NASA
ellievsbear
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#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space šø
Monterey Bay Aquarium
@theartofmadeline
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Sweet Seals For You, Always
romaā
Xuebing Du
oozey mess
Acquired Stardust
Aqua Utopiaļ½ęµ·ć®åŗć§čØę¶ćē“”ć
PR's Tumblrdome
šŖ¼
styofa doing anything
RMH
d e v o n
KIROKAZE
seen from Uzbekistan
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@hellhound-wrangler
[two tumblr soldiers bleeding out on the internet frontlines]
āhehā¦ remember strawbebbyā¦. And ranibow spramkleā¦ always made me laughā
āDonāt talk like that man. Weāre gonna get out of here i prommy.ā [mortar fire sails overhead and land nearby] āchrist its like a childrens hospital out thereā
[through shallow breaths] āI always lovedā¦ā¦ the color of the skyā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦ā
End scene
@millenniallust4death for your collection
not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as āmy liegeā would come strangely naturally
what mutual is prev
my liege lord
my loyal knight
my wise wizard
my evil advisor
my brother in arms
my lady muse
my wild mermaid friend
my fellow alchemist
my dashing rapscallion
my monstrous foe
If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.
"it will be fine if people just"
people will not just
In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.
What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?
Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.
Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether it's environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And don't guilt people about not doing it until it's as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like "wouldn't it be cool if". It's not the fault of the individual that they can't get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.
if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is "you're holding it wrong", the next question you should ask is "why did i make this tool so it's easy to hold it wrong?"
And then you're tech support begging the development team to change something very small that would make the user experience so much better cause they made the tool too easy to hold wrong and development will whine at you because they're very busy with the back end stuff and hey you're the customer facing side why can't you just make them, and no you can't just make them, please development please I'm begging you make the tool less easy to hold wrong.
sorry what was that about how "accepting gay people" is on the list of things we should "make easier"?
@alarajrogers what did you mean by this?
that the onus is on gay people to be more palatable?
No, the onus is on whoever is building the system. Most of the time that's not the gay people themselves, because people who are marginalized are rarely in a position to build systems that affect their own marginalization; that's what allies with privilege are for.
A small thing. If you want to support trans and nonbinary people, then on government forms, if they require gender and you can't get around it, allow "other"; better still, don't require gender. If you're building a medical system, and the patient's gender is M, do not gray out all the "female" problems he might be presenting with on the grounds that a man can't possibly have menstrual problems, be pregnant, or have issues with his uterus; likewise if the patient presents as F, don't make it impossible to enter a diagnosis of prostate cancer for her.
Don't set up validation rules that prevent someone with gender M from having a husband. Better yet, let "husband" and "wife" both be covered by the term "spouse", because that is inclusive of non-binary spouses as well.
Because I'm in IT, I think in terms of IT systems. But there are government systems and insurance systems and financial systems and all sorts of systems out there, that should be set up so that a gay person will be able to navigate it as easily as a straight person, and a straight person will see that the available options don't privilege them at the expense of everyone else... a subtle reminder that no, you're not the center of the universe and gay people exist. Why do you think the right wing fights so hard against there being Spanish on forms that are also in English? You'd think, it doesn't harm anyone using the form for there to be both Spanish and English. But they know, the presence of Spanish reminds English speakers that the world doesn't center around what works for them; other options exist. That's what they want to get rid of, the subtle reminder that someone besides them is important too.
This is a discussion about how to make systems work in some way other than If People Would Just, making them easier to promote the result you want, so I'm not sure how you even got "the onus is on gay people to be more palatable", and I get the feeling you don't understand the context of the discussion. I am not even sure how you could devise a system that incorporates "gay people should make themselves more palatable" because that sounds exactly like a thing that People Should Just... meaning, you're relying on humans to behave in the exact specific way you need them to for your system to work, and the whole point of this conversation is that doing that dooms your system to fail. Gay people will never Just Make Themselves More Palatable To Straights, as a cohort, so if your system for getting gay people to be better accepted relies on If Gay People Would Just, your system will fail.
Unfortunately, reading comprehension is also one of those things that If People Would Just, so posting about things on Tumblr is also a system that's doomed to fail. :-)
Happy pride month to the tiny cowboy and tiny Trojan man from Night at the Museum
This hands down the best comment in the notes, I will not be taking criticism.
I think it is so funny that the blurb of Platform Decay has Murderbot making a point to imply that it doesn't like kids.
