Carl Sagan
For science and for life.
Turns out, this poster deserves to be destroyed by the truth. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/12/fact-check-quote-truth-misattributed-carl-sagan/7925859002/

Origami Around
Acquired Stardust
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

★
Keni
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Xuebing Du

titsay

blake kathryn
we're not kids anymore.
h

Kiana Khansmith
$LAYYYTER

roma★
NASA
wallacepolsom
styofa doing anything
almost home
cherry valley forever

Janaina Medeiros

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@inthebrothel
Carl Sagan
For science and for life.
Turns out, this poster deserves to be destroyed by the truth. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/12/fact-check-quote-truth-misattributed-carl-sagan/7925859002/
Thanks @seesotv for the free Apple TV! Everyone can now watch #bajillion & #takemywife on the new app.
This is still up! Just like most of the listeners to Elsbeth Connors' romantasy audiobooks! But, more importantly: I WILL BE TAKING THE MONEY, SCAWT! And thank you to Terry Alamander for their work representing the people hurt by this post and Scott's other actions in flagrant disregard for public and consumer safety.
received this incomprehensible email from my ornithology professor
the fucking eagles got him
http://bit.ly/305Y3X8
verschlimmern = to make worse
verbessern = to improve
verschlimmbessern = to disimprove
ok wait… what about “kaputtreparieren” ?
kaputt = broken
reparieren = to repair
kaputtreparieren = to completely destroy something that was only slightly damaged in a failed attempt to fix it
Adding them both to the “to memorize” pile.
Ok this wikipedia article is pissing me off so much
yeah i’m gonna re-write this fucker
goddamn. there is so much bias in the first paragraph alone:
this is an EXCELLENT example of the way word choice and tone can be used to create bias and transform the truth to suit the writer’s purposes.
Here’s my re-write:
i got rid of the passive tone (which distances Profumo from his actions), and changed the photo. notice how the original writer chose a photo taken before the scandal, portraying Profumo in a respected position of power, a powerful man seated at a desk. I chose a photo taken in the aftermath. Which would you say more accurately reflects the context?
some other changes:
“denied impropriety” like he’s some maiden aunt clutching at pearls. No, what he actually did was:
oh, and he wasn’t
he was, in fact
after lying through his teeth. now here’s my favorite bit:
what does that MEAN? what the hell does that MEAN??? oh boo hoo hooey the Prime Minister’s self-confidence was damaged, how dreadful for the poor dear. the poor sweet man…
fuck that. in fact, Profumo’s actions
of the government, and rightly so.
oh, and the young woman in question was a model, not a “would-be” model. But ultimately her profession has no relevance here–what is relevant is that a middle-aged man in a position of power slept with a 19-year-old. I wonder what motive the original author could have had, to choose to emphasize her career over the fact she was still a teenager…
Words can be used to bend anything. Pay attention to tone. Pay attention to authorial intent. Pay attention to what is included and what isn’t. Question everything. But especially question the language used to describe historical and current events. Every writer has an agenda–look for it. Above all:
Read critically.
ko-fi / paypal
#this is not a commissioned post (it’s a ‘fuck you you bastard’ post) but i wish it was #Someone gimme 4 bucks I spent a spite-fueled 80 minutes writing to this
#spite is a renewable resource #I am absolutely flooded with spite #my spite runneth over
You inspired me to try my hand at a cross stitch pattern. Free to use for anyone who wants it.
I’d like to reiterate that “this is an EXCELLENT example of the way word choice and tone can be used to create bias and transform the truth to suit the writer’s purposes”, and I think I’m going to see if I can use these specific examples with my students. Thanks, OP.
Thrilled with my new machete
At first, I thought the light switches were museum plaques, and I was very enthusiastic about the idea of hanging a modern, industrial sword on one’s wall and then providing context for any visitors or guests. Sends a clear message. As does having a machete right next to ready illumination.
i believe every word of what this man says
i learned so much from this
I would like for “That’s tap!” to become new, omnipresent dismissive slang for anything beneath one’s standards.
The best Wikipedia lists
List of inventors killed by their own inventions
List of scandals with the -gate suffix
List of noodles
List of hoaxes
List of pirates
Response to sneezing - that is, what you say after someone sneezes
List of places in the U.S. named after places elsewhere
List of songs about bicycles
List of American advertising characters (e.g. the geico gecko. There is also an article for breakfast cereal mascots specifically.)
List of unusual deaths
List of superlative trees - its TREE APPRECIATION TIME
Recursive islands and lakes
List of Crayola crayon colors
List of individual birds. There is SO much going on here.
List of deep-fried foods (aaaaaaa)
List of words that are their own antonyms
List of genres (of...everything)
List of onomatopoeias - READ THIS PLEASE
List of Noah’s Ark replicas
List of people who have been pied
List of voids - This is meant in the astronomy sense but I think the name is funny.
List of animal sounds
List of cryptids
List of prison escapes
List of discredited substances - there’s a LOT going on here
List of methods of capital punishment
List of wartime cross-dressers
List of extinct dog breeds. this topic contains some of my favorite obscure facts
List of songs considered to be the worst - there is also an article about the worst books and one about the worst movies, if you’re interested
List of facial hair styles
List of clowns
List of sexually active popes - I just think it’s funny that this is an article
List of reportedly haunted locations
List of animals with fraudulent diplomas
List of people who died on the toilet
List of English language metaphors
List of bad luck signs
All of these are good, but please consider also:
List of fictional badgers
Story Time:
Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:
This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.
