see the FAQ here.
You will be able to view any published results from the survey at asexualcensus.wordpress.com.
Tags:
#signal boost #survey #asexuality
{{Title link: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-to-read-the-secret-language-of-starfleet-uniforms }}
This may be of interest to you guys! It’s fun but doesn’t mention skants OR the fact that the uniforms on TNG changed between seasons 2 and 3, so.
Tags:
#Star Trek #clothing #the more you know
{{Title link: https://github.com/bbolli/tumblr-utils/ }}
Want to back up your Tumblr? This worked for me!
(It’s not completely ideal, but does the trick.)
Tags:
#endorsed #(I know I recommended this recently) #(but here is a post that’s *just* the rec and not surrounded by discussion of how We Are All Doomed) #(if you would prefer)
{{Title link: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-porn-blogs-that-seem-like-bots-follow-me-on-tumblr }}
In case you wanna know why so many porn blogs follow you.
absolutely the most riveting part of this is that the person writing this response opens with “I post one picture a day of my goats”
So what you’re saying is that Tumblr needs to put nofollow attributes on links in the notes? (Is that a theme thing or a Tumblr thing? IDK.)
I’ll believe that this is part of it, but I don’t think this is the whole story. Vanilla porn bots seem pretty indiscriminate, but kink porn bots didn’t start following me until I started leaving notes on legit blogs about the same kinks. That seems more advertisement-like.
(Either way, I block them. It may or may not limit their spread, but if nothing else my follower count is more accurate.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide
{{Title link: http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/yahoo-reports-big-loss-writes-down-tumblr-value-1.2992361 }}
I FUCKING KNEW IT.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
Fucknuggets. I have so much goddamn shit to save. Writing notes, mostly.
(As an elder fan myself, I don’t think OP is overstating the case at all. :P)
I use this Tumblr backup-creation program. The archive it makes isn’t all that searchable, but at least you can pick through it at your leisure. Plus, it only uses the publicly available parts of a blog, so you can also use it on blogs you don’t own.
(One of the blogs I tested it on was yours, and when I set my computer up to automatically run a Tumblr backup update every night at 10 PM, I left your name on the list of blogs to keep. As such, I own a full local copy of your Tumblr. If you can’t get the backup program to run yourself but can find a feasible way for me to send you a ~2.5GB ZIP file, I can send you a copy.)
(I also pasted all of the stuff in my inbox into a Word document, and I keep my messaging archives separated into one Word document per person.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #amnesia cw #(I know that warning’s not technically right) #(but there’s enough thematic overlap that it feels appropriate) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
{{Title link: https://www.amazon.com/Pounded-Pound-Socioeconomic-Implications-European-ebook/dp/B01HJXVP8G/ }}
Christ Tingle is fast
He could have written both cases weeks before. I bet they would only differ in a couple of key paragraphs, with the sexy parts mostly the same.
Tags:
#Brexit #Chuck Tingle #oh my god
{{Title link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/04/14/universal_basic_income_this_nonprofit_is_about_to_test_it_in_a_big_way.html }}
GiveDirectly’s launching a test of universal basic income!!!!!!!!! They’re doing it properly, giving money to everyone in the selected communities and committing to do that for 10-15 years. And they’re good at rigorous data collection. And if this works, we can scale it up.
Tags:
#interesting #(I know I’m not being as effusive as most of the others reblogging this) #(mostly because it’s hard to wrap my head around) #(but I can manage ”interesting”) #((and I can manage a smile at the mention of the Canadian Liberal party)) #((my vote for them didn’t actually *affect* anything because of fucking first-past-the-post)) #((but the fact remains that I voted for them)) #universal basic income
{{Title link: http://deeperforme.blogspot.it/2016/03/im-changing-my-major-to-kink.html }}
Oh my god last night. Oh my god, ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod last night…
I’ve lost my virginity three times: Once when a woman touched me, with intent, for the first time (my first intercourse, only a week or two later, is almost an afterthought in my memory); once when I pinned a submissive girlfriend to the carpet and first saw that look in her eyes; and once when I hypnotized someone for the first time. After each one, the world changed.
…
Read on for my pre-NEEHU opus, about fighting programming that says it’s wrong to spend all this time, money and energy pursuing kinky sex. I put in video clips and quotes!
If we’re friends…
If you follow me…
If you read one thing about kink…
If you care about joy and love and living free from fear….
Read this.On embracing something joyous. :)
“Opening yourself up to desire and passion takes courage. Makes you silly and vulnerable, like Alison in her underpants. My friend has a line about how much safer it is just to fantasize alone in the dark – besides the obvious risks of going out and doing things, you also risk having your cherished masturbation fantasies touched by disappointment, embarassment, sadness, all the complications that come with doing things with real people, in the real world.
The upside? Having my wildest dreams come true.”
…I honestly can’t tell if there’s something wrong with this post, or if it just caught me at a really bad time.
When I talk about losing my taste for mind-control-as-such and focusing more on the sedation aspect, I describe it as uncovering something buried under desperation and ignorance of other options. I still think that’s true, but today (just today, literally a few hours ago) it occurred to me there might be something else to it as well.
It’s also more convenient. When all I had were tales of mind control and people telling me it couldn’t be done, I was most attracted to the most common type of porn. Now that I know a great deal of it can be done, I’m most attracted to the safest acts.
Perhaps that’s not entirely a coincidence. Perhaps my reaction to learning my wildest dreams could come true was to stop having wildest dreams. My dreams are tamer, these days. Oh, the thought of partnered sex still scares me, but it’s nothing compared to the terror I’d feel at wanting to enact that.
I don’t like this theory. I don’t like the way it carries the implication that the way I am now is wrong. I’m happier now than I was, more hopeful now than I was, and it feels more right and true. I neither want nor want-to-want to play in the deep end of the proverbial pool: I like sticking to the shallows. Is that wrong? If my not wanting-to-want it is at all a factor, even partially and subconsciously, in my not wanting it, does that change the answer?
(I keep thinking of those people who say you haven’t lived until you’ve done psychedelics (and risked coming back wrong), that the simplistic highs of sedatives are not and should not be enough. I wish I were confident enough to tell that idea to fuck off. I wish I were not so worried that telling the idea to fuck off would be the wrong move.)
Tags:
#sorry Divney #pretty sure this isn’t a response you were looking for #sexuality and lack thereof #I have tried to polish this thought process from its original form into #something comprehensible to people who aren’t me #don’t know to what extent I succeeded #TMI
{{Title link: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-spacecraft-displays-pluto-s-big-heart-0 }}
{{in the Tumblr dashboard’s link view, this picture is visible:
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Happy Valentine’s Day from Pluto! <3
It’s Pluto’s first one since we visited! :D
Tags:
#found one! #the ultimate in Valentine space pareidolia #proud citizen of The Future #and no Valentine’s Day in The Future is complete without a picture of Pluto #Happy Valentine’s Day from an aromantic asexual #Pluto #space #pareidolia
Brinens and Things 