Here we go again

[osmiumpenguin]

Another word, another word, another line, another interrupting line, adapt ignore embrace unearth each other endlessly & endlessly. And mine contribute to the drowning disarray no less than others you have read or heard: that crowning urgency to have my say, another paragraph, another word,

another stanza. Here I go again, exhaling connotations in a dream that meaning lives between the words and reader, and is its own epiphany and end, and sometimes, if it’s lucky, might redeem the arrogance of setting it in meter.

[fixomnia-scribble]

@osmiumpenguin we need a word for the particular psychological swoop that happens on payday, between "I HAVE DOLLARS" and then paying All The Bills and feeling resignedly virtuous but denuded.

[osmiumpenguin]

"Tetelestalgia" is the best I can do here, the melancholy that comes of having permanently settled an obligation?

[strange-aeons]

Father Strange, when considering the famous shoelaces code, do you interpret the president they were stolen from to be whichever US president is currently in office, or is it still Obama? I've held in my heart that it has been Obama this whole time

I also feel like The Shoelace President is Obama but I'm curious what Tumblr at large thinks

Who did you steal your shoelaces from?

Obama

Whoever is current US president

A non-US president (put in tags)

Remaining time: 6 days 16 hours

[fixomnia-scribble]

I'm betting Obama would LOVE the shoelaces code and try to find tumblr-themed shoelaces.

I also like the votes for Jed Bartlet in the notes, because you know he'd be HELPLESSLY enthusiastic about tumblr, in the same fashion as the Butterball Turkey Hotline and holding forth on National Parks.

"....Charlie, all these young people on the Tumbler website, I'm told they actually appreciate my willingness to share the depth of my knowledge on certain topics?"

"Sir, they've ranked them. Your blog posts on certain topics."

[osmiumpenguin]

Once upon a time, during a class exercise in writing PR material, I attributed a (fictional) quote that I no longer remember to the (fictional) president of my assigned (fictional) firm, Parliament & Whyte: "'[We're excited to yadda yadda boilerplate something],' said firm president Fred Parliament."

I thought I was being very clever by deciding that the business was named after its president and some other guy, maybe a founder from the previous generation. I had a whole backstory worked ouf in case my professor asked.

My paper came back with exactly one professorial marking: "firm" had been circled and replaced with a handwritten "buff, well-tanned."

I got my shoelaces from buff, well-tanned president Fred Parliament, thank you very much.

[gentlewordsdaily]

There is a very specific kind of sadness in realizing your parents loved you, and still did not always know how to meet your emotional needs.

Because it is confusing. It would almost feel easier if there was no love there at all. But sometimes there was love. In the way they tried to protect you. In the sacrifices they made. In the ways they worried about you, cared for you, wanted a good life for you.

And at the same time, there were still things missing.

Maybe comfort did not come in the way you needed it to. Maybe your feelings were not always understood, or noticed, or handled gently. Maybe you learned to keep certain parts of yourself quiet because it felt easier than trying to explain them.

That kind of hurt is difficult because it does not always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who loved you deeply, but did not know how to emotionally connect in the ways you needed. People carrying their own wounds, limitations, fears, or ways of surviving.

And you are allowed to acknowledge both truths at once.

You are allowed to recognize their love and still grieve what you needed but did not receive. Those things do not cancel each other out.

Forgiveness, for a lot of people, is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is slowly accepting that someone can love you and still fall short of understanding you completely.

That does not make your pain dramatic. It does not make them monsters either. Sometimes it just means everyone was trying with the emotional tools they had, and some of those tools were not enough.

And I think many people quietly carry guilt for still feeling hurt by parents they know tried their best. But being loved imperfectly can still leave wounds. It makes sense that it affected you.

At the same time, you do not have to stay trapped only in anger forever either. Sometimes healing looks like understanding that your parents were human before they were parents. People shaped by their own experiences, their own upbringing, their own emotional gaps.

That understanding does not erase your feelings. It just softens the sharp edges around them a little.

You deserved emotional safety. You deserved gentleness. You deserved to feel understood, comforted, and emotionally close to the people raising you.

And if they could not fully give that to you, it is okay to mourn it.

But I hope you also know this: the love you needed is still something you can experience in your life. Through other people. Through chosen family. Through the way you learn to treat yourself now.

The story does not end at what you did or did not receive growing up.

