Ray Ravary

An aspiring animator with the greatest hair.

[American Dad @_NotAmericanDad]

Let gramps cook

[Josh | Map Effects @MapEffects]

🏰 One of the hardest parts of building a believable medieval settlement is figuring out how many people actually did each job…this becomes even harder with trades commonly occupied by women.

The challenge is that history rarely gives us exact numbers. Historians instead piece together clues from tax rolls, guild records, manor accounts, court records, and other surviving documents. Even then, exact occupation numbers are challenging to pin down.

To make things even trickier, many women brewed ale, spun wool, sewed clothing, made cheese, and prepared herbal remedies as part of everyday life without those tasks necessarily being their “trade.” The needs of a village also varied greatly by region, season, and local economy.

So, why even put this list together? Think of these as very rough historical estimates to get you started, rather than hard and fast rules. Adjust as needed…but if you don’t even know where to begin it’s just overwhelming.

👉 Which trade surprised you the most?

Happy mapping!
- Josh

[Ray Ravary @Flapjackal]

@ViralVigor They call that drug "simple and clean" on the streets

[Lilly Batson @Lilly_bat98]

This is probably the greatest structured joke ever told on SNL 😂

[Josh | Map Effects @MapEffects]

When I create coastlines, I like to begin with broad shapes and slowly carve them back, imagining I’m the wind and waves shaping the land over centuries.

It’s one of my favorite parts of making maps. Drawing thousands of tiny hatching lines…Not so much.

So, I created a solution.

The result is something I’m calling Map Effects Smart Brushes.

This first release, the Pendragon Coastliner, lets me sketch and refine a coastline while Photoshop automatically creates the medieval shoreline and hatching as I draw.

It feels less like drawing thousands of tiny lines and more like sculpting the shape of a world.

There are just some things Photoshop does better, and this is one of them. Map Effects Smart Brushes are designed specifically to take advantage of those unique capabilities.

Launching Friday! I can’t wait to see what worlds you create.

- Josh

[Ray Ravary @Flapjackal]

@TheKaiGuy2 @mana_chan__ It's the new digimon mobile game that they announced a few months back

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Ray Ravary @Flapjackal]

Gotta line when the big bad guy of a story is introduced and he acts like a nonchalant old man before he looks at you and sends you to experience the end of all existence

[Horatius The Dwarf @HoratiusDwarf]

Improve at the WHOLE process

[Clover 🍀🐮 @MooMooClover]

My Mandarin is very rusty 🥹 I need some bilingual 朋友s to 学习 with

[Naman Budhwar (Nbz) @Lordnbz]

The perfect pairing

[Ari Meirov @MySportsUpdate]

A bride in New York wanted to reserve a presidential suite for the morning of her wedding in October, but it was reserved for the #Cardinals, who play the Giants that week.

She asked the team, not expecting it to go anywhere, but it got to owner Michael Bidwill.

Here’s how it unfolded… 👏👏👏

(via OliviaMarie256/TikTok)

[HerodotusWave @HerodotusWave]

The bag is a handcrafted piece designed to look like a giant deep-sea isopod.

[nina @ovrbrd_nina]

my current obsession are these prozd videos where he very baffledly reacts to this chocolate engineering guy's videos

[FRAIKI 🍡👀 @Fraiki]

HOLD IT...

🔥🔥🔥