Your guess is as good as mine

Soph. Australia

[doctor-roman]

You roll up to the Wizard Battle and your opponent takes out his spellbook but it’s just one of these

[ehentalix]

I'd leave. This is a sign that my opponent has the most fucked up unethical spells imaginable, and I am not about to be subject to Malchezar's Piercing Prostate Bomb or something

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[laurenillustrated]

Pride and Prejudice Art

A few recent scene redraws from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film! One of my favorite movies ever.

Prints available in my shop!

I’ve been on a big Jane Austen kick this year and currently reading my way through all the books! So far I’ve read Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and I’m almost finished with Northanger Abbey!

[goblinparty]

Last night I was talking to my boyfriend, and I couldn’t think of the word ‘library’, so I said ‘book ranch’. He thought it was hilarious and started making up alternative names for ‘librarian’.

“Cowbook! Like cowboy! No…Readcher? Like Rancher? No, fuck this is hard…”

and just now I heard him yell “BOOKAROO” from the other end of the apartment in the most triumphant tone of voice i’ve ever heard

[sasquapossum]

“Howdy, pardner. Name’s Tex. Biblio Tex.”

[certifiedlibraryposts]

Certified Library Post

[foooo]

[agnesmontague]

ive invented (note: dubious claim) something i call the bear diet which is mostly fruits and vegetables with fish as the main protein source and something like once a month you eat a few hyperprocessed foods of your liking because that is when you, the bear, raid a dumpster in the suburbs

[stellarskyes]

after the hyperprocessed foods, do you take tranquilizers to simulate getting captured by animal control and returned to the wild?

[agnesmontague]

i would settle for melatonin gummies but well. knock yourself out

[henk-heijmans]

Donkey getting some shade on a hot sunny day in Greece - photographer unknown

[chippyyyz]

Donkey about to get the fuckin drop on father konstaninos - photographer unknown

[stephendann]

Prelude to an ass kicking

[higgsbison]

happy glorious 25th of may

[notaplaceofhonour]

Ryan Gosling’s career has just been one long quest to climb the Warner Bros water tower

[notaplaceofhonour]

that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.

[notaplaceofhonour]

I’m obsessed with the implication that this was a coming-of-age ritual where a boy becomes a man, like a bar mitzvah

[soapdispensersalesman]

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

[zevveli]

StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.

[redpandarascal]

stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.

[musashi]

bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.

[lesbiassoon]

mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

[no-one-offical]

‎

[totally-cis-offical]

I used to love take me to a useless website

[kushblazer666]

[anarchistmemedistro]

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis

Some narratives in international development hold that ending poverty and achieving good lives for all will require every country to reach t

[sd-d0-l1y]

The conclusion, and one of the harder hitting parts of the article. Solving poverty does not require complex solutions and long timeframes.

[theunusualchameleon]

I'm reminded of that one part in Frederick Douglass's autobiography where he gets to the north for the first time and assumed, since they didn't have slaves, that everyone was about as poor as non-slaveowning white southerners. And they weren't! There were poor people, sure, but there were lots of people living very comfortably or in luxury.

He mentions how angry it made him, that not only were thousands and thousands of people suffering to create luxury for a few, but that slavery wasn't even necessary for wealth to exist. That's really stuck with me.

[starlit-meadow]

Look it’s me

[glorious-spoon]

anyway the thing about fanfic is that it's not essentially bad or good; it's essentially amateur. some people are absolutely out there writing award-worthy prose (some fic writers ARE award-winning writers IRL!), but that's not the point. the point is that we're all telling campfire stories. it's a community, and it's a way to spend some more time in the worlds and stories that we love.

[mattoidal]

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”

— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?

[animentality]

[immortalbeingz]

[blood-orange-juice-deactivated2]

[daphneorsmthng]