You are still allowed softness after all of it 🤍

[wizardarchetypes]

People leaving comments on my posts about Indigenous knowledge as a science and its relationship with Western science like, "I know Indigenous knowledge is extremely valuable and important, but I only trust verified science." You're just racist. I'm not going to be polite.

Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities [...] But some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency.

That's you. You only want tokens for optics. You can't say, "I respect Indigenous knowledge but—" No, you don't respect Indigenous knowledge. Western science is not the only "real" science and your attempts to argue otherwise are racist. There is no argument.

[wizardarchetypes]

It's like I'm talking to a wall. All the time when I discuss my work as a wildlife & fisheries biologist, I discuss what I have learned directly from Indigenous people in my everyday work yet it's so clear that so many people hear that and think I'm bringing it up for what reason? To appear somehow progressive?

Has everyone just believed this whole time that I bring it up for optics?

Everyone nods, "of course he mentions Indigenous people," because they believe it would simply look bad for me if I didn't.

In fact Indigenous knowledge is a constant topic of conversation and point of reference when I discuss my work as a scientist who uses Western science because my work is useless without it.

I work with endangered species which are endangered solely due to continual colonial violence against people and the land. I can follow the Western scientific method all I want and publish 100 papers on how to fix salmon populations—and get nowhere without Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

Indigenous knowledge is not an afterthought to reference as back up to Western science. Believe it or not, we can and should lead any number of scientific projects with Indigenous knowledge.

You need to change how you regard Indigenous knowledge on a fundamental level.

[hearthfire-heartfire]

bagele chilisa's book 'indigenous research methodologies' was published in 2019, btw. it's focused on decolonizing current western research practices, but obviously to decolonize you have to understand how and why indigenous sciences deserve consideration in the first place, and what counts as evidence when we look at a body of research.

Indigenous Research Methodologies

[osmiumpenguin]

The Substance (2024) is about the consequences of not going to bed on time. Stay up past your expiry date bedtime because you're full of brains and energy, and you just wake up the next morning feeling older, slower, more resentful, more likely to lose a toe, and hardly even willing to leave the house until somehow you've managed to wait enough days that your body stops waking up at oh dark thirty and finally agrees to sleep in. The Substance is Enough Sleep. In this essay I will

[thethirdromana]

The 100 best novels of all time

The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

How many of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time have you read?

0-10

11-20

21-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

61-70

71-80

81-90

91-100

Voting ended onMay 19

Bonus: add in the tags which one is your favourite.

[osmiumpenguin]

Forty Forty-three (after recounting), with several more on my bookshelf today, and another ten or so on my Buy This When You Have Shelf Space list.

A lot more than I expected TBH. I really liked quite a lot of them! Middlemarch deserves the hype.

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

you have this superpower! BUT you have this side-effect

is it worth it?

yes!!

the side effect is bad but ITS WORTH IT

meh it's okay

the side effect makes it unusable/not worth it

Results/option I didn't think of

Voting ended onMay 20

[osmiumpenguin]

"You can control time, but only once a month."

Side effect? What side effect?

[i-am-a-lazy-mess]

hate when I type :) and this 🙂 fucker appears. Go away you evil soul

[osmiumpenguin]

And its frowny siblings so often summoned by sophisticated syntaces (such as this🙁 may they too fie forever.

[osmiumpenguin]

Is it a common thing to greet your dentist by singing, "I can't feel my face when I'm with you?"

I mean, yes

Well, it should be

What if I can't feel my face but I *don't* like it?

I am a dentist and this is how people greet me all the time

I have dentures / my gums are bald

Voting ended onMay 10

[ratantics]

I needed to see this today.

[osmiumpenguin]

I misread the first panel as "SWEDISH" and kept expecting a Chef cameo.

[spoonwizardd]

gender is a performance and im getting heckled by those old gay muppets

[milkflys]

[moonlights-shadow-warrior]

[charlesoberonn]

Courtesy of r/CuratedTumblr

[charlesoberonn]

STATLER: This performer's gender is off the gender binary

WALDORF: I wish they were off the stage, too!

BOTH: DOOOOHHHOHOHOHOHO

[zoestorm]

Hey I have a question for y'all.

From where you are right now, could you reach the nearest sea or ocean by foot in less than a day?

