Misplaced Lens Cap
Xuebing Du
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taylor price

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todays bird
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$LAYYYTER
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Product Placement

ellievsbear
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

pixel skylines

JBB: An Artblog!
NASA

Love Begins

oozey mess
cherry valley forever
we're not kids anymore.

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@bathroamer
I have never. Seen this specific typesetting mistake before. I've seen editing mistakes I've seen writing mistakes I've seen typos aplenty I have never seen someone accidentally paste the file version details into the text while typesetting.
that's the first page of the book as well like. I'm assuming this got missed because it obviously happened after the copy was finalised. that's an InDesign file (and not the first InDesign file of the project (clock the 'V2')) so idk much about the publishing process but this is presumably final final steps before committing to print.
but like. idk. this is delightful to me. this is such a specific error. wow.
Also the word "leaflet" has a space in the middle of it in the paragraph above.
Somebody fucked uuuuuuup
This looks like somebody converted an earlier print pdf into an editable file (the clue is in the version details oddly inserted into the text; print PDFs have this outside the margin for identification and is trimmed off after printing). My best guess is somebody LOST the original editable indesign file and all they had was the print PDF and they had to reformat the book for a new printing - probably the paperback edition - so some poor person had to take that pdf and convert it into editable text which means the file information that sits outside the margin is converted as well. That person has then had to check the whole file through for weird formatting like line breaks and extra spaces, page numbers in odd places and this string of file version information which would occur on p much every page.
And that poor person missed that line on the first page in the new file.
@greaseonmymouth if you get the chance inquiring minds would love to know more about why mistakes tend to be missed on the first page. I would've thought that's the page that gets checked most often!
not aromantic but I believe in their beliefs.
"there's no platonic explanation for this" try harder bucko
love is a beautiful wonderful multifaceted nebulous thing that shouldn't be reduced to the strict bounds of Tier One: Romance and Tier Two: Friends. get weird with it. love your friends deeply, wildly, passionately and platonically. cowards
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
torrents work like this
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
please learn to torrent
An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over
always use qbittorrent, do not use bittorrent or utorrent.
Major pet peeve in my own life is that the brick and mortar on the porch columns of my apartment don't match the rest of the building. It's not something most people would notice at first or maybe at all, but it drives me crazy.
The brick on the building is an old sandmold standard-size flashed burgundy brick and a plain buff mortar in a flush joint. If I were to match these, I would use Belden Brick's Belcrest 740 bricks. Those aren't available in standard size, but the modular size they're made in will work because it's the same height. (Matching size exactly doesn't really matter for columns or other projects where the brick isn't going to be laid directly into the existing brick wythes (in fact, the bricks on the columns are a bit longer and a bit less tall than the bricks on the house)). I'd match the mortar with Heidelberg's Old Colonial, the go-to for matching older structures, from their Flamingo colored mortar series. Heidelberg's premixed Old Colonial could also work.
The brick on the columns is just over 8 inches long and just under 2 1/4 inches tall, so it's a weird size. They may have been "seconds", meaning the factory screwed up and had to sell them at a discount. That would explain the mismatch -- mighta been a 1970s Landlord Special. Nonetheless, they're beautiful bricks. A rusty brown color with ironspot texture ("ironspot" is somewhat literal: the clay and/or shale is mixed with actual flecks of metal, usually manganese these days I think, that melts in the kiln and makes a sort of glaze of freckles on the surface of the brick!), laid with an almost-matching red mortar.
These bricks have to have been discounted, because it shouldn't have been at all difficult to match the brick on the existing building. The reason for the red mortar evades me; colored mortars are usually more expensive than plain mortar. More traditional colors like Old Colonial are popular enough to be not much pricier than the plain grey. Idk why tf they woulda done red, except maybe to hurt me personally.
this is exactly the type of rant i signed up to tumblr to see
Dinosaur cartoon.
Important reminder
This reminds me of the fact that "Ancient Egypt" goes back so many thousands of years, that the most recent "Ancient Egyptians" were already studying (even more) Ancient Egypt.
Not even the most recent ones. It was an Egyptian prince from the 13th century BCE studying and restoring artifacts from the 26th century BCE.
