You Look Gneiss Today

Here the geologist witch reblogs things that interest them.

[whatrealbeautylookslike]

I love the casual substitution of "gods" instead of "god" in colloquial sayings. "oh my gods" "gods, my feet hurt" etc etc. like yeah deconstruct the societal standard of monotheism with me. let's party

[kassandra1184]

I started doing this years ago because I truly believe, destiny is rather a dice game between my passionately emotive Greek Gods (see Ilias) than the abandoned free will-concept from a wobbly designed deity with a harmonious mind.

[careydraws]

No, seriously,

[roadhogsbigbelly]

i honestly don't really understand why "some people prefer watching gameplay online rather than playing games themselves" is treated as such a taboo when being a spectator is considered a pretty mundane way to engage with most sports, game shows, reality tv or even just like. chess.

[linddzz]

gotta be a term that isn't the dunning Krueger effect but is a kind of similar idea where the more deep scientists get into their topic and the more exhausted they get, the more likely they are to find stupid ways to describe things

[linddzz]

this post brought to you by a bunch of coral specialists at the end of a workshop voting to define coral, a complex animal, as "a rock with problems"

[stitchposts]

[novelconcepts]

Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.

You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.

[homey-worshiper]

I hate generative AI. There was no need to give it to the public. People forgot to be human. And now they ask chatbots how to be normal again. AI in science is meant to help us live, survive. But now I wake up knowing that in a few years, I may not have water to drink. People already go to sleep with poisoned water in their bodies.

That makes me think of my ancestors. They would go to a village well to fill their pot, boil it, and have water. It wasn't "free". It required labour and time. But they didn't need endless plastic to have it. No companies were telling them that water is not a human right. I wonder if they felt like I do now. When the first person had no other choice but to buy bottled water, what were they thinking?

Did they know that in years there will be no clear water left to buy?

You can't find a portrayal of a futuristic world without mention of water pollution. Or just outright NO WATER LEFT FOR PEOPLE THAT CANNOT PAY MILLIONS FOR IT.

Do people who poison the land and water never see it? Did they never read a book? Did they never think beyond a few years? Did they never look beyond their bank statement?

Maybe they should ask ChatGPT what will happen with all their AI products if they kill all the "potential customers".

Drink water today, thank Poseidon. Cook something warm, thank Hestia. Spend time with your loved ones, thank Hera. Sign a petition against AI centres, thank Zeus. Draw something ugly, thank Apollo.

Go outside and cry about all the beauty we will lose because a few rich people decided you and I are not worth living.

Be mad at AI, thank Ares. Hunt for AI in the name of Artemis.

[infestuous]

Wally Dion, Green Star Quilt, 2019 circuit boards, brass wire, copper tube

[chekhovs-raygun]

I SAW THIS IN THE PORTLAND ART MUSEUM! ITS HUGE!

it shimmers like no gemstones i've ever seen: green as malachite and emerald but shot through with opal, gold, copper. photographs can't do it justice because of how it shines, as well as the way the actual material elements have their own dimensions. you can lean in and study all the fine lines of the circuits or step back and admire how the rearranged whole forms new patterns. it's one of the most beautiful creations i've ever seen.

[theartofmadeline]

happy pride to the gay people in my computer <3

[pherntinantos-deactivated202207]

[fairyofthemoon]

[timemachineyeah]

Imagine if we took the cop budget and turned it into a free ride service budget

[timemachineyeah]

Bringing this post back because I wanna talk about it more.

Read an article in the local paper submitted anonymously by a woman who got a DUI two years ago.

My first instinct was to hate her. Because I hate drinking and driving. Viscerally. Anyone who knows me knows how intense I can be about impaired driving of all kinds (drunk, high, tired). It’s not worth it. It gets people killed. I lost a good friend to a drunk driver. Don’t ever. I’ve gotten in fights with people! I have stolen keys!

“Don’t ever” was, in fact, the point of her writing it. But not because of the danger posed to others. Because of how much a single DUI had ruined her life for two straight years. This also didn’t garner much sympathy from me, because obviously the REAL reason not to drink and drive is because you could kill someone. What do I care if someone irresponsible is inconvenienced?