And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?
She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.
I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.
Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.
At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.
I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.
“What… did you do?”
“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”
She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.
My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”
And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.
TDLR; Library Card Charged $4,000 of Garlic Bread.
that’s just how valuable library cards are. each one is worth at least $4000 of garlic bread
A picture is worth a thousand words, a library card is worth $4000 worth of garlic bread, if we can figure out how many words the average library card can check out at once, we can probably work out a picture-to-garlic bread conversion here, too.
Once upon a time I worked in this little burger/coffee/ice cream shop and a lady came in one winter and asked if we had a caramel apple drink and we were like ‘well we have cider’ and she was like ‘no I don’t remember what it’s called but this place made a drink that was chai tea, apple cider, and caramel’ and Breezy offered to try and make something for her but she changed her mind and left so Breezy and I were like ‘alright let’s try this’ because we had chai tea, instant cider mix, a shit ton of caramel, instant hot water from the espresso and too much free time.
And let me tell you it was delightful. It tastes like watching the leaves changing color and dancing in the wind. It tastes like picking out pumpkins and gourds and fresh apples at the farm up north. It tastes like witches and freedom.
I make it every year now and this year I walked in the house on the morning of October first with all the ingredients and shouted ‘FALL DRINK’ and my roommates were like ‘????’ so I made them Fall Drink and now every time they get home from work they’re like ‘Fall Drink pls?????’
Anyway I remember literally nothing else about that woman but I’m very grateful to her.
for anyone wondering about proportions/etc here’s op’s answer from the repiles:
@gaslightgallows I feel this would be relevant to your interests.
I don’t like caramel but I can vouch for hot chaider being amazing.
Deareat @simonalkenmayer I feel like this is relevant to your interests.
Also, I do something like this in the crock pot with the overly sweet Growers Pumpkin Apple Cider, chai spices, cloves, a bit of orange juice, and some super dry Pinot Grigio.
Mix, heat, and serve on a nippy night best spent cuddled under blankets with a book.
My friend, you have essentially backward engineered a wonderful winter drink from the Stuart period.
White sack wine, cider, spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger) tea, sugar, and if you want it authentic, a bit of cream or whipped egg. All this is brought together in a low temperature and then stewed for a time. It can also be “pulled”, a process in which one “stirs” the concoction by using a ladle and pouring it repeatedly from high in the air. Makes it foamy and frothy.
Serve warm.
On a cold night, this is a delightful thing. Believe it or not, we also used to make it with a stout beer instead of wine. For a darker richer flavor.
One Black Tea Bag, One Cup Apple Juice, 2tsp butter, 2tsp brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger to taste will also accomplish something similar (just melt the butter and brown sugar together and whisk them around a pan a bit - don’t bother making proper caramel) Make your faux-caramel then you add the apple juice and then the rest; heat it up to a boil then turn off the heat, drop the tea bag in and let it steep for 3 minutes, serve with gingersnaps.
Nothing better than tumblr recipe posts
I made butter tea after watching The Dish and finding an StumbleUpon recipe for it soon thereafter, and made my family try it. I think I owe it to myself to make this fabulous combination of old world tradition and new internet exploration for our harvest family gathering in the same spirit. Watch out, relatives. FALL DRINK’s a’comin’.
she replied with sources
But where are the sources tho? Cause that’s something I’d read the fuck out of a scholarly article about.
it's literally linked in the caption
You know what’s interesting, designer Jessica Ray - the actress who played the white ranger in Power Rangers Wild Force - actually started an entire line of swimwear based around brain studies like this. She gave a presentation in 2013 on the history of bikinis, invented in 1946 in France by Louis Réard, a car mechanic who looked after his mother's lingerie boutique in Paris. He named them after Bikini Atoll, the place of atomic bomb testing that year because he thought the public’s reaction to the bikini would be like an atomic explosion (it was so scandalous at the time no french model would wear it and he had to hire a stripper to debut it). From her presentation:
Princeton University had conducted a study of how male brains react to seeing people in different amounts of clothing, and brains scans had revealed when men were shown pictures of scantily-clad women, the region of the brain associated with tools, such as screwdrivers and hammers, lit up. Some men showed zero brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that lights up when one ponders another’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions [...] researchers found this shocking because they almost never see this part of the brain shut down in this way, and a Princeton professor said “It’s as if they were reacting to these women as if they are not fully human; it’s consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs as if they were responding to objects, not people”.
(her full presentation here, it’s a very interesting watch, she refuses to wear bikinis anymore)
She designs swimsuits now with Audrey Hepburn as her inspiration
Also
i like how in the tiktok, she still is too worried/scared to call out men, so she says “really sexist men”, when this effect is found in all men in the studies, regardless of their conscious views of women.
videos that would be funny for humans from any time period ever
Oh my goodness.
There are political newspaper comics that aren't this succinct
引っぱらないで💢💢
I laughed at the pettiness of marmalade cat, but I goddamn cackled at the additional image. Thank you, internets.