Yes

No

Voting ended onApr 30

(reblog for sample size)

[osmiumpenguin]

Literally all I would have to do is step outside and jump overboard. Fifteen seconds and a deathwish.

[osmiumpenguin]

I. Mass bends spacetime. In the proximity of mass, points separate in space draw closer together (i.e. a distant observer watches stuff fall toward the centre), and points separate in time pass slower (i.e. the same distant observer watches physics slow down). This phenomenon is known as "gravity." II. Gravity is pretty weak compared to the electromagnetic force. If the mass isn't that dense, then spacetime keeps flowing inward but the atoms inside spacetime bump up against each other. Their electrons stop each other from falling. This phenomenon is known as the "ground." III. The ground has a limit to its strength; gravity does not. IV. If the mass is denser, then atoms collapse into themselves, and the protons and electrons merge into neutrons. But gravity is even weaker compared to the strong nuclear force, so if the mass isn't super-dense, then spacetime keeps flowing inward but the neutrons bump up against each other. Their quarks stop each other from falling. This phenomenon is known as "neutronium." V. Neutronium has a limit to its strength; gravity does not. VI. If the mass is even denser, then weird shit happens. There's no physical mechanism which lets quarks collapse in on themselves, but there's also no physical mechanism which lets them not collapse, because the quarks beneath them are falling even faster. The quarks at the centre keep falling into the centre even though they're already at the centre. There is no more up; there are only different speeds of down. This phenomenon is known as a "black hole." VII. Even for distant observers, black holes still have a measurable size, mass, rotation, and duration within spacetime. Weirdly, the size is proportional to the square root of the mass, instead of the cube root like normal matter. It's as if the whole mass gets smeared out onto an oblate spherical shell, with nothing on the inside. This kind of makes sense if you think about a distant observer watching physics slow down: at a black hole boundary it slows down all the way to zero, so you can never actually watch anything go through that shell, only get shellacked onto the outside. This phenomenon is known as a "firewall," and physicists are still debating whether it's real or an observational artifact. I prefer to think of it as "weird shit." VII. Logically it is ridiculous to suppose that spacetime keeps falling forever into whatever is at the centre of mass. We have conservation laws. How can spacetime just keep flowing out of the universe? So there are theories about black holes being wormholes to white holes that spew matter outward, or about white holes being other universes' big bangs, or about spacetime just kind of getting denser and denser as it rotates around the centre, because gravity might have no limit but neither does centrifugal force, or about spacetime getting stuck-for-real in the firewall until the black hole evaporates, or about gravity being mediated at tiny scales by a quantum particle that spins all the way around every 180 degrees. All of these theories are supported by viable mathematics. None of them has been proven. This phenomenon is known as "theoretical physics." VIII. In order to preserve any semblance of conservation of spacetime, something has to be holding up the universe at the centre of a black hole, whether it's centrifugal force, or a firewall, or an equal-and-opposite white hole at the big bang of our own universe, or whatever else. IX. Physicists can sometimes get lost in the math and miss the obvious. X. The dude holding up the inside of a black hole is obviously Atlas. I will not be taking questions at this time.

[wintersoldierfell]

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

[textpostscymraeg]

rwyt ti wedi clywed am farwolaeth yr awdur, nawr bydda'n barod am farwolaeth y gynulleidfa: ble yn hytrach na seilio dy ymateb ar fil o farnau anwybodus ar-lein, rwyt ti wir yn darllen ac yn ymgysylltu â'r testun

[best-bird-tournament]

FINAL POLL: class Aves

Which is the best bird?

Little spotted kiwi

Common raven

Voting ended onApr 16

Thanks to all who participated in this tournament! Here it is: the final question. May the best bird win.

[ffoxer]

Post by @rongzhi · 1 video

💬 4  🔁 38125  ❤️ 48869 · English added by me :)

Adding one of my favourite raven videos! (Sound highly recommend)

[osmiumpenguin]

These are both excellent, excellent birds, and ultimately the _only_ reason I am voting for Little Spotted Kiwi is because I am terrified of what Raven might do with unrestricted access to nuclear weapons.

[osmiumpenguin]

Cassandra, a seer, a female seer; Apollo, a god of golden sun; Narcissus, a man who loves himself; Marathon, a long long way to run; Lachesis, a shuttle weaving thread; Atropos, a fate to follow Lachesis; Ambrosia, a drink for when you're dead: And that brings us back to Cassandra.