Mollysynthetic @mollysynthetic - Tumblr Blog

2 mandarins for good luck 🍊🍊

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

xeansicemane

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

vexwerewolf

missmacfire

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

it's healthy for academics to have professional feuds. enrichment activity

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

Holy shit. "The demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes lengege a fecter?" published in the Science magazine

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

short but sweet

blogquantumreality

I don't know how unique this is to English, but this is a really nice encapsulation of how English itself has undergone a fair amount of vowel reduction already such that a majority of word-final vowels can become a schwa and still be understandable from context - so this entire letter being comprehensible when spoken verbally shows how close the vowel sounds in English have already gotten over the centuries.

All this is to say this letter is quite the brilliant refutation of the idea that a lack of a vowel inventory doomed the Neanderthal family :)

#linguistics

pinche-aquarius

Keep up the great work, lads

mayax81

homeboygirl

theres bikes around the city you can rent but you have to use an app that needs your drivers license. theres buses that drive right to your destination, but if you dont have change you need the app. you can wash your car here if you sign into the app. you can go to the bathroom here you just have to unlock it with the app that needs your location on. you can order at this restaurant if you scan the code and download the app. im losing my freaking mind

charlesoberonn

duraraross

I got my phone and wallet stolen once and the amount of things I couldn’t fucking do without The App was bonkers. I couldn’t order an Uber or the bus home because no phone or wallet, so I had to walk home based on directions written on a sticky note. I couldn’t do my laundry even though I had change in my apartment because my building’s laundry machines required The App. I couldn’t log into my school email because my school’s email requires two factor authentication and will ONLY take a phone number, not another email address. I had a hard as fuck time getting new cards set up with my bank because in order to do that I needed to log into The App. I couldn’t get any packages that were delivered to me because my building’s locker system was app based. So on and so forth.

We should not have this fucking single point of failure like this.

qsycomplainsalot

mobilis-in-mobili

*breathes deep breath* *slams reblog button*

lilybug-02

why is this the funniest thing I've seen all day?

dduane

A brief moment of rationality from the bird place.

kittydealer

#cats

thedoubteriswise

so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things

starstrung

I made a uquiz to find out what member of a doomed spaceship crew you are, take it to find out what member of a doomed spaceship crew you are.

starstrung

I love reading the responses people are writing for the final question. There are so many “I love you"s in here. It’s giving me some kind of emotion.

starstrung

As the uquiz keeps spreading, I keep thinking about what the win condition is. On day one of the quiz, I was so sure the win condition was to send a message telling others not to trust THOM, that THOM was responsible for their demise.

But I’ve read so few messages from people blaming THOM. In fact, and I wish there was a way to quantify this without spending hours and hours, so many more people are asking THOM to be set free. Sending messages of love.

So I’m revising my idea of what the win condition is.

teathattast

thefurriestofchows

oh,

oh this is absolutely beautiful

wakingfromthewater

I saw some James Webb Telescope scientists give a talk and one of them said this was her favorite image because she had waited and worked 25 years to see this.

#space

ajaxgb

Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

elodieunderglass

Reveal of Welsh postdoc and rugby lad Dr Howell Jenkins (27) perennially one of the funniest things tumblr users can discover in fiction.

It’s unclear whether he finished his PhD or is still a grad student in the process of slithering out of his actual viva.

Here is Calcifer’s “silly saucepan song” that he sings to himself, which Howl sings when drunk (and Sophie doesn’t understand.) It’s a Welsh rugby song.

#howl’s moving castle #best book ever

lasaraconor

Kidd Gorgeous -Nightfish

weidli

[ID: a reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks; the diner is now an aquarium, the people gone and several different types of fish slowly circling above the counter. the ripples of light through water move on the street outside. /end ID]

lizardsfromspace

The best resolution to a missing persons case ever was that developmentally disabled person who walked off in 1986 saying he "wanted to be a cowboy in Texas", starting a twenty-one year search for him on the assumption he died somewhere in the desert or was murdered, only for everyone to discover that he had spent those decades working as a cowboy on a ranch in Texas. Missing persons investigators rarely consider that maybe they achieved their dreams