Maybe A Sunflower. Or not.

The profile picture is from a photograph taken by me many years ago. The contents of the photo are 100% real. Is it a photo of me? Maybe. (He/him | Other labels pending | Odium delendum est)

[blumineck]

I’ve got a lot of Thoughts(tm) about The Odyssey at the moment, but damnit Blum I’m an archer, not a film critic, so here’s something in my lane!

[mapsontheweb]

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

[largedad]

[impossiblepackage]

I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.

[bisquid]

I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

The universe is infinite. So are the stars

[bisquid]

I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.

[5c0l0p3ndr4]

this is not a shot from a space telescope overlayed behind a woods, or anything. that’s not the sky as kepler or hubble or james webb see it. that’s the sky from a dark sky park in michigan. that’s the view you are missing out on from right here on earth. that’s the view that has been stolen from you.

[mckitterick]

I fell in love with the sky as a child growing up in western Minnesota, miles from a small town, near a massive lake and just downhill from an 18-hole golf course - the pure darkness broken only by a single bright light I could escape by hauling my telescope up that hill or into a nearby field

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

that’s what’s been taken from us all

[cosmo-the-ethyrian]

OH OKAY so actually im fully ugly crying snotty-sobbing about this. what

[i-like-reblog-maps]

this post was inflicted upon me so now i’m inflicting it on all of you

(full map of ~75k is too much for me to load, but i got to 40k! very laggy, but worth it.)

[vacuously-true]

We can have this back btw. This is solvable, and it’s not THAT hard. It’s not pollution like greenhouse gases in the atmosphere where we have to stop making it worse AND clean up the mess we already made. With light pollution, all we have to do is stop doing it. Use shielded outdoor lights. Don’t run lights when they don’t need to be run. Install motion sensors and dimmers. And it’s not expensive- it literally SAVES money. Push for these policies at the local level. Get the stars back.

[summer-fruits-and-cream]

Creating codes and statutes

Establishing quality requirements for outdoor lighting is an effective way to protect local character, enhance visual safety, and mitigate t

some good guidance by DarkSky on how to do this!

[cyphir-spacerobot]

Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!

[koiagain]

[argumate]

“my bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea,”

are we talking about the same body of water here, which is weird, or different bodies of water, which is even weirder

[theinflammablemammal]

this makes more sense if you assume both are the same body of water but the time between the statements is about 50 million years

[argumate]

you’re right, that’s significantly less weird

[argumate]

toasthaste said: maybe there’s more than one bonnie

blocked

[lalaithion]

A hypothesized geography.

[truth-shitposting]

i bless the bonnie over africa

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

The bonnie is in geosychronous orbit, thus over all the Earth’s bodies of water

[special-lucky-chosen-one]

the bonnie is merely moving very fast, perhaps at hypersonic velocity, relative to the singer

[special-lucky-chosen-one]

my bonnie lies over the ocean

my bonnie’s exceeding mach 3

[idlesuperstar]

 - Very good. 

[txf-tarras]

This is the type of film that the phrase “glorious technicolor” was invented for - look at the richness of the colours!

[petermorwood]

To say nothing of a phrase that gets used in this house a bit too often…

[quousque]

ok so this is The Court Jester with Danny Kaye and it is the best fucking movie i swear. It’s a comedy musical robin hood parody thing about an incompetent moron and his extremely competent ass-kicking girlfriend taking down a tyrannical king and restoring the throne to the rightful heir

-the rightful heir is a baby and they can tell it’s the right baby because of a giant birthmark on his asscheek

-the main character’s only talent is singing and the rest of the pseudo robin-hood group just kinda tolerate him because he repeatedly fucks up

-he gets hypnotized into believing he is this amazing swashbuckling sword fighting hero along the lines of Wesley from the Princess Bride and ends up fighting the villain while snapping in and out of hypnosis

-the vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison, the chalice with the palace has the brew that is true “what”

-he stumbles his way through the entire plot and never knows what the hell is going on

-Danny Kaye is the funniest motherfucker you’ve never heard of

-seriously go watch it you wan’t regret it

[oldshrewsburyian]

#yea verily yea ( @lessthansix)

[whatevercomestomymind]

And a fun tidbit from the filming was that Danny Kaye had never fenced before this film, so he was trained by Basil Rathbone’s stunt double who was also the fight coordinator. Kaye got so proficient so quickly, that Rathbone himself had to do most of the duel scenes between them as the fight coordinator eventually couldnt keep up with him on the more technical parts of the fight. If you watch closely, you can see that Rathbone stays on camera doing the fencing for a much larger percentage of time than he normally did by that point in his career, and Kaye does all but a couple of shots of his own fencing, because HIS double couldnt keep up and make it believable.

