Latest Posts by quantumjames - Page 5
Tuxedo eats anyone who calls Furbies creepy https://www.instagram.com/p/B7n2Wd6Ju2v/?igshid=1bom68bpd7ohz
Missing Asks!
I FOUND IT! I FOUND THE ANSWER!
Okay, maybe not the final answer, but part of the problem! Asks keep getting eaten. Which is a big problem when you’re doing something anon and don’t want to ask the person “did you get it”?
If the ask contains an ellipsis without a trailing space, it gets eaten. It says delivered, but it goes nowhere.
So “Well… then” will get delivered but “Well…then” won’t!
Hopefully this helps in getting your asks actually delivered.
Hi, I know you can’t share the letters for ethical reasons, but could you share some tips on how to write effective fuck you letters? It sounds like a useful skill to have.
Oh absolutely. So a fuck you letter should always be in response to an inciting action from another party. We don’t write “fuck you” letters unprompted, we write them to illicit a specific “oh shit, I’ve fucked up” reaction from the recipient. Furthermore, the inciting action on the part of the other party ideally has to be wrong. Now, when I say wrong, I really mean two things: 1) that it would incense a reasonable person, and 2) that it’s the type of action that people can get in trouble for.
So, I’m going to make a example up to demonstrate. This example has literally nothing to do with the type of letters I write, but I think it illustrates my process. Say you live in a neighborhood that has a Homeowner’s Association, but your house was built prior to the HOA forming and no owner of the house, including you, has ever agreed to join. You hung up a Pride flag on your porch last June, which is unremarkable, as many houses have flags displayed on their front porch; some are purely decorative, others convey meanings, like your neighbor’s Blue Lives Matter flag, or your other neighbor’s Build the Wall flag. The day after hanging the flag, you go on vacation for a week. When you return, you find that your Pride flag is missing, and you also find a letter in the mail from the HOA stating that you have 24 hours to remove the flag or it will be removed and you will be billed for the cost of its removal. You have, furthermore, recieved a bill for 200 dollars for the expenses incurred by the HOA in removing your flag.
Okay, so we obviously have our wrong act. So now we’re onto Stage Two, and this is the most important stage, Fact Gathering and Research. The obvious move is to find proof that the HOA had no right to enter your land or remove your property, and naturally we’ll do that as the very first thing, but really, is that going to make them sweat? We want them to sweat. So, let’s find news articles about other times this HOA or other HOAs in this neighborhood have entered someone’s property and removed or materially altered the property. Let’s find out what happened to them - were they sued? How much did they get hit for? Was there a ton of negative publicity? How did that impact housing prices?
Even though you’re not a member of the HOW, can you get a copy of the bylaws and see what they say about decorations outside homes that are part of the HOA? Is there a rule against displaying all flags? How about the neighbors? Have any of them recieved demands to take their flags down?
How about researching the demographics of the neighborhood? Do any gay couples live there? Have any gay couples applied and been denied housing there? Does the jurisdiction you live in have a law against discriminating against housing applicants due to sexual orientation? Has anyone ever complained that the HOA has acted in a discriminatory fashion against them because they’re gay? What penalties are available in your jurisdiction if that were the case? Are any of those complaints still pending, and could the complainants use the HOA’s act of removing your flag as proof of discriminatory intent?
What about the bill for $200? How was it calculated? Was it based on the time it took to remove the flag? Did it actually take that amount of time? Do you or your neighbors have a video doorbell that might have captured the removal of the flag? Who actually removed the flag? Did they say anything while removing it that might bolster your argument that the HOA acted with the intent to discriminate against gay people?
How about your own property? Did anything get damaged in the course of the flag’s removal? How much was the flag worth? How much was the property damage worth? Have you spent money related to this incident?
Once you’re done with your fact gathering and research, you’re onto stage 3, which is organizing the letter. So, you line up everything you’ve figured out, and arrange it from “least scary to the HOA” to “pants shittingly terrifying for the HOA.” Let’s say here, least scary is probaby “the cost to replace your flag” and most scary is “the prospect of a ton of lawsuits from other people who have been discriminated against and the prospect of publicity that will cause every HOA associated home’s property value to tank,” with a bunch of other stuff in the middle. Start with establishing that you’re not subject to HOA rules, and then walk them, sentence by sentence, step by step, through just how badly they’ve fucked up, and the bad outcomes they can expect in response to their fuck up.
