Never Try To Defeat The Void 🐈‍⬛😉

how bout bulldog bat!euripedes wearing one of them novelty fishing hats?

"let any fish who meets my gaze learn the true meaning of fear, for I am the harbinger of death; the bane of creatures subaqueous. for my claws are true and unwavering, as I glide above the surface of the aquatic abyss."

or unaltered text hat, merely strategically transferred from an outdoor store to end up resting atop the head of Euripedes. maybe the brim is lined with superglue too, so it stays on while flying. and resists the best attempts of Vikus to remove it.

Spinoffs: Space Station Innovations in Your Cart (and Heart!)

You might think NASA technology is just spaceships and telescopes, but did you know the camera in your cell phone is, too? It’s one of many NASA innovations now found everywhere on Earth.

The International Space Station has had crew living on it for 25 years straight. In that time, the space station has enabled a tremendous amount of research, helping NASA and scientists better understand long-term living in space – but it’s not just knowledge coming back down to Earth! Technologies developed for the space station and experiments conducted aboard the orbiting lab also benefit people on the planet below. Here are a few of these inventions, or spinoffs, you can find in your everyday life.

A Sunscreen That Blocks Radiation in Space – and on Your Face

After surviving for 18 months outside the International Space Station, an extremely hardy organism is now improving sunscreens and face cream products from a cosmetics company, which licensed use of the organism from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Build Muscle With or Without Gravity

Muscles atrophy quickly in space, so when astronauts began long stays on the International Space Station, they needed some specialized exercise equipment. A resistance mechanism made of a coiled metal spring formed the basis of the first way for astronauts to “lift weights” in space. Soon after, that same design became the heart of compact home gym equipment.

Fresh Greens Every Day of the Year

The need to grow fresh food in space pushed NASA to develop indoor agriculture techniques. Thanks to the agency’s research, private companies are building on NASA’s vertical farm structure, plant-growth “recipes,” and environmental-control data to create indoor farms, resulting in higher crop yields and better-quality produce while conserving water and energy and eliminating the need for pesticides.

Cultivating Hearts and Knees in Space

Gravity is a significant obstacle to bioprinting cells and growing human tissue on Earth because heavier components settle to the bottoms of petri dishes. In the absence of gravity, each cell layer stays in place, which is how it’s possible to grow heart and knee tissue on the space station. The same principle also allows mixing of complex pharmaceuticals on orbit.

Storing Oodles of Energy

NASA chose nickel-hydrogen batteries to power the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station because the technology is safe, reliable in extreme temperatures, and long-lived. NASA’s improvements brought down the cost of the technology, which is now used by large-scale utilities and renewable power plants that need to store energy generated by intermittent sources.

You can read about many more products sourced from the ISS on spinoff.nasa.gov.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

I'm seeing a lot of posts on my dash today encouraging folks to start archiving their favorite online resources, in case they might be at risk of disappearing in the near future. Since privacy and data ownership are major interests of mine, it seems like a good time to share a bit of what I know! I hope that some of this might be helpful--please feel free to reach out if there's a specific question that comes to mind! 💕

(My bona fides, in case anyone wants to know: I do work in tech, with over fifteen years of experience in the same. Linux systems administration is a hobby of mine, and privacy, particularly as it relates to tech, is very near and dear to my heart. That said, I am not an infosec professional, so you may want to supplement this guidance with your own research, depending on your threat model.)

General advice

If you rely heavily on traditional cloud storage providers, like Google Drive and Dropbox, now is the time to start exporting your important files to a more secure location. Data stored with most online platforms is encrypted at rest, but the encryption keys are stored on the server's side, meaning that the contents of your files can still be accessed by the service providers themselves. This also means that your files and their contents are vulnerable to data breaches, DMCA takedown requests, subpoenas, and the oh-so-popular AI scraping that has wormed its way into nearly every tech product of note. (Including Tumblr! Lucky us!) Saving files on your own computer is one option, but if you want something closer to the Google Drive experience, Proton Drive is my recommendation. Free accounts get 5 GB of storage, and all data is end-to-end encrypted, which means even Proton can't read the contents of your files. A suite of document features were rolled out earlier this year, including rich text editing, collaboration, and sharing, so if you use Google Docs for writing, you can use Proton in pretty much the same way. I also use Proton for my email, and I'm happy to vouch for them--they are nonprofit-backed, EU-based, and all of their products are built on privacy from the ground up. If you have an Apple device, you can also turn on Advanced Data Protection for your iCloud account, which will enable end-to-end encryption for most services. (Notably, mail, contacts, and calendars will remain unchanged, to ensure compatibility with standard protocols.) This might be a good option for folks who already have iCloud services and who don't want to set up anything new. You can learn more about how to enable this feature here.

Archiving websites

There are a number of ways to archive specific webpages, depending on how much content you want to preserve and how tech-y of a solution you're willing to tolerate. A web clipper is probably the most straightforward option: install one of the listed notes apps, install the web clipper browser extension, open the page you want to save, and clip clip clip. The images and text (with formatting) will be stripped from the page and saved to a note in your app. Both Joplin and Obsidian's apps are available cross-platform:

Joplin + Joplin Web Clipper

Obsidian + Obsidian Web Clipper

Notes you create in Joplin are encrypted before being saved to your device, while Obsidian's notes are saved to a location of your choosing in plain-text Markdown format. If you aren't sure which to choose, choose Obsidian--it's a little easier to use right out of the box.

If you want to preserve the full context of the webpages you save, similar to what you'd see on archive.org, SingleFile is a browser extension that lets you save complete web pages as a single HTML file. You'll find links to the various browser extensions, as well as documentation, on the project's GitHub page:

GitHub

GitHub - gildas-lormeau/SingleFile: Web Extension for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file

Web Extension for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file - gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

Note that these files can get pretty big. In general, I'd recommend a web clipper for most cases, but it's good to have multiple options on hand!

