1. Hobby books are often written by the same people who think you can caramelize onions in 5 minutes
2. Hobby books are even more often written by people who don't have or are actively neglecting their partners/full-time jobs/pets/children/household maintenance.
3. Hobby books are often written by people with ADHD, and an hour in ADHD hyperspace is like 2-7 hours for everyone else, including other ADHD people who are not currently in the zone.
4. Hobby books are written by people who, when told by an editor to add in how long it will take, just make shit up
5. If you're doing something for the first time, you're going to take way, way longer to do it than someone who's had years of practice. Maybe it does only take an hour IF YOU'VE BEEN DOING IT FOR TEN YEARS. Think about how long it took you to make idk your first excel spreadsheet vs how long it takes now
To actually answer your question: proud. You should feel proud, because you made something, AND you did so while learning a brand-new skill! Go you!!
May I ask what the Allegedly-One-Hour project was? Both because I like hearing about what my friends are doing and I want to see how wildly inaccurate the listed time scope is.
The crazy thing is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you asked me on any given day "Would like to see a picture of some genitals?" my answer would be "😰 No, that's... No, thank you. I'm okay, actually." I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who do engage with the penis side of the internet, but personally, I've spent the better part of two decades doing all I can NOT to have pictures of dick and balls or sexy bikini babe buttcheeks blasted onto my retinas constantly. And yet... to be denied the penis? To have a jumped up pile of javascript tell me, a grown adult with an air fryer and an outstanding council tax bill, that I cannot be trusted to withstand the sight of a bare nipple unless I let it scan my drivers' license? I will move heaven and earth to see that fucking nipple, friend. I will walk a thousand miles barefoot on hot coals before I give you big brother bitches my passport number. A thousand miles through the desert with five VPNs just to press my face up against the glass and see the last uncensored picture of two My Little Pony Characters sixty-nining each other, and I don't even want! to look at it! But I will! I must! for the sake of our fucking democracy!
Cats are supposed to help fight rodent problems but the neighbour's cat just caught a mouse some other fucking place, brought it through my window (alive), then got distracted asking me for pets and let the fucking mouse go. Now he's calmly eating kibble like he didn't just give me a rodent problem I didn't previously have.
Great character choice for Hugo Weaving to play Elrond like he's always either mad as hell or on the verge of tears, like Book!Elrond I imagine as seeming way more chill but Movie!Elrond is #relatable af like if I had seen and experienced the shit this man has I would also be mad and crying all the time.
For everyone who ‘used to love reading’ but now hasn’t finished a book in years, you CAN get it back. Genuinely start bringing a book (preferably short and either fiction or a non fiction topic you already really enjoy) everywhere you go and when you have 5-20 mins waiting for the bus or at the doctors office or mechanic or whatever, get out your book and read it! You don’t have to finish it quickly or even read it often but it is so good for your brain and fun to get into the habit of reading more (and replacing being on your phone for those moments). Source: I read 0 books in 2023 and I’ve read 12 in the first 4 months of 2026
Welcome to the 1960s, where the goal of home security wasn't a Ring camera, but blinding your neighbors with "Space Age" luminescence. This house looks like a secret lair where the owner definitely knows how to make a proper Gibson and probably has a "conversation pit" that is a frequent stumbling hazard. The lighting is moody, the door is a bold mustard, and I'm 90% sure a secret agent is about to step out of those shadows.
to be honest, i only personally care about plotholes when they appear in writing i already have a bunch of other problems with. if i like something enough, i'll give it a pass/invent an explanation in my head. i can't find the exact quote, but roger ebert said something about this. to paraphrase: "the movie's problem wasn't [such and such inconsistency], its problem was that i was bored enough to be thinking about that."
There is nothing quite like the 1970s "lifestyle" aesthetic, where the height of sophistication was apparently eating an entire ocean's worth of shellfish directly off a salty, splinter-ridden dock. Our friend in the yellow raincoat is doing the heavy lifting, hauling traps and smelling like brine, while we’re expected to believe that a bottle of 86-proof bourbon is the natural chaser for a pot of steaming mussels.
Note the composition: we have the "Earth Tones of Destiny" palette in full swing. Everything is beige, brown, or "dilapidated pier grey." It’s the ultimate "Old Man and the Sea" cosplay, but with more liver damage and fewer metaphors about marlins. Honestly, the most impressive part of this photo isn't the "genius" of the bourbon; it’s the fact that they managed to set up a five-star seafood buffet on a pier without a single seagull swooping in to commit a felony. That’s the real miracle.
Long, long ago in 1970, where we decided that the best way to crown a home was to give it a "shaggy dog" haircut made of wood. This mansard roof isn't just an architectural choice; it’s a lifestyle commitment to looking like a very expensive shed that has achieved sentience. The cantilevered carport offers just enough shelter for your land-yacht to stay dry, provided the wind doesn't blow at more than two miles per hour. That teal sedan in the driveway is clearly the main character here, built with enough chrome to blind a low-flying pilot and a turning radius that requires a written permit from the city council. It’s the ultimate "Good Decor" flex: a house that matches your car's optimism and your gardener’s caffeine intake.
