if i look back, i am lost
almost home
ellievsbear
NASA
#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Janaina Medeiros
DEAR READER
Keni
pixel skylines
trying on a metaphor
i don't do bad sauce passes
we're not kids anymore.
dirt enthusiast
Discoholic 🪩
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Claire Keane
Origami Around
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@hurricanewatcher
Tweet by Heather Hogan:
Straight friend: Will you sensitivity read my book for my lesbian best friend character?
Me, two weeks later: The lesbian best friend is absolutely perfect. Here's 16 pages of notes detailing the incorrect things you said about Star Trek.
5:32 PM on 2/25/24
who was the fool who was tasked with naming the galaxy and the only adjective they could think of was ‘mmmmmmmmmmmmilky…’
scientist: (gazing up at space) scientist: ……….. it sure is a milky boy
NO
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND
ASTRONOMERS ARE THE SHITTIEST EVER AT NAMING THINGS I KID YOU NOT.
When it came time to name the two theoretical particle types that might be dark matter THEY INTENTIONALLY CHOSE THE NAMES SO THAT THE ACRONYMS WOULD SPELL “WIMPS” AND “MACHOS” I SHIT YOU NOT
THEY ARE FUCKING TERRIBLE AT NAMING ANYTHING
I just listened to a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson himself LAST NIGHT and he went on about this more than once.
“I’m walking down the street and I’m like ‘ooh pretty rock…’ and some Geologist is like ‘actually, that’s anorthosite feldspar’ and I’m like ‘Nevermind, I don’t want it anymore.’ Any biologists in the audience? [some clapping] Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The most important molecule in the human body, what did you name it? It has NINE SYLLABLES and it’s so long that even YOU GUYS abbreviate it as ‘DNA’!
But astrophysicists and astronomers? No, man, we call it like we see it. Star made of neutrons? NEUTRON STAR. Small white star? WHITE DWARF. You know that big red spot on Jupiter? Know what we called it? JUPITER’S RED SPOT.”
okay i’m glad you mentioned the biologist nonsense bc their naming methods are the bane of my existence
I see your astrophysicists-are-shit-at-names and raise you Marine-Biologists-Are-Fucking-Maniacs.
See this beautiful creature?
It’s a carnivorous deep-sea sponge that lives off of Easter Island and never sees the light of day, as it’s about 9000 feet down. Those delicate-looking orbs are covered in millions of tiny hooked spines, which latch onto anything unfortunate enough to bump into it, and hold it in place as it is digested alive by the sponge’s skin. Amazing, beautiful and profoundly creepy. They could have given it so many cool names. Could have drawn on mythology (I think Scylla would have been an appropriate reference), the region it was found in, the textured skin, PHAGOCYTOSIS, anything!
You wanna know what they called it?
PING-PONG TREE SPONGE.
Good job, marine biologists.
there’s a spot on Mars named after my hometown, Winnipeg and the rasional was literally just, “Winnipeg is cold and Mars is cold too”
Many lgbt teenagers and young adults growing up on the internet today have socially conservative beliefs that they voice at all times that they got from their conservative parents which they’ve never challenged because they think the life experience of being gay or trans makes them politically progressive
This is why I hate it when people say something homophobic and then go “so you’re really accusing me, a whole ass lesbian, of being homophobic 🙄” like yeah
There's a model of culture that I like to cite for this idea, called the Iceberg Model:
The LGBT youth (and young atheists, too) will cut off the stuff "above the water" but not really examine the stuff down below that line that they have as part of their upbringing.
So you get young LGBT people making comments like OP cited, or young atheists acting with an Evangelical persecution complex, and going, "Don't call me Culturally Christian!"
This is the sort of thing I keep talking about when I’m saying identity is not the same as ideology.
Who you identify as (who you are) says absolutely nothing about what you believe (your ideology).
I love how wacky the concept of Last Christmas really is. Like the implication that Santa Claus ships Twelve and Clara and he's had enough of their angst and lying.
Probs seen the end of Death in Heaven and went 'You two are so stupid, can't believe I have to fix everything myself'.
I’m surprised no one is talking about how in TGS, they said that many Square Enix titles have anniversaries coming up soon, so to be on the lookout for announcements because things are going to heat up soon. *cough* KH twentieth anniversary stuff. *cough*
Maybe because it’s obvious?
Or because it’s an announcement about future announcements.
But the way KH YouTubers usually cover any speck of news we get, even if it’s barely anything (and I swear I’m really not meaning this in a mean way, even if I’m perhaps wording this poorly. I definitely enjoy this, in fact), I’m just kind of taken aback.