Anyway, this woman was pulled over after leaving a bar where she had two beers to drive a few blocks to her friend’s place. This didn’t really make me more sympathetic because I’m a hardass when it comes to drinking and driving, but she wasn’t pulled over for any kind of impaired driving. She was driving perfectly. It was clearly the kind of stop that happens late at night when the cops are just fishing. The cop made up something about her stickers being placed wrong or a faulty light, before making her take the normal physical impairment tests (as someone with dyspraxia these scare the shit out of me, but that’s neither here nor there) which she passed just fine. In fact, her driving was perfect, her reactions were perfect. But then came the breathalyzer. And her blood alcohol was just too high.

She got arrested.

And the rest of article was her detailing her attempts since to try to get her license back.

The for profit companies she had to take classes from, the for profit companies who make you pay to install the breathalyzer in your car, how if you are able to plead poverty to get aid for that installation you also have to commit to going once a month to a for profit company that will calibrate your discounted breathalyzer and how if you don’t go your car will get remotely bricked and how the pandemic interrupted the hours of these places without notice meaning her car needed to be towed when she missed an appointment after the place was closed when she expected it to be open, how this added to her sentence, how she lost her insurance.

As I read this, I thought, sure, about how much I hate drunk driving. About my knee-jerk, visceral lack of sympathy. And I asked myself:

Does any of this actually make me feel safer?

And it doesn’t. It doesn’t make me feel any safer at all. This woman was writing this article to say “Don’t drink and drive. Not even once. It’s not worth it.” But what I got from it was, these punitive measures aren’t preventing people from drinking and driving. They’re just… giving cops and for-profits fun new ways to mistreat and exploit normal people. People we, people I personally, can feel disinclined to protect because of judgments we have about them.

Meanwhile, people are still going to drink and drive.

And I thought about what would work. What would make me feel safer. And you know what would make me feel safer? If people who hadn’t planned ahead could still get a ride home. I’d much rather someone call the police (or a service that’s one of the many we institute to replace them) and go “I drove here but I don’t think I’m safe to drive home” and have the reply be “someone will be right there”. Then a pair of public servants show up, one to drive you home and one to drive your car home, and you get home safe.

I would love for traffic safety to be, like, the actual goal of how we manage traffic laws.

But more than that, punitive attempts to control people, blatant disproven behaviorism, doesn’t work. If your political philosophy is about finding the “bad” or “undeserving” and ensuring they struggle, I can’t identify with it. It’s hard to come up with a type of “common crime” that I have more disdain for than drinking and driving, but disapproving of the way this woman has been treated is not the same as justifying her actions. I don’t care! I don’t care if she learns her lesson! I don’t care if I like her! Everything you’re doing to her for a single breathalyzer failure is not keeping the roads safer!

The moment she failed the breathalyzer, you should’ve just given her a ride. That’s all I need.

[narwhalsarefalling]

oh yeah have i ever told yall of the academic war i have been an unwilling soilder in for the past two years

[narwhalsarefalling]

okay SO. i have two professors that both teach this one subject, but different classes. they have different last names, so i didnt know this at first and espically since they are academic RIVELS at my school, but they are MARRIED. but for the past 8 years they have been in an academic WAR of geospatical sciences data. more accurately, the raster vs vector data debate. i am personally on the side of "both have their pros and cons and can be utalizied to the utmost efficency" but both professors are like, DEADLOCKED in insistanting one is better then the other

so, professor A is my mentor. i like him a lot, and he was the main person that taught me the most abotu Eris and ArcGIS. professor B is a professor i had one for class, and shes nice and knows a lot of little tricks about Eris programming but mostly relies on arcMAP because shes the raster data professor.

and THESE MOTHERFUCKERS. have written no less then 30 papers that is basically like a "re: re: re: re: re: re: vector data is better then raster fuck you" but like, Professionally. and they leave stupid notes in the footnotes that read "Reguardless of Professor A's opinions reguarding the efficency of Vector data, Raster data has a more efficant polygon computing rate and is the most commonly used program on interplantaring mapping" and its HILARIOUS