For context, the last Pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, lived in the 1st century BCE. Prince Khaemweset, known as "the first egyptologist", was as ancient to her as the pyramids and tombs he was studying were ancient to him.
I remember having me mind completely blown when I learned that the "New Kingdom" was pre-Bronze Age Collapse.
This has totally be mentioned in another fork of this post, but it reminds me quite a bit of Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, a museum in Ur, c. 530 BC, which housed mesopotamian artifacts dating back in some cases to the 20th century BC
We thought that these were boat stairs, but it turns out that they are stairs in a youth hostel.
I slip and pinball between the walls as I slide down
"Charity shop" - 2007
@silly-signs
Official silly sign
Fish-shaped interlocking paving stones.
mcmodernslopcore
Howdy, howdy, folks.
For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper -- from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.
This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another -- they represent the owner's idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.
These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I'm nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.
The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word 'slop' but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:
Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit. Ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which makes it appear entirely ersatz. Were it not for the interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.
In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don't warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what's in these images isn't real.
Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.
By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It's basically a sunroom.
Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.
Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the "grindset tiktok video kitchen." This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.
Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that they were one of the first iterations of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one's will to question reality, what one sees with one's own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I'm living in. These chairs are not my problem.
It's actually AMAZING how much of what's in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it's hard to say from just pictures. I don't even trust the floors!!
Ok if you haven't read Kelly Pendegrast's amazing essay "Merchandizing the Void" about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.
Please, I'm very cold.
Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.
If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don’t worry! This doesn’t adjust for inflation! Now’s the perfect time to join!) By the way: new subscribers can buy a year of McMansion Hell for just $12!
Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! (I would seriously appreciate any and all tips because I am in the process of moving house!)
This house is a cybertruck
I know it isn’t comparable in any way, but for $12 million USD, or £9 million, you could get…. A beautiful 18-bedroom castle with a beach, an operational farm, houses, shops, and businesses on a delightful island in Scotland.
Property details for Glengorm. One of many properties for sale in Tobermory, Isle of Mull, Argyll and Bute, PA75 6QE from Savills, world lea
Like. For the price. For the price!!!!! For that price,,
it wants to be close to me. probably because it is so cold and soft & it knows i am strong and warm
The trip back to Erid isn't really covered in the film, and I'm happy that that means I can get my heart torn asunder over and over again by fanart 👍
i`m going to loose my mind i just burnt my toast and i am so tired that for some reason i completely forgot where i was. and with the instinct ingrained from years of living on a sailing boat as a child i just went to feed the fish.
only that i am not on a sailing boat. there are no fish to feed. i just fucking threw bread out of the window of a third story apartment in the middle of the city very much on land. what the fuck
I wish I could've seen how the piece of unloved, burnt toast looked flying out the window 🍞💨💨
the second 'o' in "zoologist" is putting in heavy duty work. girl is working two jobs
hey guys so the hero that keeps barging in my tower seems to be using some sort of chronomancy called “quick saving.” have we figured out any counters for that yet or what’s the deal
Ok, lets have a look at this: Over the last few days a new paper in Science has led to MANY discussions in the paleo community and it appears to have breached containment into the wider world, judging by headlines and google results.
"Earliest octopuses were giant top predators in Cretaceous oceans" by Ikegami et. al describes a new beak of the basal octopus genus Nanaimoteuthis. And yeah, it's a whopper! Just look at the specimen next to a giant squid beak in this figure! They also note that...
...beak shows some intense, asymmetrical wear, indicating a lot of hard objects being processed by this beak. On top of that they assign the genus to the group Cirrata (finned octopuses and relatives) instead of Vampyromorpha as it was in past papers. This is were the hard facts end though.