The 1970s, a time when "dieting" wasn't a lifestyle, it was a personality trait, and Fresca was the bottled liquid courage required to lift your girlfriend without throwing out your lower back. This ad is selling us a dream where citrus-flavored chemicals and cyclamates (or saccharin, depending on the week's FDA ruling) grant you the core strength of an Olympic gymnast.
Note the hyper-specific calorie count: 2 1/2 calories. Not two. Not three. That extra half-calorie is where the "frosty" flavor lives, apparently. They’re laughing because they’ve achieved the ultimate 1973 aesthetic: looking like they’ve never seen a carbohydrate in their entire lives while sporting haircuts that require more hairspray than the ozone layer could ever forgive. It "works like a diet drink," which in 1973 terminology usually meant "tastes like a battery but makes your swimsuit fit."
Welcome to 1963, where the water is crisp, the mahogany is polished, and "safety first" apparently means balancing a lit heater between your lips while wrestling a rubber flipper onto a child. Nothing captures the mid-century aesthetic quite like the juxtaposition of wholesome family bonding and heavy-duty nicotine consumption. This man is the ultimate multitasker: he’s navigating the family vacation, the choppy waters of fatherhood, and a significant lung workout all at once. The wood grain on that boat is gorgeous, but I suspect the "scent of the sea" was largely overshadowed by a thick cloud of unfiltered tobacco.
Sourced from the July 26, 1963, issue of LIFE Magazine.
i tried explaining to this girl at a party once how i could be gay and asexual at the same time and it basically boils down to never being into anyone but like once a year i’ll find a man attractive. and she was like “so what am i if i only like girls, and i’ve never found any of my boyfriends attractive and and i just wanna do cocaine all the time?” i was like “you’re a lesbian with a coke addiction?” and she was like “woooooah”. she broke up with her boyfriend that night and had a threesome with two girls in the bathtub. rebecca if you’re out there, i hope you’re going places. well, not far, since you’re electronically tagged. but spiritually.
This artist’s impression pinpoints many cosmic voids –– relatively empty bubbles of space.
The universe is home to trillions of galaxies, each chock full of smaller cosmic objects like stars and planets. Since galaxies gravitate together in a web-like pattern, there are also immense open spaces called cosmic voids in between. In those growing, gloomy places, dark energy dominates.
Galaxies in this animation are structured a bit like a Hoberman sphere (a lattice-like toy ball that expands and collapses), growing farther apart as the universe expands.
Zoomed out maps of the universe show that galaxies often cluster together in bright city-like regions. Each cosmic metropolis is connected to others by interstate highways – vast filaments of dark matter, gas, and dust, along which additional galaxies can be found. This large-scale structure is called the cosmic web.
Way out in the boondocks – far from the galaxies and filaments – are the cosmic voids. They’ve been growing larger for billions of years, emptying out as gravity pulls matter elsewhere.
This animation visualizes the early universe, when the cosmic was full of a hot plasma soup.
Cosmic voids were born when the universe looked extremely different than it does today. Instead of being speckled with stars and galaxies, the cosmos was filled with a sea of plasma (charged particles) that formed a dense, almost uniform fluid.
There were slightly denser kernels of matter, like a single ounce of cinnamon sprinkled into about 13,000 cups of cookie dough! Since the clumps had more mass, their gravity attracted additional material. Those areas grew and grew, drawing more matter together to form stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters as the universe expanded over billions of years. Meanwhile, the spaces in between became ever emptier.
A simulation of large-scale structure forming under the influence of gravity.
Cosmic voids aren’t completely empty, though. They do have sparse galaxies, though they seem to have delayed development. Since there’s less matter, there’s weaker gravity pulling things together so stars and galaxies form more slowly. And those galaxies are isolated so they’re less likely to interact with others, which fuels growth in denser places like galaxy clusters.
But voids are mostly filled with things we can’t see. They contain a thin mist of dark matter along with a relatively larger amount of WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles) like ghostly neutrinos than we find elsewhere in the universe. Since there’s not very much stuff in voids to create gravity, a different force reigns supreme: dark energy, the mysterious cosmic pressure that seems to be speeding up the universe’s expansion. Since cosmic voids are influenced primarily by dark energy, they offer clues about its behavior.
Astronomers haven’t thoroughly studied cosmic voids yet, but our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be wide-eyed enough to reveal those desert patches of space like we’ve never seen them before. Studying them will show how the universe is put together and how dark energy is pushing galaxies apart.
If you could fly through the cosmic web at hyperspeed, you might see a view like this simulated one!
So far, scientists have found around 1,000 cosmic voids. Roman’s 3D surveys should find tens of thousands more, both large and small, scattered throughout earlier cosmic eras than previous large sky surveys could see. That means we’ll be able to watch how the most vacant places get even emptier over billions of years. And astronomers can trace any changes in dark energy’s might by seeing how it stretches voids, where dark energy dominates, across cosmic time.
Follow along with Roman’s journey to launch at nasa.gov/roman.
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