[copperbadge]

I need everyone in this thread to know that it is my belief that the post escaped containment in a drastic way because my Texan stepfather, a lovely man who is the least On Tumblr of anyone any of us has ever met, put this movie on for us to watch yesterday because “The Internet says it’s great and underrated, and apparently there’s a fight scene we need to watch.”

He chortled his way through it and pronounced you all correct and then lost his shit when I showed him my favorite backstage photograph:

[shittysawtraps]

can i be a big hater about something unrelated for a second

[shittysawtraps]

ok awesome

so i have finished a psychological thriller novel, and have begun the process of doing research so i can prepare to query agents. now, my novel has some pretty intense triggers in it, so i am aware it’s a bit of a hard sell– that being said, many agents have a “do not send me your novel if it has these things” list, so that’s what I’m looking for so i don’t accidentally trigger someone.

so i’m going down this list, and i find this agent. their “do not send me” list includes the following: non-consent/sexual violence, age gaps, teacher/student relationships, stalkers, cheating, everyone dies at the end, miscarriage/pregnancy, and abuse masked as love.

okay, cool! everyone has different tolerances for stuff, and it’s perfectly reasonable to not want to be involved with a story that has stuff you’re uncomfortable with. not the agent for me, but good on them for defining their boundaries.

but then i scroll back up and they’re requesting for gothic horror.

excuse me?????????

gothic horror without pregnancy or miscarriage? gothic horror without cheating? without stalking? gothic horror without major character deaths? GOTHIC HORROR WITHOUT ABUSE BEING FRAMED AS LOVE AND THE INTERROGATION OF THAT DYNAMIC?????

HEY CAN I GET A GOTHIC HORROR WITH NOTHING???

THAT’S JUST A STORY ABOUT A BIG HOUSE

[maybeasunflower]

Sounds like they want the novelization of "Clue"

[what-even-is-thiss]

Kids sitcom about a group of friends where all of them are a part of secret magical or superhero based underground society that don’t know about each other and they all think that the others are ignorant normies that they have to protect from their magical shenanigans.

[what-even-is-thiss]

The witch kid, the superhero sidekick, the cryptid hunter, and the half fairy kid are all unknowingly trying to hide the same talking cat from the principal of their school and the talking cat doesn’t tell any of them about each other because it’s currently getting many extra helpings of treats in exchange for its silence.

[what-even-is-thiss]

During the episode where they all find out about each other’s secret lives there’s obviously a slow look over to the cat who’s like “well you never asked. Anyways, completely unrelated but I’ve gotta go.”

[sistersorrow]

As more seasons pass, it's eventually revealed the rich kid who bullies the main cast is secretly child of some dark lord all the societies fear and eventually the bully works with the main cast to defeat them in the series finale or movie

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah I’m down for some 8th graders taking down the devil that’s good tv

[paradoxspaceheater]

very interesting to me how quickly and how perceptively pashavar clocks what's going on between setheris and maia without ever seeing them interact

[asteroidtroglodyte]

You can’t Abstain your way to a Better World.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

The Burger still gets made, even if you go Vegan. If you don’t buy it, it just winds up in the trash. If you want to do something meaningful about waste, you need legislation: It must become a crime to waste food in those ways.

If you care about Animal Cruelty in Factory Farms, you need to get legislation passed. It must become a crime to mistreat animals in those ways, and when malfeasances occurs, the onus of responsibility for those crimes must fall upon wealthy shoulders. That, also, requires legislation. It requires regulations, and regulators.

