Weird Bird

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
chungledown-bimothy
anotherjadedwriter

history fucked me up

oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built

anotherjadedwriter

I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar

archaeologysucks

You mean like this?

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The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

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World History Timeline

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway

I had this book! My grandpa gave it to me and it was really freakin useful!!

mckitterick

I loved this book! Same for The Timetables of Science: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Science.

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Same for The Timetables of Technology: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Technology. Great references!

lepetitpoete

okay but here’s an even cooler (free!) visualization that goes a step further and tracks ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power


Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500


✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️


You can spend hours upon hours exploring this

djeeba
bucksboobs

*Valley Girl voice*: I must, like, not fear. Fear is literally the mind-killer. Like it’s basically the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will totally face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and? When it’s gone? I’m gonna like turn the inner eye to see its path! Where the fear has gone there will be literally nothing. Only I will remain.

djeeba

Read this in Brennan Lee Mulligan’s voice

sharas-bae
sharas-bae

godddddd it's just that steel is a perfect villain. i love her so much. this bad guy has everything, she's tragic she's charming she's cool she's hot she's funny. she loves her daughter (woof). she "saved" her best friend by murdering her. she's impressively devious. she's running an ornate justification machine the likes of which the world has never seen. she's willing to do anything and everything to keep it operational.

and she could have been different. despite steel's best efforts, suvi proves that she could have been different. (in fact the intensity of those efforts makes her failure with suvi all the more damning. suvi chose to see the citadel for what it is and walk away, even after all of that.) but the choices she made means she's Terrible. it wasn't inevitable. it makes her so horrifyingly compelling.

steel is amazing and twisted and i love her. my heart shattered when we learned the truth. until she's dead there's a chance for her to turn it around but uh. i think she's going down. (and honestly with such a deliciously tragic and nightmarish setup i think i might be a little disappointed if she does change)

haltraveler
keatxu

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

omikronsoul

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

justletmeremember

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

jollysunflora

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality

chungledown-bimothy
sentientfloatingeyeball

Possibly the greatest NPR exchange ever recorded

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jinxquickfoot

Because I don’t need ten ideas when I’m stuck.

I need one. THE one.

I’m not saying there’s only one way to write, but when I’m stuck, I go for a walk in the woods until the answer comes to me. Not ten answers. THE answer. The answer to how to tell the story I want to tell, in the way I want to tell it.

Art takes time. It takes mistakes. It takes courage. And we’re devaluing it by just trying to make products as quickly as possible.

I don’t want to have a book. I want to write a book.

homunculus-argument
homunculus-argument

Fun fact: you can avoid midlife crisis by literally simply just skipping it. Straight-up just skip being middle-aged. Once I turned 30 and aged out of the "young adult" bracket, I skipped straight into being a weird little old man. Record youngest bizarre old geezer in generations. Now if I'm lucky and play my cards right, I've got like 80 or 90 years of being a weird lttle old man left in me. If I manage to do a hundred, I'm going to start telling people that the secret to living to 130 is that I ate an entire pine cone every single day.

That, or that I can't die because heaven isn't taking me and the devil owes me money so he's avoiding me.

byjove
byjove

Another thing about the plummeting birth rate in America is that America is just not a pro-natalist country. No paid maternity leave. No paid paternity leave. Children are treated like burdens. Why the fuck would you have a kid if you’re seen as ‘flakey’ for leaving work early to go to their kindergarten graduation? When you live in this ultra individualistic capitalist hellscape, there is no room for a child.

carriesthewind
carriesthewind

On the subject about parents needing to control their child's reading and invade their privacy in order to "protect" them from "inappropriate material:

Until I was in....college? At least? The vast, vast majority of the books I read were either a) assigned by my school or b) (the vast majority of my reading) provided to me by my mother.

My mom is a librarian. She filled our rooms with books, picked especially for us. She pointed out books on the shelves in our home library (separate from our bedroom shelves) that she thought we would like. She bought us books for birthdays, Christmas, and just stacks of recommendations. She once paid me $10 to read one of the Cirque Du Freak books because she said I needed "to be exposed to bad literature."

She respected my privacy in room, didn't go through my belongings. She explicitly pointed out to us that she wouldn't know if we took a particular book of the shelf, as long as we returned it, if we didn't want her to know we were reading it. She purposely brought us books that she didn't care for herself, because she thought we might find them valuable or enjoyable.

And if we wanted to read something she thought might upset or disturb us, she would explain why. She wouldn't stop us from reading it - just ask us to check in with her, to talk through it.

And so when I read something that upset or disturbed me, I would go to her. She would listen and talk through it with me.

If she said she didn't think I would like something, or that a book might disturb me, or that she thought I should wait until I was older, I listened to her.

She didn't need restrictions or control to protect me. Because she proved I could trust her.

Controlling kids is never about "protecting" them. It's just about control.

goatsandgangsters
goatsandgangsters

an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

language is amazing

atticcreationz
atticcreationz

Suvi in CA Ep 1 and Ep 54: fleeing the citadel in the middle of a fight to save it, teleporting with her parents magic

Eursulon in CA Ep 1 and Ep 54: a knight in a golden pauldron speaks to a spirit about honor and protecting those who can't protect themselves, and the spirit crosses over to the mortal world

Ame in CA Ep 1 and Ep 54: welcoming new guests into her house that need shelter, and they will become part of her Home

wizard-loving-wizard
whyistheroomempty

Big Wbn relisten feelings this is gonna be a ramble and maybe mean nothing

lots of thoughts on suvis line after the bath scene of “I made him different and now he can’t go home” and how that directly parallels the finale and how each of suvi and eursulons story’s mirror each other

i think it’s really interesting how the importance and goodness of being apart of the world and changed by it is a central theme of the story but is often portrayed as negative. It essentially bookends and runs through the whole story, -eursulon being cursed by the well intentioned kindness of ame and suvi in giving him food home and a bath, steel comparing the change in suvi from her connections to ame and eursulon to a sickness- but even in the final discussion between eursulon and the Great Bear he saids ” you have undone the mistakes you have made, you have completed a quest…” and what what mistake has eursulon made? is it really just believing in the ideals he saw in Sir Curran? wanting something he wasn’t supposed to know to want? outside of the isolation of the world he grew up in? i can’t look anywhere in this story without absolutely drowning in parallels i’m so not normal about this