Finish by telling them who else you’re copying on the letter, if it makes strategic sense to do so and will result in a better outcome for everyone that’s been wronged. In this case, you might think about a variety of gay friendly organizations, local news media, and governmental representatives. Wrap it up by asking them to provide you with a list of the actions that they intend to take to repair the damage that they’ve done to you and to the community within, say, fourteen days, so that you can give that to your attorney in order to help you consider how best to respond to their actions.
End with the most brutally infuriating sentence known to man: “Thank you for your kind attention to this issue.”
You’ll sleep like a baby once that letter’s in the mail.
They won’t.
“I was raised Catholic” just translates to “I’m an atheist, but I feel kinda bad about it.”
Social Security doesn’t actually publish the rules for disability benefits, I don’t know if y’all are aware of that.
You don’t get a booklet when you apply or approved that explains how things work. Not for SSI, anyway; SSDI is a separate thing that works very differently and I don’t know anything about it. The SS website isn’t the easiest to navigate, and only lists minimal information for many aspects of the program, and for specifics, you have to call them and ask. When you do that, they offer to send you some pamphlets, which contain the same information that’s on the website, which means you wind up having to call again.
And the thing is, even when you reach someone, they don’t always give you the same information. Some employees seem ignorant about the entire system, some seem apathetic about everything, and some are doing their best but don’t know everything. And some do know what they’re talking about. And there is no way to know what kind of person you’re dealing with, and no way to check their information against something you already know to make sure, because you very well may not have the right information.
I have, in fact, been told things that are incorrect more often by SS itself than by anyone else, and I have been told wildly conflicting things by SS employees. As an example, I was told initially that I had to report all income, even if it was under $1000. Then I was told I only had to report income if it was over $1000. Then I was told that they can only go by taxable income, meaning if you made over $1000 at, say, an off-the-books unlicensed popup lemonade stand, or if you sold a dozen of your empty butter tubs on Craigslist for $100 each, that money doesn’t count because it’s not money that is taxed by the US government.
I was told these things within the span of six months, and the most favorable take, the latter one, came from someone higher-ranking than anyone else I’d spoken to. She said, in these exact words, that “We only really care about taxable income.”
So what would you do? Go by what is most favorable to you, but run the risk of having it held against you if someone decides it’s wrong, or if it IS wrong but you didn’t think it was because an employee of Social Security itself told you it was correct? Or would you go the conservative route and live in more hardship just to be safe?
We shouldn’t have to crunch ourselves into the smallest possible living situation, afraid of what they might do, not knowing the rules. Even in school, even for the very smallest children there are, there are clear rules, and everyone knows what they are so the kids can abide by them and the teachers can fairly enforce them.
You don’t get that with SS. You get the information piecemeal and from unreliable sources. We are treated in a way that authority figures agree even children should not be treated. And I want people to know that.
Now, I admit I may have missed something. Some very obvious site, or a rulebook they were supposed to send me and I just never got, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think they deliberately keep this information kind of under wraps because they don’t want people to “take advantage” of it. But withholding information people could use to help themselves qualify for benefits they deserve is harming the many people who need help in order to prevent a few theoretical people from fleecing the system.
Something like 5 million people are on Social Security. Compared to the number of people who genuinely need it, welfare fraud is nearly nonexistent. And yet policy is set, not by the overwhelming need of those who cannot do for themselves, but by the potential abuse of “undeserving” people.
Keep in mind, even those trying to fleece the system have to go THROUGH the system to do it, and it is designed to catch those people using measures that would be absolutely exhausting and almost impossible to fake. I should know, I’ve been through the approval process.
Keeping information secret that could help someone after they have been approved is low, it prevents us advocating for ourselves and keeps us dependent on a largely untrained or poorly-trained network of social workers, SS workers, and case managers. It is utterly inhumane.
THAT SAID
It IS worth it to fight. It IS worth it to be on SS. It DOES help. It gets you into the Medcaid/Medicare system. It helps get you SNAP benefits. It is not enough to live on forever, not by itself; the system is broken by design; but it is SOMETHING, and without it, even fewer people would be able to survive. The process is difficult and discouraging. It is still better to take whatever they will give you, not as alms, not as a pittance meant to keep you quiet, but because they deserve to have to give it. So TAKE from them. Take everything you can.
Hello everyone! Today is my birthday! To celebrate I have a very special friend to raffle out to one lucky winner!
Meet Buttonby! He is a button loving buddy ready for his forever home! He even comes with his own little container of buttons!
How to enter;
Like and reblog once each, if you reblog you must put 'entering' in your tags!
This giveaway ends December 10th, 2019!
To enter, you must not conflict with my DNI, and you must be following this account!
You can get extra entries over on my Instagram, Furby_o_rama!
Good luck to you all!