The largest source of Microplastics is wear and tear on automobile tires. It doesn’t matter what brand of shampoo you buy. It doesn’t matter which company you support with your dollar. The issue of Public Transit is too large-scale to be handled at anything less than the municipal level.

It’s not enough to just not participate in society

If you want the world to Change, you must leverage the mechanisms of political power.

You need Government.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

STOP PROPOSING INDIVIDUAL SOLUTIONS TO COLLECTIVE PROBLEMS

[catsbeaversandducks]

Art by Jesse Jarldane

[chotomy]

Iliad mini comix, books 1-8! yes i am going to do all 24 books! pray for me!

more iliad stuff

more ancient studies comics

part 2/part 3

[kuttithevangu]

Being a calm, gentle, non-reactive person is really hard work, which is probably why many people are none of these things. Personally I think it’s worth it but sometimes one does want to just roll around on the floor wailing at the top of one’s lungs

[kuttithevangu]

People in my notes who think I’m repressed or dissociating: you will feel better when you learn emotions are not a binary of Not Feeling It vs Being Overwhelmed By It

[maybeasunflower]

Also: managing emotions is a skill. It's not something you are born with (literally or metaphorically).

[chemicalico]

who wanna be friends with drawbacks

[eatthekidsfirst]

friends with consequences

[maybeasunflower]

Frodo, to Merry and Pippin.

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[maybeasunflower]

When mom says we have data transmission at home

[copperbadge]

Old school readers from my livejournal days may recall that I have an ongoing grudge against Magnolia Bakery for crimes against midwesterners (long story involving the phrase "We didn't realize people in Chicago were so attached to menus") and I'm cackling like a supervillain this morning over their health inspection issues.

It's a saying in Chicago that high health inspection scores are a great way to tell who is paying bribes to health inspectors, but I'm still just a little gleeful.

[bumblebee-madgirl]

...would you consider retelling the menu story for those of us who weren't around in the livejournal days? 🥺👉👈

[copperbadge]

It's not super exciting in retrospect, it was just funny at the time :) Magnolia Bakery had just opened in Chicago after being THE bakery that made Cupcakes Happen in NYC, and I had a friend visiting who wanted to try them out. So we consulted the website, which listed their flavor offerings including the daily special flavors, and I went down to the storefront with a list to buy them.

I started to give my order to the woman behind the counter and she immediately started shouting at me that we didn't have this that or the other, really aggressively given I was just placing an order. I hadn't been rude or asked for special treatment or something. I said "Sorry, that's what was listed on your website, what DO you have?" and she shouted some more and gestured at the display case.

So I picked out what I thought would be good from what was available and paid and went home, and that evening I made a -- I have to stress this -- entirely amused post about how if you're not going to carry a certain flavor on a certain day maybe don't list it as a flavor of the day. I get sometimes there are issues with ingredients, but by then there were multiple other cupcake shops in Chicago that did not seem to have this issue. We all laughed, we had cupcakes, life was fine.

A few days later, somehow the bakery manager found my post -- this was pre-algorithm, I had maybe 3000 readers at most, on a blogging site that was not all that well known. And she left a frankly rather nasty comment about how Magnolia Bakery originated in New York, and New Yorkers understood these things, and they hadn't realized when they expanded that Midwesterners were so attached to their menus.

Yeah. How dare we bumpkins out here in corn country see a menu and presume the establishment showing us the menu actually offers what is on it?

Anyway, I replied that I wasn't aware New York, a culinary capital of the world, was unfamiliar with the idea of a list of food and prices for said food. I suggested perhaps they could speak to their peer institutions in Chicago, like Sugar Bliss or Sprinkles, and see if they could help Magnolia Bakery out if they were struggling with the concept.

I did not receive a reply, but I laughed about that for days. We're too attached to our menus.

Anyway thenceforward they were added to the list of places in Chicago against which I hold a grudge, which also included Corner Bakery. If I had a nickel for every bakery I had a grudge against I'd have two nickels, which isn't that many, but it is weird it's happened twice.

[c-rowlesdraws]

👋 friendly reminder to use more inclusive and respectful language! 💐 Instead of “disemboweled”, try “differently-emboweled” ☺️

[maybeasunflower]

Umm, actually the correct term is "colectomy".