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did a bit of driving through the state of georgia today and wound up driving through a small town that i later discovered was called newborn, which is an odd name but doesn’t technically have anything wrong with it, except for the fact that i nearly gave myself whiplash doing a double-take at a building sign advertising NEWBORN TAXIDERMY
Pride (2014)
sends me into the stratosphere every time
crazy how every time a female character gets cliche misogynistic writing we have to explain to people again that fictional characters are not real and do not choose things for themselves.
it’s really this at the end of the day tbh
Just need a look under the hood.
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I see this sign so often
Turkey’s justice ministry is drafting legislation that would imprison people for publicly praising LGBT identity, criminalize same-sex engag
EXTRA INFO:
The Bill hasn't passed yet; however it is very likely. Turkey just shut down the social media accounts of LGBT+ organizations, and quietly banned/"made not possible to see" multiple dating apps for LGBT people such as Taimi. These are small steps leading up to this. Just less than a year ago the distribution of Estrogen was made ten times harder and hormone replacement therapy laws upped the transitioning age from 18 to 21. Please speak for us.
waaaay back when I was a cashier in retail we would talk about dumb shit while unloading the truck, and we got to the "what would you do in a zombie apocalypse" me and another worker were like yeah we would just die. End it all, we can't fight or run or shit. I refuse to put that much effort into survival.
And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!
Anyway, random shout out to that guy. You were too kind for retail management, Devin.
also afterwards everyone who was talking about their cool bunker fantasies were like "Damn, Devin's right, we should also be considering helping people around us." which is the only recorded instance of a retail shift making people better human beings.
That’s exactly why I don’t like most zombie apocalypse stories (or most other post apocalypse stories). They always fall into the trap of Everyone Being Awful.
The idea that societal collapse exposes mankind’s true nature ignores one thing: society IS mankind. We make it, just by being around each other. Social mores and customs aren’t arbitrary rules inflicted on us by some unseen force, they’re our own behaviors and views. We say please and thank you because we want to be kind. We establish charities because we want to help others. We set up garbage cans because we want to be clean. We’re the ones setting the standards and frowning at the people who don’t rise to meet them. We’re the ones who are appalled by the cruelties in our history.
Yes, we’re capable of truly awful things, but we’re also capable of remarkable kindness. We’re capable of more goodness than we give ourselves credit for.
THANK YOU
The problem with nearly every post-apocalypse story is that they take the worst behavior of people during a riot or a natural disaster, extrapolate it to all of humanity, and assume that situation never changes. But even the worst disasters end. Hurricane Katrina looters aren't still looting. And there were far more people helping than looting.
I'm so tired of this assumption that the worst of humanity is "realistic" while the best is cartoonish or childish. Every single time there's a disaster, or a crisis, you see people helping and people risking their lives for others. Hell, we've even had societal collapses before and we've rebuilt civilization every time. The real childishness is assuming all people are, at heart, selfish and uncaring. Because that's how bitter teenagers who have never experienced the world view it.
Note how these columns are designed to perfectly allow the climbing of small lizards up and down their faces. This is a typical example of Gecko-Roman architecture
people are so fucking weird about uncontacted tribes/peoples oh my goddddd you are not making it out of the colonialist mindset
fun fact uncontacted peoples are not ignorant they are fully aware of the "outside world" and are CHOOSING not to have contact because they (rightly) feel it would add no value to their lives and place them in an exploited position. it's voluntary. they are isolated on purpose.
sentinelese people aren't like some ignorant noble savages, or actual savages who are all about warfare and killing (wildly racist take i see very often), they are literally regular ass fucking people who have seen the exploitation of their neighbors (other andamanese people) AND the massive disease outbreaks caused by contact, and decided they want no part in that. they are literally regular people choosing to survive. that's it.