(source)
Unsplash - photography, illustration, and art
Pixabay - same as unsplash
Pexels - stock photos and videos
Stockvault.net - stock photos
Veceezy - vectors and clipart
Getdrawings - simplistic images and drawing tutorials
Gumroad - photoshop brushes (and more)
Canva - needs login but has lots of templates
Library of Congress - historical posters and photos
NASA - you guessed it
Creative Commons - all kinds of stuff, homie
Even Adobe has some free images
There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without infringing copyright! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own.
Please add on if you know any more sites for free images <3
To people who are desperately asking for fundz/donations on tumblr.
USE THESE REDDIT SUBS INSTEAD PLEASE FOR GOODNESS SAKE!!!!!!!!!
Hate Reddit if you want, but using these subs are your best chance. People gather in these subs because they have charity to spare:
/r/Assistance /r/legaladvice /r/RandomKindness /r/Charity /r/care /r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza /r/Food_Pantry https://www.reddit.com/r/RandomActsOfPetFood/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RandomActsOfChristmas/ https://www.reddit.com/r/almosthomeless/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homeless
/r/freelance /r/povertyfinance /r/thrifty /r/borrow /r/gofundme
/r/depression /r/familysupport /r/transitions
I never see anyone actually getting any significant donations on tumblr and to be honest, tumblr is the worst place to ask for assistance. Use it as your last resort, it frustrates me to no end seeing people begging for help, reblogging the same post over and over, the same types of posts over and over, to no avail, when people are waiting to help you on a different part of the web GO TO WHERE THE HELP IS. IF YOU WANT DIRECT ACTION TO WORK STOP WITH TUMBLR AND USE REDDIT.
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF SATAN REBLOG THIS SO WE CAN START REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF DONATION POSTS THAT GET STUCK FLOATING AROUND THIS WEBSITE
what if All Riku in FF7 AC
FURBY HAIR DYEING TUTORIAL
FURBY FUR DYEING TUTORIAL:
Hi everyone! Welcome to my Furby Tutorial! In this specific tutorial we will be dyeing the hair on the Furby’s head and tail (this can also work for maned Furbys). EDIT: THIS TUTORIAL ALSO WORKS ON BODY FUR!!!! Please read the entire tutorial before dyeing your Furby with this method! Thank you!
BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE THAT CAN HELP YOU: Furbys have synthetic fur. Synthetic = PLASTIC. As you all know, most commercial dyes won’t work on a Furby very well. That is why we are going to use ACRYLIC PAINT to color our Furby! Keep reading!(also plz be aware that Nomi’s hair was dyed prior to this tutorial)
MATERIALS YOU WILL NEED: 1.) A glass of water 2.) A small vessel to mix your paint wash in 3.) Acrylic paint color of your choice (we are using metallic green for Nomi) 4.) A paintbrush (any medium sized flat or round brush will do) 5.) A toothbrush (CLEAN, preferably a clean used toothbrush) 6.) A Furby (thank you Nomi, for being our model and willing participant!) 7.) Paper towels (not pictured but you will need them.) 8.) Hair Dryer (optional but it can be very helpful; also not pictured)
Step One: Wash your hands! This is a great way to start a new art project!
Step Two: Create your wash/“dye”: this part looks daunting but is actually QUITE easy! We are going to make what’s called a “paint wash”- some of you artists may already be familiar with what this is! It’s basically thinned-out paint. What you do is put a tiny bit of paint into your empty vessel (I used about the size of a dime) and add water to it until it becomes a mixture that I slightly more WATER than paint. For me, that was about a dime-sized paint blob with about 3-4 tablespoons of water. You want it to be RUNNY, not thick.
Step Three: Once you have made your wash, it’s time to get that “dye” on your Furb! Take your toothbrush and dampen it with the wash. Tap your wash-soaked toothbrush out on a paper towel to remove excess wash. This step is important because you want your toothbrush WET with paint but not SOAKING wet. It’s best to start out first with a tiny dab of wash to play around with and then work your way up to a more saturated toothbrush.
Step Four: comb your wash through your Furby’s hair. It’s best to have your Furby ready to receive the wash, which means you should part the hair you wish to dye AWAY from the fur you do not wish to dye, so that there is minimal pigment transfer to the fur you do not wish to dye. (Tl;dr-part ya Furby’s hair, y’all)
NOTE: See this hair clumping here? I did this on purpose to show what can happen when you have TOO MUCH wash on your toothbrush. You don’t want this because it can take longer to dry and give your Furby’s hair a matted look. (I mean, if you like this look by all means, go for it! It’s your Furby, my dudes!) If this happens and you don’t like it, just blot with a paper towel, tap off your toothbrush a bit, and continue combing the wash through the hair again!