Meanwhile Murderbot's actual interactions with children throughout the books:
(Not pictured is Sofi spamming her best friend Secunit with heart emojis or it carrying Tula around because she feels safe with it or Amena calling it Mom)
You are good with kids!! You are a person who likes kids!!! Would it kill you to say it? There's no shame in saying it.
something Iāve noticed about Kep, which surprised me bc I always thought it was instinctual, is that he does not know how to dig. never has. he will paw at his bed or the floor when heās getting ready to sleep, but only ever with one leg at a time. I have never seen him do the left-right-left-right alternating standard digging motion. itās always left-left-left-left and sometimes heāll switch to right-right-right-right but never does he alternate feet. itās also only with bedding, never in the yard. Stellina has always liked to dig ever since she was a puppy (mostly in water but she also has a nice little scrape under my lilac bush she naps in) and Boone was a big digger who made several upsettingly large holes in my yard. I feel like Kep would love digging based on his general penchant for destruction, so maybe itās a good thing heās never figured it out.
i really really like this post
does your dog know how to dig?
ohhh yeah
yes but they are nonpracticing
no. my dog is innocent.
this trend of shitting on peer-reviewed academic studies in favor of tweeting āwe already knew this was happeningā is so soul-crushing. not to be an elitist cunt, but we have got to open the schools again. people genuinely seem to have forgotten that their personal lived experience isnāt indicative of the larger population, AND IF IT ISā¦ā¦ then you need researchers to support these assertions from a relevant data pool instead of a blog post from 2013 š
"Believe women and the marginalized" does not replace the value of empirical data.
it's also just so shitty being a scientist right now and seeing people shit on research at a time when the federal US government is trying to starve and strangle American research. like. when you say "oh we knew this already, there's no point funding research to prove it" we hear that our work doesn't have value. and if you think scientists aren't hanging out here on tumblr in our free time, well, think again.
It also ignores all the scientist who got into the field BECAUSE no one in power would believe them without empirical data. People who spend years documenting and analyzing data so it canāt be denied, so that when you need to speak to power you have a solid piece of evidence that holds weight in courts, schools, and doctors offices to stand on. Scientist who are trying to do research to lift their communities who then get spit on by said community saying āwe already knewā and āthis research is pointlessā.
Do you think there are no Native American scientist doing environmental research? No black women studying public health impactors? No neurodivergent pedagogy researchers? There are. They are some of the most passionate and driven scientists out there, because they are people trying to help the people and places they love.
You do your own community a discredit when you dismiss scientist doing āobviousā studies because more and more often there are names on those studies from your community who have punched their way through a glass ceiling to stand before the world bloody knuckled and victorious to say āLook. Listen. Understand, accept, and change.ā
unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!
(warning: loud chirping throughout)
source: hellgate osprey cam
In celebration of World Book Day
Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have the summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all. (The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)
Laws like this indeed do a lot to stop fascist book censorship. They can also help legally protect librarians from getting fired or harassed for keeping books on the shelves! Some states like Rhode Island have already passed these laws. If you're in a blue state, look up whether you have laws like this on the books. MAYBE your state is trying to get one passed right now, like New York's Freedom to Read bill. call your state elected officials to voice support for it.
oh! Also I should take this opportunity to air my crack theory about Night Watch, to wit: Ned Coates is a time-traveling grown-up Young Sam.
My evidence:Ā
Ned is the only other Watchman who is new to the squad, and new to Ankh-Morpork.
He is supposedly the only person who knew the real John Keel, but he never calls Sam out for it.Ā If there ever was a real Ned Coates, and he really knew John Keel, we only have Nedās word for it.
When he and Sam spar, he fights just as dirty as Sam does, and claims John Keel taught him the tricks Sam uses himself.Ā
Heās protective of Vimesy, moreso than other Watchmen though heās known them all for the same length of time.
He is clearly up to SOMETHING; Sam thinks heās one of the real revolutionaries plotting to overthrow Winder, but none of the other revolutionaries interact with him or seem to know him that I can recall.
When Sam admits heās a time traveler, heās unfazed; his questionĀ āFrom how far back?ā would make perfect sense asĀ āfrom how far back in my timeline, where you are my dad?ā
He supposedly dies in the last fight, but Sam doesnāt see it, and Sam supposedly died in that fight too.
Lu-Tze is 100% good enough to have two time-travelers operating at the same time without breaking the timeline; he does, however, worry about the unusual strain heās creating.
So, letās say an adult Young Sam has a time-travel accident. Possibly after some sort of major falling-out with his dad, one thatās got him still pissed off at him. And now heās stuck in a vastly more shitty version of the city he grew up in, and the versions of his dad he has met so far are a) a dumb kid and b) kind of a dick. He is not having a great time. He really, really wants to go home, but first he has a revolution to see through.
Viewed that way, Ned Coates makes a lot of sense.
reblogging for the Glorious 25th, once again.
practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of itād be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance
āoh i donāt deserve rest and relaxation, i havenāt done enough, i havenāt earned itā and my carās breaks donāt deserve break fluid because they arenāt breaking well enough to earn it. thatās what you sound like!!!!!
one of the "these can and should coexist" things to me is "there are numerous fat people who eat healthy and exercise and could beat the average skinny person in a hike" and "fat people who are fat and arent athletic and dont eat super healthy and do get winded walking up hills also are apart of fat liberation and deserve love too"
both of these are true and both deserve love and to be able to be accepted and get proper healthcare
starting a collection
self-awareness check, list five things you like that aren't media pieces in the tags now ā¼ļø
