riding the highest horse you’ve ever seen back to my glass house

"grackle" really is a perfect name for a bird. knocked it out of the park w/ that one

Damn. That really is a grackle.

phallus

this doesn't render on windows unless next to a non-phallus hieroglyph so here is a version for windows users:

𓀐𓂸

Prev: mobile user here! theres fucking nothing here

It's supposed to look like this:

Prev: How did someone make this??

Unicode, the technical standard describing what text symbols exist in computers¹ and how they are encoded², has a block containing Egyptian Hieroglyphs. And since there exists an Egyptian Hieroglyph depicting a penis³, they included it in the standard. And since most computers follow that standard, they can display a penis.

You can check out unicode characters for example here:

1) There do actually exist different standards describing which characters computers should use and how they should be encoded. These days pretty much everyone uses UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) because when exchanging data between computers or programs everyone must use the same encoding to get readable results.

This also means that unicode must (try to) support pretty much everything any human could ever want to write, which means it includes many things like mathematical symbols, special symbols for just about every language, emoji, combining characters that modify other characters, a variety of spaces, box drawing symbols, control characters for eg. text direction, ...

2) Which is actually somewhat complicated. Unicode assigns each symbol a number, but then the text (sequence of symbols) needs to be converted into a sequence of bytes. This is done via the Unicode Transformation Format, which actually results in different characters needing differently many bytes to store.

Also, certain emoji (flags, anything with skin colors or gender, emoji depicting multiple people) are actually multiple characters that get squished into one symbol when rendered.

3) There actually exist three. The above, a version with cloth (𓂹) and one with emission (𓂺).

Also the unicode standard defines words like character, symbol, glyph, ... to have exact meanings, I used the interchangeably here.

this made me have a complete meltdown with delight as I went from "bwahahaha penis sign lol lmao" to "wait if hieroglyphs are unicode there must be an oryx one" and THERE IS!

look at it! 𓃲

𓃲𓃲𓃲𓃲 <- herd!

and the newborn hartebeest!!! 𓃛

frog! horned viper! CREATURES! I'm so happy! I'm gonna be so insufferable with this!

it's kinda crazy. you can use these like more detailed emojis, or even make whole stories without using a single letter. here's an example:

𓀥 𓁆 𓀕

𓁆 𓀟 𓀣 𓁀

Canadian bilingual packaging is fun because you get to see how various slightly odd idioms end up being translated by people who don't give a shit. I just saw a tub of double chocolate chip ice cream where the English label says "death by chocolate", but the French translates literally as "chocolate until death", which has a somewhat different vibe.

#there are so many cases i see when the english packaging has a pun for a tagline #and then the french is just a poor translation EVEN THOUGH an equivalent pun can be made (via @souplover13)

Occasionally it's the other way 'round, though, and the French is clearly the original pun. There's a brand of cheese sticks at the local co-op where the English tagline on the packaging is "cheesetastic!", but the French is "fromidable", which is so much better it's faintly offensive.

good fucking lord we need to demystify minerals. crystals do not have healing or magical powers you guys are just getting scammed

and we are what exactly? everything we interact with is a jigsaw puzzle of atoms. everything that effects or heals us in made of atoms and vibrations. negative ions from moving water affect our mood so why wouldn't crystals?

you are getting scammed

I own a rock shop. A lady came in about three years ago and asked me which crystals are best for healing, I gently explained that they didn't have powers or healing properties. She started crying. She had late-stage cancer and no medical treatments were working. A crystal-healer had told her the only thing that would save her were crystals, then proceeded to convince her to spend $2000 on what realistically was only maybe $50 worth of Arkansas Quartz. She had two months to live, and was being strung along by scammers who gave her false hope in exchange for her life savings. I had indirectly just told this woman she was going to die, and it was hitting her all at once. Unfortunately, stuff like this is a regular occurrence. Maybe that’s my worst story, but it’s something I encounter on a weekly basis at least. Rocks, Minerals, and crystals are cool as hell but they don’t have powers. They aren’t mystical or special. I’m sorry for going off on a rant about this but it’s frustrating and it can ruin people’s lives.

If someone told you that crystals have powers, you got scammed.

If you tell other people that crystals have powers, you are scamming people.

Stop fucking scamming people!

To be fair, there are some minerals that have powers, but those minerals are Uranium and Plutonium and the powers are Radiation Damage

Still one of the best animations I've ever done. Took just under a week and was equal parts fun and challenging. So here are some process passes! The full version had too many colors so I had to do some compression T0T

As always, no ai.

new top contender

the jewel book of anna of bavaria

pages from the kleinodienbuch (jewel book), an illuminated inventory of the jewelry owned by duke albert v. and duchess anna of bavaria. illuminated by hans mielich in munich, c. 1552-55

source: Munich, BSB, Cod.icon. 429

you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for a nuanced reason

it's fun for me just to grab a boob

"Decolonize Everything"

“When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught… then you will realize money cannot be eaten.”

Anti-colonial graffiti seen in Pensacola, Florida

"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."

-Alanis Obomsawin, Abenaki, 1972

I think about this cake every day

sorry for exposing your tags but this is hilarious

OP, I hope you don’t mind me making an addition:

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

I love a botched cake.

one time me and some pals spotted one of those big cookie cakes in a store. it was done up with red icing and little X's for kisses and in the middle it said

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

for ages after when we'd wind each other up we'd declare "NO ONE LIKE YOU ☹️👎"

I just feel like it's important to post the Sacred Texts

The Cake Wrecks blog is one that I miss.

Pro-censorship wattpad refugees drama is so funny to me because when I started using ao3 as a kid I was a devout mormon and I thought that reading anything even remotely pornagraphic was a sin and would ruin my life. So when I was 13 and found ao3 I went "oh awesome I found a fanfic website with a filtering system so I won't ever randomly stumble into porn. This is great! I was really worried about seeing something I didn't want to see on the other platforms." I didn't read any smut online until like three years later. If a mormon 13 year old can figure out 'don't like don't read' wattpad users can too cmon you guys i believe in you.

You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.

Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.

And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.

Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.

On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I'm pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include "lying down with my eyes shut for an hour," even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from "exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep" to energized and refreshed

The post (?) as found on Reddit with bonus explanatory Reddit comment.