Other tips

Even in the absence of major geopolitical events, it's worth remembering that anything you see online can change or be removed at any time. Keep backups of anything that's important to you. (And make sure you back up your computer, too!) Have an alternate contact method for your online friends, in case one platform goes down or otherwise becomes inaccessible.

Consider signing up for a Signal account, if you haven't already, and recommend that your friends and family do the same. It's a free end-to-end encrypted chat platform, and unlike some privacy-focused chat protocols (looking at you, Matrix), it's easily accessible to non-techies. Don't use email, DMs, Discord, Slack, etc. for any communication that you expect to keep private. Any platform that can access your messages will give them up to authorities if compelled to do so by a court order or subpoena. This is not a theoretical risk. It is happening to people in the US right now. I am being so, so serious about this.

If you're looking for a new creative hobby, why not teach yourself a little HTML and CSS? Neocities is a great place to build your own website, and it's free. And it's fun! (If you make something, please drop the link, because I want to see.)

Breathe. We have to survive this, somehow. Log off for today, if you have to. Drink some water. Pet a cat. Sit outside and watch the birds, just for a few minutes. Believe that we will be okay, however you can. ❤️

Bat Profile: Spectral Bat

Vampyrum spectrum

Source & Photo credit: Jennifer Barros

RANGE: Central & South America

CONSERVATION STATUS: Near-Threatened

HABITAT & DIET: Like so many bats, we still have a lot to learn about this species. But we do know a few things about their diet and roosts. First, they are carnivores. This species is particularly large (see below) and thus they will eat birds are large as doves and cuckoos, as well as rodents and other bat species. They have even been observed eating bats right out of researcher's nets!

They live in smaller groups that are most often found in hollow trees. One of their unique traits is that they appear to form monogamous pairs, which is very unusual for bats.

Fun Fact: With a wingspan of about 1 meter, the spectral bat is the largest bat species in the western hemisphere and also the largest carnivorous bat in the WORLD!

create

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To my fellow American Citizens

The answer to despair is action!

Please read:

Reblogs help reach more people, if you cannot help for whatever reason you can still reblog and that makes all the difference!

Image transcript:

YOU CAN CONTACT THE WHITE HOUSE DIRECTLY:

Go to this website https://t.co/nhEejuzfG3

Submit directly to the president

Click the first option, select your reasoning as election security

State these pieces of information in a paragraph:

32 fake Bomb Threats were called into democratic leading poll places, rendering polls to be closed for at least an hour

A lot of people reporting their ballots weren't counted for various reasons that are not very sound seeming. (Signature invalidation, information that vote counter could not have had)

This all occurred in swing states. (PA, Nevada, Georgia, ETC.)

This is all too coincidental that these things happen and swing in his favor after months of hinting of foul play.

Directly state that an investigation for tampering/interference/fraud is required, not just a recount.

The White House

Contact Us | The White House

Contact the President, Vice President, get help with a Federal Agency, or request a Presidential Greeting.

Hello, I'm the Easter Bunny! Er... what? Bunnies have wings, right? Since they lay eggs, right...?

Virginia Big-eared Bat (Corynorhinus townsendii virginianus)

Kentucky, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Virginia, USA

Status: Endangered

A standard dungeon but the fey decided to troll the adventurers by polymorphing every creature in there into rats and let them run around. You can attack the rats and with enough damage, they will turn back into the usual dungeon enemies but no one’s in their right place so you have no idea who/what will pop out.

The kobolds who were guarding the entrance? The prisoners you came to save? A spider that was just chilling in the dungeon? The final boss you need to kill? You have no way of knowing until you smack the rat!

(For more randomness, a GM makes a set of cards with all the creatures and players randomly draw them so that no one knows what’s next.)

Do you have any Swoobat facts?

I love Swoobat so much it's the cutest

Swoobat Facts

-The scientific name for Swoobat is "Cardilorus gobelinus" which roughly translates to "Courting-heart goblin"

-Swoobat are Chiropterans, with their closest relative being Crobat. Despite their obvious differences, they share many similar traits, l8ke both being cave dwelling and both using echo location

-While the ultrasonic waves they produce can be quite harmful, they rarely use them since it takes a lot of energy, and using it too much leaves them unable to fly for a while

-Swoobat's eyes are almost completely useless in the dark, and they rely entirely on echo location to help navigate the area they're in

-In Unova, Swoobat are often symbols of Valentines day, and many valentine's day decorations will include Swoobat on them

-Male Swoobat will often have multiple partners at a time, with the entire colony caring for their young

-Swoobat berries, fruits, and insects. Often times, they'll leave their caves at night to go hunt for fruit, but there have been Swoobat colonies thst survive purely off of bugs in their caves

-Swoobat sleep upside-down with thir tail latching onto something to keep them in place

-The average lifespan for a Swoobat is 35 to 40 years

-Swoobat have very good hearing, which is amplified by their sound waves

-When a Swoobat likes you, they'll often stamp you with their nose or wrap their tail around your arm

-Both Woobat and Swoobat are very cuddly and their fur is very soft. Because of this, and their ability to create a calming effect with their soundwaves, they are often used by therapists

-While the pokedex doesn't mention it, Swoobat still keep the suction cups on their noses. They don't roost by applying them to cave walls however

-In some parts of the world, Swoobat's nose is seen as a good luck charm, and they'll chop it off to get it. This practice is seen as unethical in most parts of the world

-Swoobat's overbite helps them keep bug types in their mouths from escaping

(Art by Kouki Saito)