DEAR READER
Cosmic Funnies
Claire Keane
Mike Driver
we're not kids anymore.
⁂
Game of Thrones Daily
taylor price
YOU ARE THE REASON
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Discoholic 🪩
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Not today Justin
pixel skylines
AnasAbdin
No title available
shark vs the universe
JVL
No title available
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Philippines
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from Tunisia
seen from Indonesia
seen from Argentina
@kungfunurse
Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)
. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
I genuinely believe that the new SW trilogy wouldn’t have flopped out into irrelevance like it did if they hadn’t dumped Finn on the side of the freeway like a new pet rabbit the week after easter
Anyway in my heart Finn became a Jedi alongside Rey and inspired a Stormtrooper insurrection and Kyle Ron went back to his mom like he should have day fucking one and that angry redhead dude blew up with the star destroyer and Poe got to make it happen and at the end Rey doesn’t give a shit who her bitch ass non-palpatine parents might have been because she gets her new family like she needed and palpatine stays dead at the bottom of his musty hole like he should have and Finn and Poe give each other approximately 130% the amount of lingering meaningful looks and then one of their run-together-to-reunite moments results in a heat-of-the-moment make out like it should have and Luke and Leia meet in person a minimum of once so she can sibling slap him at least once for being a useless dramatic old hermit for a billion years and tell him to get the Chanel boots back on and stop being a sad hobo and then for no reason at all there is an ewok style moon of Endor forest party at the end like God intended
I cried watching Project Hail Mary btw
I’ve been listening to the Kosuke Kindaichi detective stories (Japanese mysteries originally published in the 50s through the 70s, set in post-war Japan with nods to golden age detective fiction from the West) as they’ve been translated into English.
The latest one published on Tuesday, but as I was waiting for my pre-order, I borrowed from the library an Agatha Christie novel that I’d read in high school and remembered nothing of but the solution. It was fun to re-experience it while watching for the clues.
The newly translated Kindaichi novel has the same twist. So far I haven’t caught author Seishi Yokomizo actually borrowing a twist from a golden age detective novel (although even in this one, the execution is different enough to be a reinterpretation/homage rather than a copycat) and the first time this he’s used a recognizable ploy,
I’ve just happened to have read the famous English one that did it back-to-back with it by sheer random happenstance
I don’t care if Monday’s yuck
Tuesday, Wednesday tread through muck
Thursday maybe eat a duck
It’s Friday, Flat as Fuck
Guillotine vs a spray paint can.
this caption is so deceptive, this video is so much more than that
Go ahead, make your OC the sibling/child/friend/whatever of an important canon character. Ship your OC with a canon character. Its fandom, its posts on social media/fanfic/fan art. Go for it, have fun, make up your own headcanons.
We're all just here to have fun.
Have you guys seen that clip
Go off Kermit
we're just normal men
Why the heck is this dude trying to confirm if the frog puppet is hetrosexual???
assessing the situation before he shoots his shot
Happy Pride to Kermit the Frog, questioning king
A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.
damn that shit is light lmfao
Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!
Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.
Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful
I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons
In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”
Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.
Lens Rotation by Thomas Tag | United States Lighthouse Society
Ah to be a sailor in 1890 who has to turn to his fellow men and ask "is it just me or are the lighthouses flashing faster?"
They had been slowly getting faster for decades.
It mattered for optics reasons.
Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.
The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.
This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.
What’s a little Madness, in the face of Progress?
mods are asleep, post the fresnel lens
The mercury baths are slowly being replaced by a new system, this video about it is super interesting and explains it way better than I can!
French-Iranian author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi, best known for the book and film “Persopolis”, has died of "sadness", members of her
This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.
May her memory be a blessing
in 2026 i am wishing for all of us the energy of bilbo baggins, who was headhunted for an extremely well paid role he had no qualifications or experience for, blagged the interview, and within his first week found a magic ring that does the job for him
Commissions for @elodieunderglass feauturing OCs Derek (a big nerdy guy) and Killie (a grumpy little racehorse jockey).
Look at them guys!!!