Don't get me wrong: This must have been a huge animal, but I also think that anything beyond this is purely speculative. The authors give a total length of 7 to 19 meters, an enormous range, with an estimated mantle length of max 4.4 m. They base this on the proportions of finned octopuses and other close relatives but I would argue that is just math for the sake of math. We know VERY little about early octopuses. Their beaks are often the only thing preserved and their diversity in the Cretaceous remains murky.
That's the size part, what I have an actual problem with though is the way they deduce behavior, died and even cognition from this fossil. Based on the size, wear and asymmetry they propose that this animal would compete, maybe even hunt large marine reptiles, in a smart way.
That's plain bullshitting in my eyes. Intense wear on a beak suggests this animal would be durophagous, going after armored or hard shelled prey. cracking the bones of marines reptiles feels very contrived and modern day octopuses (that often eat crabs) don't look much different.
The asymmetry of the beaks is an interesting detail but I would NEVER derive an argument for higher cognition from that. Cognitive abilities are next to impossible to grasp from the fossil record even IF you have the brain. Which leaves the question what was this guy doing?
Short answer is: we don't know. As I hopefully illustrated here we have simply too few data points to make any concrete arguments for this animals appearance or lifestyle. HOWEVER
As people pointed out on Discord: crushing shells in an pelagic habitat is something that was a breeze in the Mesozoic. Ammonites in the cretaceous come in many different shapes but also sizes. 50 cm plus species are not rare.
We also know from the Jurassic there were likely other cephalopods that went after ammonites. So if the ammonites grew in the Cretaceous why shouldn't their predators as well? Beyond ammonites the Late Cretaceous also gave rise to a large to gigantic bivales like many inoceramids
This abundance of durophagous prey is also reflected in the predators, large sharks, mosasaurs and even giant chimeras took advantage of this plentiful food source. I therefore think a large ammonite predator is a much more likely niche for Nanaimoteuthis.
In my interpretation I pair the octopus with the giant ammonite Parapuzosia, these animals aren't known from the same localities but their time ranges overlap which makes it plausible to me that these guys, or close relatives, could have met.
Lastly I want to quickly talk about the promotion and reception of this publication. While I don't completely fault the authors for their writing - after all LOOK AT THE MODERN ACADEMIC CLIMATE - I do think it's troubling that the editor's note, the journal itself, immediately evokes the image of the Kraken, a mythological creature, to sell it's new paper. This in combination with Science being a high profile journal makes it feel as if the claims in this publication are standing on more solid ground than they do. This is just my personal opinion but I think this is just bad science communication. It is something that will echo through the online sphere for years to come and does not in any way promote the caution that I would expect when claims like these are presented. Subsequently the ideas and evocative speech of the paper have already spawned a large amount of paleoart that goes for the largest and most speculative sides of it. Again: I think the size estimates in the paper are certainly possible, but I also think a more critical examination of the text is warranted when presented with such incredible claims. I am not here to kill your fun. But I also think that we are maybe looking at something even more interesting that the (at this point) already rather old trope of the mosasaur eating squid. At least to me a giant mollusk eats mollusk world is cooler.
AS ALWAYS, these are simply my opinions on these matters, but I thought there was enough uncritical yay and nay saying about this paper that I felt like it should warrant a reaction. I think the paper describes fascinating material and I eagerly await more!
Neither “the magic is going away” nor “the magic is just beginning” but “the magic has been around for fifty years and society has only partly adjusted”
You understand me
"How do you turn this ... HELLO? HELLO??"
"Dad? Dad! Just ... you don't need to stand that close to the scrying orb. All I can see is your eye just ... just step back!"
"SON? IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, YOUR MOTHER WANTED ME TO ASK YOU ..."
"Oh, you don't know what you're doing. Let me. HONEY! IT'S MOM!"
"Y-yes, Mom. I know. That's how scrying orbs work. I can see you."
"HONEY, I WAS TRYING THIS NEW INCANTATION AND NOW MY TULIPS ARE BREATHING FIRE. DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DE-SPELL?"
"It's ... it's 'dispell' Mom, I ... look, I'll have one of the kids open a portal and we'll be right over. Just, no more incantations if you don't know where they come from, okay?"
"OH YOU KIDS ARE SO SMART WITH THESE THINGS. MAYBE YOU CAN HELP YOUR FATHER TOO. IT'S BEEN RAINING IN THE GARAGE SINCE TUESDAY."
"I told you I'm handling it!"
"Animating brooms to carry rainwater is not handling it, George!"