Step Five: YOUR ROOTS ARE SHOWING?!
This is any easy way to cover roots! Just take your paintbrush and load it with a TINY bit of wash, then dab the wash into the hair roots and continue to comb through with the toothbrush! Ta-daaah!
NOTE: Keep a paper towel nearby cause YOUR HANDS GONNA GET PAINT ON ‘EM.
Step Six: Continue adding the wash into the hair and combing it through until you like what you see!
Step Seven (optional): Use a hair dryer to dry your Furby’s hair!
This is for peeps who don’t want to wait for the hair to fully dry before they handle their newly-dyed Furb! I also believe that this can help seal the pigment in better, as it’s actually melting the pigment of the paint into the shaft of the synthetic hairs. If you don’t want to use this method, simply put your Furby in a place where they will be undisturbed until they are dry! (Please allow at least ONE HOUR for your Furby to air-dry if you don’t use a hair dryer). While you dry, continue to brush the hair with the toothbrush to get rid of any remaining clumps!
FINAL STEP: admire your work! Well done!!
I hope this helps you guys! You can also use washes to dye eyelashes!!! I’ll be making a tutorial on how I do mine next! Thank you for your time!
In case anyone was wondering what the insides of these guys looked like. Found a pair while thrifting and liked their vintage looking face sculpts.
The eye plate screws into the white tube which slides into the black tube. The top of the head was sewn onto the removable textured plastic on the eye plate. The face didn't want to come off after being unscrewed from the black tube and I suspect its glued on.
Might try to remove the eye paint with acetone and cotton balls.
My first furby that I thrifted with his box. Finding him kinda distracted me from all other doll projects for the past week lol.
His name is Bi-lighting or Bilite for short. Might make him a little vest. If I find any more furbs I will get wilder with the customs but I wanted one "normal" one.
Toad Words
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…
It's from the Yakuza 3 remaster (it was cut from the initial release). It's on PSN right now and a physical copy of the game (bundled with 4 and 5) will be available next year.
SEGA DOES WHAT NINTENDON'T
Honestly, Kingdom Hearts III still just feels like a weird dream.
Like, aw, man, I had this weird dream. Kingdom Hearts III came out, and Vexen was suddenly already a good guy for some reason?
Axel and Saix suddenly had this other friend, and everyone kept talking about her, all the time, but we never saw her.
There was a Toy Story world, and Young Xehanort, like… Split its soul in half? Or something? Somehow?
There was a Frozen world, and, like, none of the locations from the movie were in it? We just kept running back and forth between Arendelle and Elsa’s ice castle without actually ever getting to either of them?
- Mod A.
Now that Miku is becoming more mainstream
It is important that anybody new to vocaloid or even veteran fans understand something VERY important:
Miku is an instrument, a tool, a program. A song cannot be "by" Hatsune Miku. By saying this you are refusing to credit the talented producer who made that song. Miku and any other vocaloid singer is a guest singer technically. If you're going to formally address a song, format it like this:
Rolling Girl by Wowaka ft. Hatsune Miku.
Specifically using Rolling Girl as an example because the producer, Wowaka, stopped making music with vocaloid because he wasn't being credited for his work. Nobody recognized his music as HIS music. It was all "Miku's music".
So please, if you plan on saying who the song is by, do not say the song was by Miku or Rin or whoever is singing, take the few seconds it takes to look up the song's producer and give them the credit they deserve.
Why it’s Helpful to Hear Terminology:
I’ve seen some debates about whether having a pretty word for a symptom actually makes any difference, and I’m here to say that it did for at least one person.
I recently learned that sensory overload is something adhd people can experience too, and learning a word for why I always felt “sick” and had to go to the nurse in middle school brought me so much peace. When I learn terminology for my experiences, I feel validated.
It’s like proof that I’m not just being dramatic or weak. Kind of like when I realized that the reason I’ve never been any good at sports was because I’ve had asthma all along. I thought I just tired out quickly.
It’s like having a name for my struggle gives me power over it.
So, TLDR: Terminology can help us feel validated in our experiences, and that can be a great encouragement.
You were a laundress in a castle owned by a prominent but reclusive duke. There were other laundresses, but you were the duke’s personal one, largely because of the bloodstains on his clothes and bedding. You asked no questions and passed no judgment. He’d never spoken to you directly, but he did send you small gifts and treasures, for your… discretion.
Early one evening, he decides to thank you in person.
Based on @furbsplosion‘s majestic drawing I created this being