Biscientific

Rocks, books, space, politics, critters, fandom

[jabberwockypie]

Me: I don't know, maybe I was overstating how bad my migraines are to the neurologist. :-/

My best friend:

[jabberwockypie]

#THIS BITCH #do you know how many times a week this winter she got a migraine??? #Or this spring? #THIS SUMMER? #CALL OUT POST#between this and 'well maybe I don't have asthma and am just choosing to wheeze for aesthetic purposes' #I will be inflicting one million 'well maybe I could talk if I just tried harder' DON'T TEST ME (tags via @arinrowan)

Arin did you just turn MY post into a callout post?

[arinrowan]

Crawling out of the well of deep tumblr for the purpose, yes

[jabberwockypie]

#for every note this gets op has 1(one) day where she's not allowed to say maybe her disabilities what disable her are fake or made up (@arinrowan again)

I don't think you can do that?

[arinrowan]

Can I do that?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 1 day 6 hours

[king-carnivore]

what really fucks me up about watching the truman show in 2025 is how it's not fictional. truman is fictional, but the truman show isn't.

there's thousands of truman shows. you find them on youtube, tiktok, instagram... family and mommy vloggers, sad beige moms and now the trend of neglectful moms showing the "reality" of parenting. all of them using their kids for entertainment. each child their own truman; living a life manufactured by their parents, a camera watching their every moment, broadcasted for the entire world to see.

[king-carnivore]

tbh, i didn't even think about that when i made my post and holy shit you're so fucking right

[napoleononthebellerophon]

the amount of lawsuits these exploited children are going to be filing 20 years from now is going to be crazy and im all for it

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Hanky code but it's me making sure my Rite-in-the-Rain notebook pokes up out of my back pocket so the econerds know I'm one of them

[bisonwares]

It's up :))

[joy-and-whimsy-official]

Joy and whimsy I found on another platform! How joyful and whimsical!

[lilyblisslys]

the main trick to dancing at a goth club is:

1. Imagine you’re a powerful wizard

2. Imagine you’re channeling mana for one of your strongest spells

[lilyblisslys]

3. you can also pretend you’re a deep sea predator pretending to be aquatic plant life drifting in the currents to attract prey

[nudityandnerdery]

Kids today need to learn how to pull the evil taffy.

[madfishmonger]

4. Brush away the spiderwebs in the vast and mysterious crypt you're exploring

[morningwitchy]

FIG & ROBIN GIVE✦AWAY 

its been a little while since ive done one of these!! 🤭 i thought it would be a fun way to celebrate the fig & robin launch a little.

✦ The GA will end August 15th, after which a winner will be randomly selected! 

✦ The winner will recieve 2 pieces of their choice from the current fig & robin collection. (If you have already placed an order or are planning to and you win, ill refund the cost of two items back to you!)

To enter:

✦ Follow + reblog this post! 

✦ Must be within the US

💖💖 good luck!! see the collection here!

[captain-price-returns]

this comic is 30 years old

[partywithponies]

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

[partywithponies]

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

[findmeinthealps]

guy on a work call just accidentally said “have a nice freak-end” instead of weekend and now i desperately want that to be the new meme. have a nice freakend everybody

[hylianengineer]

There is one very important thing I need people without major dietary restrictions to understand: the distress caused by allergies, celiac disease, and other food restrictions is largely not about the food.

Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.

I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.

Food is such a basic human need, and a lot of people don't really need to think about it. When your danger foods can be anywhere and everywhere, suddenly your entire life revolves around avoiding them, and it massively sucks. You get used to it and it's not a big deal most of the time, but then you go to a new restaurant, or your office has a potluck, or you've been invited to a party and suddenly it feels just as miserable and exhausting as it ever has.

[were--ralph]

the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists

[were--ralph]

we're going to try again witha little but minimal casting

IT will happen in August of 2026. like to charge and reblog to cast but cast sparingly

[were--ralph]

Wait stop. everyone +like now and spread it a little but cast on the same day in August. lets try August 6th or something.

[were--ralph]

CAST NOW

[imanwithoutbowie-deactivated202]

Continue✨ Keep going✨

[tartrazeen]

Thank you, lady 🤗

[kukoyi-deactivated20210512]

The Nigerian accent. God. She reminds me of home...

[everybodywantstorueltheworld-de]

Always grateful when this makes the rounds

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[frondescence]

In honor of one of my favorite short stories of all time being set today, August 4, 2026, here is a repost of a commission I got from the wonderful @bethfuller in early March 2020 of the poem featured therein (and that which gives it its title) by Sarah Teasdale:

[heatherwitch]

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Graphic Novel: On Internet Archive.

[unamccormack]

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

[regionalpancake]

!!!! Today is the only chance we’ll ever have to listen to this absolute banger of apocalyptic fiction on the very day the story is set 😲✨

Nemoy’s voice is PERFECT in this!

(A content warning if you do listen - the dog dies, though it’s not super graphic)

[regionalpancake]

I paused the robot vacuum so I could listen to this 1950’s story predicting the robot vacuum.