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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
durch-hali

I love my service top crowley so much what a smitten idiot, on aziraphale’s beck and call at all times, completely wrapped around his bossy bottom boyfriend’s finger (who 85% of the time is a pillow princess).

good omens crowley ineffable husbands my text i speak facts fact they do switch buf most of the time azira likes to bottom cause hes too lazy to top as it takes too much effort also hes a pillow princess
darkstrangerx overrideeclipse
saintcucumbers

Can someone please tell me what it means when an owl LITERALLY fucking swims towards you and then stares you down??

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Like look at it?? Literally flew past me and my my friend, it was so close that the wings touched our faces.

shiraglassman

It’s reminding you to do your Duolingo practice

demonladytakkuri

The real answer is that it really wants you to go away

That’s a fledgling great horned owl, they’re known for being generally ballsy and aggressive, and owls have been known to both climb trees and swim through still water in a pinch

Most likely full scenario: the bird was practicing flying, but it fell because it’s still a kid and they do that. It probably fell in/by the water. It then was like Oh Damn Oh Jesus and decided it was not in fact a duck and headed to shore, saw you, and was utterly offended but confused on what to do. So it decided to Square Up and face you like the hellbeast it is.

The pose it’s taking in the pic is one I affectionately call Full Orb. A fully orbed owl is 100% READY to FIGHT 1v1 no items final destination. You were probably its first up close encounter with a human, and since birds tend to associate larger animals with predators, it tried to make itself look as big as possible to make sure you know what’s up. It was staring you down because it was waiting to see you make the first move in the dual or flee in fear from its superior owl might.

timatisblog

This reply made this post 101x better

karmacharmeleon18

me: oh hello little owl

owl: i will fuck you up

zetabrarian nerdswithanxietysaywhat
thewayoftheleaf

Concept: A ghost hunting show except after the dramatic, night-vision opening narration of all the haunted stuff, it’s just me walking around the house fixing the loose boards and uneven doors that are actually causing the problems while I ramble about Carl Sagan and offer bad interior decorating advice

thewayoftheleaf

Hysterical couple: there’s all this moaning and knocking from the walls and the doors slam all on their own when no one’s near them, we can’t stay here if this doesn’t stop

Me, disassembling a window: yeah so this house is a hundred years old, none of these windows are sealed properly, and the whole house is one big draft. So we’re just gonna pop these boards off and replace the insulation and then caulk it up nice and tight, doors will stop slamming and bonus, your winter heating bill is gonna drop! Stay tuned after the break for our recurring segment, Hot Water Heaters And You: When’s The Right Time To Replace Old Pipes?

cephalopodvictorious

WAIT OK
There’s a show I found a while back on Netflix that was people with haunted houses had a consultation with a paranormal investigator, a psychic, AND A HOME INSPECTOR
he was just the most chill dude, and at one point they were like “well why do the stuffed animals move at night HUH????” and he was like “ma'am you have a dog” and I lost my mind. flickering lights were all just wiring that was old and dangerous. he jsut wanted people to not be dead

cephalopodvictorious

Its called Paranormal Home Inspectors and please don’t let the reviews turn you off, its delightful because they are the exact three levels of belief. The psychic says every house is haunted by dead kids pretty much, the paranormal investigator just runs investigations and presents the results, and the home inspector is BEGGING people to hire professionals instead of botching their own home repairs

obscuritory

Going off-topic today to share what I’ve been working on at my day job! It’s tangential to what I usually talk about here, so I figured y’all might enjoy it.

I’m a librarian in the Washington DC area, and for years, my library has been working on a project to preserve our collection of VHS tapes. This week, we finished digitizing the last videotape on-site for a total of 2250 videos that we can make available to our patrons again.

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We have a collection of over 8000 VHS tapes, including lots of documentaries and educational films. For obvious reasons, our patrons can’t access them anymore. VHS is undergoing what has been called “degralescence” – degradation and obsolescence. The tapes are deteriorating, and the format is becoming more obsolete. Fewer new TVs even have the video inputs for VHS players.

For the most part, these tapes aren’t unique. They’re commercial videotapes, which means compared to one-of-a-kind video collections, they’re a low priority to digitize. But if we don’t do it, who will? If not now, when? So we did it.

Under Section 108( c ) of US copyright law, libraries are allowed to make a reproduction of a copyrighted work, as long as 1) there are no new replacements for sale and 2) the original format is degrading, damaged, or obsolete. There’s more to it than that, but basically, as far as VHS is concerned, if it’s not being sold anymore, we can digitize it!

With lots of help from our student staff, we audited the collection and found that we had about 4000 videos that qualified. A huge chunk of those were being kept in off-site storage. The remaining 2200+ were on-site, and that’s what we finished digitizing this week.

It took a lot of time. VHS digitization happens in real-time, so an hour-long tape takes one hour to capture.

In total, that comes out to 37 TB of video, compressed! Here’s our storage arrays:

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This is a big achievement for us, and it hasn’t been an automatic process. Preservation takes work. There’s a lot of human labor involved, especially in A/V preservation, with manual processing and attention needed for individual videos. We listened to experts and found how to make it work in our time and budget.

The project is still ongoing. In addition to everything we have to digitize from off-site storage, we have to keep maintaining the digital video collection. Digital storage is volatile, and we have to ensure we have backups and that we keep it in an accessible format. Paraphrasing Sophie Shilling: Preservation is never in the past tense. A thing is never preserved. We’re always preserving it.

This has been a huge team effort across the library. These projects don’t happen alone, and I want to stress how much the whole library contributed to this!

VHS preservation digital preservation video preservation
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