Good resource to start learning about uncontacted peoples:
There are at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups living in forests across the globe. Right now, more than 95 percent of uncontacted peop
For those in the notes arguing about whether "uncontacted" is the correct term; whether or not it seems the most accurate, it's the term that is being used. "Uncontacted" just means they reject contact with non-Indigenous society, not that they are isolated from all other people or don't know it exists or have never spoken to a white person before. From the link above:
Uncontacted Indigenous peoples reject contact with outsiders, as an active and ongoing choice. Survival International has calculated that there are 196 uncontacted groups worldwide; some of these are entire peoples who are uncontacted – such as the Sentinelese in India. Some uncontacted groups – such as the Ayoreo Totobiegosode in the Paraguayan Chaco or the Amahuaca in Peru – are sub-groups of bigger tribes with whom they share a language and often a territory. All are aware of the outside world, and reject it. They are self-sufficient and resilient. They live independently in forests, sometimes on islands. They resist intrusion, and thrive when their rights are respected. Uncontacted peoples may encounter outsiders sporadically, or not at all. They are aware of neighboring Indigenous peoples, who may be closely or distantly related. The uncontacted Hongana Manyawa in Indonesia have family members who have left the forest, mostly under duress. The uncontacted Pirititi occasionally encounter their contacted Kinja neighbors in the Brazilian Amazon. The Massaco, also in Brazil, were for decades known only by traces in the forest, including booby traps sharpened with rodents' teeth and placed on their hunting trails to warn off outsiders. Uncontacted peoples’ rejection of contact is often rooted in memories of devastating past contact and invasion, which brought violence, epidemics and death. Their denial of contact is a clear expression of their autonomy and self-determination.
At that link you can also check out "Voices from the Edge" which is a collection of interviews mostly with Indigenous people who have been forcibly contacted and whose relatives are still uncontacted.
Super disappointing to finally see artwork accurately representing my body and realize it’s being reposted on subreddits like “awful taste but great execution” and “diwhy” :( Like this is so cool
(Note- none of the people reposting it to make fun are posting a source and I haven’t been able to find one after an hour of searching, so I can’t say for certain what the artist’s intentions are/if it’s intended to be about intersex genitals or embryonic genital development or both)
The artist is Sonia Rose aka Rose Grown. It is captioned "Biology is not binary".
152K Followers, 676 Following, 550 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Sonia Rose (@rosegrown)
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i snorted so fucking hard omg
omg fuck me i snorted coffee
shirley jackson casually asking the pharmacist how much arsenic would be necessary to kill a family
from on fans and fanmail, a lecture by shirley jackson
so i feel the urge to add a bit of context here because i find the vague on-screen text deeply underwhelming.
this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.
AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.
this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:
it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.
but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:
this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.
here's an original:
and here's Mitchell's version:
i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!
which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.
so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention NASA? mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.
and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.
so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.
the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.
here, feel it for yourself:
----
[P.S.: before you lament that this is an "AI" problem, while yes "AI" has radically increased the volume of low-value (often negative-value) inspiration bait like this, know that this has been a problem in online science education for a LOT longer than chatgpt's been around. this example isn't extraordinary, just close to my heart. nothing new under the sun and all that]
lmao someone else got their knocks in on this post before i could finish writing mine. clearly we are hand in hand re: Talk About How Cool Voyager 1 Is You Fucks
💬 0 🔁 109 ❤️ 245 · Okay, I need to add some clarification and correction to this. This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was take
>#I love how this gag would be funny at any point since the third century BCE
huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while
something earth shattering going on here
this is why one of my favorite all-time paintings is Ship in Stormy Seas by Ivan Aivazovsky... he was really onto something there
a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time
THERE IS A BOAT BY IVAN AIVAZOVSKY!!
Ivan Aivazovsky could paint glowing water. One of the GOATs for sure.
I don't want to buy mass-produced garbage from a big box store so I go to etsy but half of etsy is now dropshipped mass-produced garbage or AI slop so I go to the local arts and crafts street market but a ton of those booths are also selling the same generic plastic objects or identical stickers or 3D printed dragons so WHERE do I buy real trinkets and art from sincere freaks
ursula k le guin affirmations for your day:
it is our differences which make us dearer to one another
it is never too late to start loving
the enemy is not the foreigner, but the ones who tell you to hate the foreigner
everyone should have food, shelter, and work
everything is a yin and yang metaphor if you try hard enough
sci-fi is important
