The Chittering Undead @professorzombiesquirrel - Tumblr Blog

♪ The Blob by The Five Blobs

THE BLOB (1958) dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr.

Can we please talk about how much this song bops? Especially for a theme song to a 50s sci-fi/horror film?!?!?!?!

It's like the filmmakers hired someone, said, "Our film has a blob in it," and then gave no other direction to a pop music writer, who possibly thought they were writing a song for a teen beach film?

#the blob #good music #sci fi #50s

what-even-is-thiss

It’s crazy that countries on the edge of the Sahara desert are reversing desertification by just digging half circles

what-even-is-thiss

The ground in these places is too compact for water to soak in during wet season which leads to flooding but digging these holes gives the water a place to stop and soak in. And they’re pushing back the desert with this. By just digging holes.

what-even-is-thiss

The new plants also help even more water soak into the ground which reduces flooding even more.

These places also give people places to grow food and graze animals like people are turning completely dry compact desert into a refuge for wildlife and plants and solving regional food insecurity just by digging holes.

untitledgoosegay

The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.

Immensely cool dude. He's been a personal hero since I learned about him.

she-is-amused

Ooooh, Mr. Sawadoga innovated the traditional zai method by adding manure and other biological matter to the holes! This put nutrients in the soil as well as helping even more with water retention and attracted termites whose tunnels helped loosen the compacted earth, all of which supported plant-growth like no zai before! Which increased water-retention even further! Oh excellent, excellent work!

shannoneichorn

It is a crime that the link preview doesn't show Mr. Sawadoga's face, so here's his photo from Wikipedia.

This is the face of a man adding beauty to the world and making the future better.

i-am-a-megalodon

This is beautiful. I love this.

takereveng3

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

tartrazeen

burkiningalerisi-deactivated202

redscharlach

I feel you, Artoo.

redscharlach

May the 4th be with you, tired people of the universe.

lotostar

Go little guy, go!🎵

#happy neil day!#neil banging out the tunes #april 13 #neil the rat #fanart

adamedits

Airplane!

nasa

Earthset

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon. The Apollo 8 mission was the first crewed spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.

For more imagery from the mission, visit our Artemis II Multimedia Page.

#tumblr snek

moniquill

traycakes

It's not just to have a "do over" that doesn't involve the original cast, it's to cut them out of the royalties. Literally the entire point is to make sure all the money made by Harry Potter goes to transphobes or people willing to work with transphobes.

If you watch it, you are supporting bigotry, hate, and oppression. That's just objective reality. All for a story that you probably have already seen in movie and book form.

apocalypse-angel

#the last point is especially true since the old cast receives royalties for anything with their likeness on it#meaning the original trio still gets money for every mug with their 14 year old faces on it#if they stop making those and replace them with the new cast which they will the old cast gets cut off completely#which is again exactly what rowling wants because she cannot stand those 'ungrateful brats' as she would likely put it#and as she has last say in anything that gets made in harry potter paraphernalia this might also explain the decrease in faces on products

via @discipleofkleio

I hate Rowling so much.

amuseoffyre

Likewise, the new all-star audio books featuring people like Keira Knightley, Riz Ahmed, Michelle Gomez, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and more, only seem to have happened because Stephen Fry - who did all the original audio books - said he thought she radicalised and "was a lost cause" (x)

jesterlesbian

CORINNE MASSIAH as May Grant│9-1-1 9.11 "Going Once, Going Twice"

professorzombiesquirrel

Can we please talk about poor Harry's face in this last gif? The rising panic? This is a man whose mother was his highest bidder at the bachelor auction, and now he's having to watch his sister bid on one of his friends. Harry is having a night.

#911 spoilers #911 abc #may grant #harry grant #athena grant

The dog is standing in my room, staring across the hall at a closed door and whining, pitifully.

"No, I will not open their door so you can go into their room and wake them up to check for food." It's a bedroom, and its occupants are asleep. But he knows that people drop food in all sorts of places, and even if he checked that room dozens of times today that doesn't mean that new food hasn't dropped since then.

He has now moved into the hall and stands, staring at the door. The whining comes in waves. Whine, whine, whiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Whine, whine, whiiiiiiiiiiine.

I am the villain of this story because I won't wake people up for a sniffing expedition.

whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

I feel like the worst sort of person, and he knows I'm not immune to the whining.

So he's standing there like a Victorian orphan, thrown out onto the streets, starving, staring into the windows of a food shoppe. Except this is an 85-pound dog that was fed under an hour ago and who, I am sure, knows exactly what pitch to make these whines so they hit for best effect. He's an evil genius with the biggest puppy dog eyes ever (because they are literally puppy dog eyes).

whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.

I'm going to go scream into a pillow.

#dogs #my dog #hungry dog #victorian orphan #his name is jones #he's named after a cat

helloelicia

Christine Ward

alibrariangoestoikea

I was working with an item today that just utterly flabbergasted a part of me (the other was deeply frustrated with the catalogue record AS SOMEONE APPARENTLY THOUGHT IT WAS PRINTED ON SILK, coming back to that in a minute) … but ANYWAYS … said item is a replica of a medieval manuscript prayer book THAT IS ENTIRELY WOVEN out of grey and black silk … WOVEN … text, images, intricate grey scale, WOVEN … NOT PRINTED …

And it’s flabbergasting because it’s from 1888, Jacquard machine, IT USED PUNCH CARDS to weave these intricate pages … something like 400 weft per near square inch … IT looks like a page of textured paper, but it’s not, it’s entirely SILK … F*CK …

Anyways …

alibrariangoestoikea

OKS I’ve since calmed down and found out that the reason they used “printed” is because it is essentially printed by a computer … in a weird way; when I import the record, I’m just gonna take that note out …

BUT this is the item btw