"And so many think incorrectly that everything was created by the Creator in the beginning as it is seen, that not only the mountains, valleys, and waters, but also various types of minerals occurred together with the rest of the world, and therefore it is said that it is unnecessary to investigate the reasons why they differ in their internal properties and their locations. Such considerations are very dangerous for the growth of all the sciences, and hence for natural knowledge of the Earth, particularly the art of mining, though it is very easy for those clever people to be philosophers, having learnt by heart the three words 'God so created' and to give them in reply in place of all reasons." -Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov
fantastic. i love it. i posted this after my wife said it yesterday and as i was doing it i was like "this can't be an original thought. as soon as i hit post someone's going to say 'you stole this from a tweet from 2014' and i'll say 'no, i stole it from my beautiful wife.'"
Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!
Here's what I need you to do:
If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.
Yes, that's really it.
I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.
If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.
I am not talking about that unless I have results to share. That would bias the results.
I did write them down and I did share them with a trusted contact who can prove that I wrote them down the same day I made this post. (While I did so before I made this post, I am not sure they will be able to provide proof of that, because I did so on the same day.)
OP are you interested in...?
Do you have to click through to see the post? Does the clickthrough contain the words "mature content"? Then yes.
OP are you interested if the post is about...?
I am interested in the mature content labels, not the content of the post. Is there a clickthrough that contains the words "mature content"? Then yes.
Yes, please. I felt really silly when I noticed I forgot to include that in the original post.
Is it okay if I send you my own posts?
Yes, those are perfect for what I'm looking for. I actually need to do some processing on a post to make it useful for testing my hypothesis, and this makes it easy.
Are you looking for "potentially mature content" also, or just "mature content"?
I want both, please. Anything that throws up a blocking screen that you have to click through. The distinctions between them are one of the things I am hoping to study.
Does it matter when the post was made originally?
Technically no. There's no way to respond to this without introducing some bias in the results, and I don't want that. However, I do collect some data on a post as part of making it useful to me, and that data is easier to collect if the post is recent.
What if I request content label review on a post after I send it to you?
I need to see the mature content label to be able to use the post. Because the mature content label hides the content of the post, it is very hard to use a post that no longer has a mature content label. You could send me a screenshot, but people could use that to lie to me.
Basically, it's more work for you to make it usable to me.
OP are you a transphobe? It would ruin the experiment for me if you're a transphobe.
I promise I'm not a transphobe and not doing this for transphobic reasons. You should still double-check that I'm not a transphobe for yourself, though. I am not sure that this study will have the useful effects you're hoping for; I am studying something specific, and it may not be what you hope.
I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you
I grew up before the term 'thigh gap' was invented I grew up before 'hip dip' was invented I was born before 'muffin top' was a thing before 'clean girl look' was a thing before 'glass skin' was a thing before razoring off peach fuzz was a thing and I'm so so so fucking tired of us inventing new concepts purely for the purpose of convincing people to hate their own bodies enough to buy products
Last time Tuberculosis ran through the USA a small number of people got it on purpose to look skinny and waifish and delicate and used makeup to look flushed and bony and when the Victorians figured out tapeworms people would infect themselves on purpose to starve themselves smaller and women and now in the year of our lord 2026 there is a noticeable fraction of the USAmerican population genuinely thrilled about a treatment-resistant microbial parasite that makes you shit and vomit your brains out for a month because side effects include weight loss and STILL we talk about being skinny like it's the natural default setting for all healthy people as if it's a self-sustaining standard and not an imaginary goal that we are constantly constantly constantly beating ourselves with a whip to acheive
Betrayed and backstabbed by your scheming evil advisor? Psch. Skill issue. Absolute amateur problem. Just hire two of them and reward them for snitching on each other. Just make sure that neither of them is gay or they'll just end up hate-fucking each other and fucking you over all the same.
Listen -- you're a good defender and your pussy is fantastic, but that's not what our team needs right now. We're trading you to Greater Boston in exchange for someone who has a car.
"Whether someone understands it or not, these are the consequences of the political views they're espousing" is a pretty important analysis tool for online movements because quite honestly, over half of everyone engaging in politics online have no foundations for the stuff they're saying and are just saying whatever makes them feel like a member of an in-group.
If your in-group is "the left" you're very much not immune to this. In fact, trying to do left-wing politics without even trying to build a foundational political understanding is a great way to end up as a neo-nazi with a tumblr accent rather than an effective left-wing advocate.
I don't read as much fic as I used to but one "tell" for non Canadians writing us, besides the etransfer, is the units you use to describe us measuring something. I hate to tell you this but The Chart is real and it's completely subconscious. Please abide
ID: A photo of an almost entirely white living room, with a big red circle with a strike through it overlayed over it, and captioned "No more white interiors. Society has progressed past the need for white interiors." End ID
Remember! When companies lay off all their staff because AI is cheaper, this sort of shit is what you can leverage for a better contract when they are inevitably forced to hire everyone back :)
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
Reblogging to drag this project over here, this is killing my notes on main so I'm giving it its own URL. Follow over here for updates on the star system generator and only the star system generator, and not on my Star Wars bullshit.
Will go through and tag interested parties when things calm down below 100 notes an hour.