I’ll be honest, I though they might’ve been mostly talking about Final Fantasy, since they also released the 35th Anniversary logo two days ago and we already knew that KH was supposed to be coming back next year. It could be KH-related, too, though. KH’s 20th and FF’s 35th just happen to be the same year. I think 2022 is also Bravely Default’s 10th Anniversary and TWEWY’s 15th Anniversary
They probably will have some KH stuff ready, I just don’t think it’s going to be as big of a focus as you might hope when it’s also sharing a milestone anniversary with three other Square Enix properties, one of which just happens to be their flagship series
It’s also Final Fantasy VII’s 25th Anniversary. The Flagship of the Flagship series. Next year is going to be HUGE for Square Enix.
(insp.)
malcolm x clara kiss
"Family-friendly" has been a dogwhistle for all kinds of evil horseshit since at LEASE my childhood, 40+ years ago.
Don't fall for it. And don't let pro-LGBT+ people use that language without challenging it, it's a direct fucking quote from our oppressors.
Image 1
[ID: A tweet from @DJ_theoretical. It reads:
Every time I see the phrase "family-friendly" in the Discourse, I remember how I was evicted for being trans and the landlord's exact words were "I want a family-friendly household, and you [trans people] aren't that"
/End ID]
Image 2
[ID: A tweet from @hayxsmith. It reads:
The purpose of Pride is to find safety in numbers and put pressure on social/political barriers with visibility and protest. The reason it isn't "family-friendly" is because you believed we did not belong in your families.
"Family-friendly" has become an anti-gay dog whistle.
/End ID]
Make it count. Meet me at the clock.
Titanic 1997, dir. James Cameron
Bouncy bois
(via)
I love that RPG race trail rations post, and it got me thinking about non-Eurocentric fantasy trail rations. I focused on Central and South Asian cuisines (as I also needed the information for a project I’m working on). I looked for foods that were easy to carry (dry or dehydrated), easily obtainable in markets/easily foraged, easy to cook/not needing cooking at all, and high in protein/generally filling. Many foods had language-specific names and some overlapped into different regions, so I bare-bones’d the names. This is what I came up with:
Dried curd comes in many forms – kashk, aaruul, quroot, etc. – and was of particular interest to me, since I learned it was used since (and before) medieval times as a trail ration for soldiers and travelers because it is lightweight and high in protein. The more you know. 🌈
Tempeh is one of my favorite food options, but I should note that it originates from Southeastern Asia, Indonesia in particular.
Bamboo is extremely handy for use as both a carrying and cooking vessel, and would save a character the hassle of bringing a skillet with them (provided the character is in an area with large bamboo and a water source). It’s a method still used today because it’s extremely efficient. Storing eggs in rice is a good way to travel with them and keep them from cracking for a short time.
These are just some basics and I’m only scratching the surface, so if anyone has foods to add from these regions (East and Southeast Asia, too!), or any non-European region honestly, don’t hesitate to add them!
The “Is four a lot?” meme saga
In 2016, screenshot from Yik Yak (RIP) asking “Is 4 a lot?” was posted on tumblr.
It spread on social media and became a popular phrase for “incorrect quotes” style memes.
In 2019, @incorrectwhoquotes on Instagram used it as an incorrect quote for Clara Oswald and the Twelfth Doctor from Doctor Who, aided with screenshots from the episode Listen.
It has since become a meme of its own merit, even to the point where people think it is actual dialog from Doctor Who.
One driver already quit and NASCAR responded with basically “we had to google you because nobody knew who the fuck you were”
Nascar started because they said fuck cops and its nice to see they havent lost their roots completely.
I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.
So that people don’t need to go through the notes:
- We have fossils of spider webs
- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of
- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa
- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)
If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.
We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.
We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
We know they had remarkable vision.
We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.
We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.
The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”
(Art credit Julio Lacerda)
Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.
(Art credit Vitor Silva)
This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.
We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.
We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.
We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)
We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.
As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.
If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)
Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”
Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health
@lusus–naturae
TwelveClara - Doctor Who Icons
Please like or reblog if you save
@DocMystery on twitter
TIL that the Audubon Society has released official statements on the difference between a "bird", a "birb", and a "borb", featuring such gems as:
I miss my whouffaldi so much. :((
Aww, I hear you, my friend. But hey, the Whouffaldi fandom is strong, and as long as there are passionate fans talking Whouffaldi and creating awesome fanworks, Whouffaldi lives!
