Technicolor Dreams

Mostly things that make me happy, sometimes things that need talking about.

[playwrongs]

Stephen King’s Fujo

[kungfunurse]

yeah @sunderwight these tags are gold

[2productive]

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

[copperbadge]

I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.

[eternalgirlscout]

you can't say "hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby" on a poll with a 60/40 split. that's hydrogen bomb vs regular bomb

[prokopetz]

Pipe bomb versus somewhat smaller pipe bomb.

[thecolorofthegame]

Hydrogen baby va coughing bomb

[rudywiser]

Two bombs, both alike in dignity, in fair tumblr, where we lay our scene

[househunting]

$495,000/2 br/1.5 ba/1,594 sq ft

Waitsfield, VT

Built in 1990

"A rare opportunity to be part of a unique collective of homes that address the challenges of housing in the 21st Century. Designed and built by Yestermorrow founder John Connell, and recipient of a 2026 Preservation Award, this home is creative and whimsical, but also highly efficient and exciting. Sit on the cantilevered deck overlooking the Mad River and you'll feel like you're floating in mid-air."

[I post the most interesting houses on substack and it is free and I post them first before they show up here]

[not-your-average-url]

I miss when ads were a single click and then they’re gone. Now every ad has a minimum of three phases where you watch a video, exit the still frame of fake gameplay, and then exit the app download. That doesn’t even touch on the ones that forcibly take you to another app after opening a tab in safari without you ever touching the screen.

I hate advertising. I hate that you can’t do anything without companies jumping down your throat with mostly bullshit ads. I hate that billboards exist. I hate that every company unanimously decided to make their ads longer and longer. I hate that ad blockers try to charge you money and there are in app purchases to remove ads. I hate that my attention has become commodified. I hate that there’s nothing I can do about it.

[bookpdf]

oh this phrase is not going to leave my mind for a solid week at least. obsessed with this collection of words

[bookpdf]

le doohickie in question btw:

[redstonedust]

i wanna see more stories with a time skip epilogue where at least one character has clearly transed their gender and it isnt really remarked upon. bonus if none of them were remotely hinted to be trans until that moment because i think it'd be funny to watch a fandom react to that. your blorbo's happily ever after involves being a woman. dont worry about it.

[ageofthegeekdotcon]

[nudityandnerdery]

Just a casual reminder that posting on the internet about how you would want to do physical harm to members of the US government is something that they can (and will) detain you over, so just be careful what you say in public spaces like, uh, on Tumblr.

[nudityandnerdery]

I have got bad news for you about how connecting to the internet works and how corporations will respond to requests from the government.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

this is your semi-regular reminder that tumblr has cooperated with the fbi to hand over user information in a very public way at least once. and that's not the only way the feds can collect information on you either

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[sweetwithheatwriting]

@hellenhighwater @copperbadge

[copperbadge]

These popcorns are very spicy.

[redstonedust]

sometimes you have to sit down and decide "do i think this was a bad narrative choice or is this just the part of my brain that wants to see all my favorite characters end the story perfectly happy and thriving." and its surprisingly hard to tell sometimes because that part of my brain is loud as fucccckkkk.

[dame-de-pique]

Cecilia Glaisher - Mountain Bladder-fern / Wilson's Fern, 1850-1858

[spiribia]

I like when the bus stops directly in front of you out of the line of waiting people and opens its doors. Chosen by the dragon

[icarusdiesatdawn]

I hate this post. Ever since I read it I can't help but think "chosen by the dragon" whenever the bus stops in front of me or "denied by the dragon" when it doesn't. Every. single. time. That's a minimum of ten times a week. Do you know how annoying that is

[soreheadinamblemood]

[copperbadge]

An additional perplexity to this moment of local politics high strangeness is that we get notifications of upcoming Community Meetings but they're done in such a bizarrely roundabout fashion that I am considering actually bringing it up to my Alderman at some point.

The meetings are technically not "public" (don't get me started). If you're in the local community and on your Alderman's radar, you get an email about the video meeting which includes an explanation of the meeting, a link to the meeting, and a blurb about who to contact for questions.

The problem is the email isn't...text. There are visibly embedded links, there's formatting, but it's a .jpg image embedded in the body of the email. It's just like...a screengrab. Nothing is clickable. So in order to attend the meeting you have to download the image and enlarge it (the text is very tiny) and then hand-type the URL for the video call into a browser. Which, it's not like that's an hours-long process, but it does seem to be a pretty unnecessary barrier to access.

I suspect it's that the original message is coming from the BACP (Business Affairs and Consumer Protections) office, with an official City of Chicago seal and such, and someone in the Alderman's office is just screenshotting it. But surely you could just copy-paste the text and attach the screenshot of the actual document.

Local politics are wild. My friend A jokingly suggested that I should run for Alderman myself, which led to an extended riff session on what specific bribes I would be most interested in, because it's not IF a Chicago politician is corrupt, it's just HOW.

(I actually really like my Alderman, it's just, the joke is too good not to make.)

[arsnof]

Beware of the Leopard

[copperbadge]

I have been thinking about that scene in Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy a lot, lately.

For those unfamiliar:

‘But the plans were on display . . .’

‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’

‘That’s the display department.’

‘With a torch.’

‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’

‘So had the stairs.’

‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.’

[morhath]

I hate when king arthur has all these fussy little steps in the instructions and you're like "no way do these fussy little steps matter" but you try it and they do. they matter so much.

[bookaddict7342]

I thought you meant Camelot quests and I was like "that's fair, 'never pick a four leaf clover on the last Wednesday of the month' IS a fussy little step that shouldn't matter" but then I was like "wait isn't that also a flour company"

[morhath]

nooo I am not a beleaguered knight of the round table I am making elaborate focaccia 😭

[copperbadge]

"I hate when King Arthur has all these fussy little steps" -- Camelot cleaning staff, probably