The artist @lonicera-edulis is open for commissions and is so lovely to work with 🥹
hey @elodieunderglass your horsebackriding wouldn't let go of my brain so I made a (tiny) poster
A graphic with two stick figures riding horses on either side of a "no shrimp" sign. Text below reads "SHOULDERS OVER HIPS, you horrid shrimp." /End ID]
❌🦐
Thank you so much oh my goodness. This is your reminder to unshrimp (if able)
oh hey this reminded me of a thing I wanted to tell you
recently I started a new job that involves a lot of bending/twisting, and picking up heavy stuff, and the best way I could get myself to actually do the "lift with your knees not with your back" thing, because those instructions are kind of not detailed enough, was to instead put the instruction of "point your BUTT at the GROUND" which works better cos it makes more sense to conceptualize. trying to reach into a box under waist height? don't bend at the waist to do that, that'll hurt your back. because you stuck your butt out instead of down. instead you gotta point your butt at the ground and bend your knees instead.
and a couple hours into the shift I was like. this sounds like a Killie thing I should tell Elodie. and then a couple more hours and I was tired and forgot.
Ohh! Thank you for telling me! This is exactly the sort of thing that Killie would be barking at his poor beanbag of a boyfriend:
Another way to think of it might be:
you are wearing a corset/safety vest/plate armour/super tight waistcoat that you’re not sure of/full binder or Spanx that you’re not 💯 sure of. Get to the ground without bending your waist and compromising this garment.
If this doesn’t mean anything particularly to you, because you haven’t worn one, then do feel free to purchase and wear a garment that forces a certain premeditation upon yourself.
Myself (and Charlie) wear an invisible corset, and use the resulting knee-movement to remind ourselves of how sexily supple and versatile we are in the knees and hips 😌
Killie would presume his back is straight and that his sit bones move down on command (as you do)
Someone like Derek, who is unsure of what “core muscles” are in the first place, might benefit from more severe instructions, like being told to balance an imaginary book on their head!
Good on you for making a big effort to lift properly! I am personally proud of your effort and also very proud of you
Just finished Life is Strange 2 and it’s clear that I have An Type. Dean and Sam Supernatural. Tim and Valentine Wilde. Bolin and Mako (Legend of Korra). And now Sean and Daniel Diaz. Two brothers against the world, fighting all comers to stay together and keep each other safe. Codependent little trash gremlins that will burn the world down and count it a win if they do it shoulder to shoulder. I’m eating that up with a spoon.
Any other great brotherhood stories out there that I should check out, pls let me know!
Uncharismatic Fact of the Day
What's so great about the great bustard? A lot of things- but the greatest of all is probably that they can lay claim to fame as one of the heaviest flying birds! The heaviest of them can weigh upwards of 18 kg (40 lbs)- and to help them lift all that weight, they boast a 2.7 m (8 ft 10 in) wingspan!
(Image: A male great bustard (Otis tarda) by L. Jargal)
The Great Bustard is featured on the flag of the English county of Wiltshire! I personally think it’s peak and very charismatic
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)
It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.
It also bears mentioning that the current culture of RPGs encourages a separation of player knowledge and character knowledge. I, as a player, know that the big cat with tentacles out the back is a displacer beast, but my character doesn't, and the character that replaced the one the displacer beast killed. That separation, particularly with Survival Modules, was not the case back in the day. Characters had full knowledge shared between them, so if Dave the fighter got disintegrated by a beholder, Dave's identical twin brother now knew beholders have disintegration attacks. This is part of the reason why it was considered bad form for players to read monster books.
It's broadly untrue that the idea of separating player knowledge from character knowledge is a modern development. The practice descends to tabletop RPGs from the historical wargames they splintered off from; tabletop wargames which focus on accurately re-creating historical battles often operate on a gentleperson's agreement to refrain from acting on strategic information that your side's commanders couldn't reasonably have been aware of, or employing tactical doctrines which had not yet been developed when the re-created battle took place, and many early tabletop RPGs adopted similar conventions, to greater or lesser degrees. Heck, games like Paranoia were parodying those conventions as early as the mid 1980s! It's come in and out of fashion in mainstream RPGs over the past half-century, but it's not a recent thing.
It is, however, correct that there typically was no expectation of observing these conventions when playing survival modules in particular.
may the dread wolf never hear your steps