[narwhalsarefalling]

ive read all of their papers, and its basically like reading an email chain between a married couple arguing over the colors of the kitchen backsplash for their new home. its HILARIOUS. but obviously, because of their differnet last names and because they act like they HATE each other, NOT VERY MANY PEOPLE REALIZES THEYRE MARRIED

until like LAST WEEK

[narwhalsarefalling]

professor B publishes a paper that casually drops the word "husband"

and obviously all the students are like "oh i didnt know u were married!" because we read that shit like how white suburban mothers read People Magazine

[narwhalsarefalling]

and shes like "yeah, its Professor A"

[narwhalsarefalling]

and we all FLIPPED. THE FUCK. OUT

[narwhalsarefalling]

we thought the framed picture of the two of them on professor A's desk was ironic because hes that type of guy

[narwhalsarefalling]

like, you gotta undestand. these two have gotten into YELLING matches in hallways. these two refuse to go onto trips with each other. but apparently they have a system where they quite LITERALLY leave all of their work at work and drive home in seperate cars and literally NEVER mention work at home. it is SO funny

[beez-n-crackers]

[thisartisfine]

I drew the gang,

[welcometothemindparty]

my horrible hybrid of all of them

[klance-daydreams]

a small cowboy-style break 🌾

[victusinveritas]

[the-lost-alchemist]

How Mexicans feel about duendes too.

[designertrances]

True. Most Irish people, as Norwegians do with Trolls, will happily let the 'fairies' be a thing to make tours for tourists and idle threats to make children behave. Most Irish people will have a very normal and mature explanation of fairies as a common folk mythology that expresses some dimension of Irish culture but are not, obviously, to be taken literally.

And most Irish people, if you ask them to move a stone from a fairy circle will immoveably, flatly respond with 'absolutely fucking not'.

Construction projects have had to halt and be abandoned for it.

[roach-works]

At work me and a couple coworkers (black, white, and mexican) had a fun discussion on whether there are more ghosts at a hospital or a cemetery.

everyone individually took a moment to specify that ghosts probably aren't REAL real. then weighed in on where and why.

for the record my position was that there's probably way more ghosts in hospitals because that's where people die horribly, but since you can only see ghosts in dark, solitary conditions, graveyards at night is where the majority of ghost sightings occur. hospitals are usually well lit and busy, so even if they're crammed with ghosts the living are too damn busy to see them. meanwhile if a cemetery has even one ghost that followed her corpse there from the hospital, she'll be spotted because that's where all the ghost hunters go to look.

this theory was received as extremely sensible, and a coworker drew the conclusion that that's why abandoned hospitals are even scarier than graveyards. once the place gets abandoned then you can tell how much ghosts got built up.

we all liked this explanation a lot and explained it to everyone else all night. and of course, none of us believe in ghosts.

[depsidase]

[homunculus-argument]

My favourite harmless prank I've heard of was done by this girl whose dad was a geologist, and they'd go on day hikes with his geologist friends/co-workers and when she got bored on them she'd habitually pick up a random rock and go ask him what it is, and one of them would explain what kind of a rock that is, how it probably got here, and usually some notions of the more unusual features the rock had, if any.

And she had a friend who had once gone on a tourist trip to Iceland and brought back a volcanic rock. So she borrowed the rock and took it with her on the hike, and after two randomly picked up "hey dad what rock is this", she presented the volcanic rock, in the same fashion as all the others.

3 minutes later there are five middle-aged and older men circled around this mysterious rock, all agreeing on what it is, but not why it is. They keep asking her questions, where did she find it? Were there any other rocks around there that looked like it? Was it like this on the ground? People walking past the group try to stretch their necks to see over the geologists' shoulders to see what's the source of such amazement.

And in the end she couldn't take it anymore, burst into laughter and confessed. The geologists agree that it was pretty clever.

[feenyxblue]

Geologist enrichment

[coelii]

reblog to give your headache to elon musk instead

[coelii]

I’d just like to point out the growth in this post has mostly coincided with elon’s public spiral downward and I’d like to think we’re all a small part of that

[coelii]

bro can’t think because he’s just got a rager of a migraine 24/7

[fiannaai]

yes I would like to give elon musk my menstrual pain. I think he deserves it

[jupiter235]

Reblog to also give Elon Musk your menstrual pain.