Darkling Musings

...and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. - Thoreau

[roughentumble]

you know it really isnt immoral, if you do it right, to raise cows and sheep for meat. so. well. i think there should be a story about, vampires who have a town of humans that they keep well-maintained, so long as the humans donate their blood once a month, like vampire blood farm stuff

but instead of antagonistic everyone's like. no he's a nice man you leave the count alone. he keeps us safe and cared for and he just needs a lil snack now and then, it dont hurt anyone. like a cow that loves the farmer and the farmer that loves the cow, even with both knowing one will end up on the other's table. because its like. its like. cows just have such pretty eyes, you know? they love you so much. i think it should be like that

[roughentumble]

literallyyyyyy

i want to be part of a vampire's herd. and i want him to pet me like a cow

[sarnakhwritesthings]

It's only safe for humans to donate a full unit of blood every eight weeks (and even if they only manage to get a partial out of you, they still recommend you wait 2 months), so our hypothetical count would need to have 56 healthy, non-anemic humans in his pool, presuming he needs a full 500 mL of blood each feeding, and he needs to feed once per day.

Obviously, a vampire family will need a larger community to care for, scaling linearly with the number of adult members of the family, assuming the above blood intake.

This still lets a vampire build a healthy relationship with his herd, presuming that he has Traditional Human Dinner with his donor before feeding, or some other social bonding ritual, on a rotating basis.

[vampires-official]

official vampire post

[thewackypegasus]

[ID: screenshot of tags that read, "#i LOVE this #vampire who's very invested in his town and spends tons of money for good parks and libraries bc 'they need enrichment!!!' #he stays up to date on milestones and birthdays bc that's his herd!!!" end ID.]

[vampires-official]

official vampire post

[mel-155-a]

People be out here reinventing Vampire: The Masquerade every day

[thememedaddy]

[homunculus-argument]

A good rule of thumb for AI is "would you trust a trained pigeon to do this?"

"We trained a pigeon to recognise cancerous cell clusters and somehow they're really good at it" okay great, that's something that could plausibly be a thing.

"We trained a pigeon to recognise good CV:s and left it in charge of sorting through all our job applications" uh perhaps consider not doing that.

[homunculus-argument]

@gem-is-still-bored I was so inspired by this comment that I had to make a grunge poster about it:

photo source

[gostaks]

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

[btc-official-deactivated2024071]

“why don’t they teleport back” because they’re not on the planet where everyone can teleport anymore. try to keep up dumbass

[retroactivebakeries]

#this feels like a fable that would have some kind of moral but I’m not quite sure what#something about like hard work/effort/the need to be curious idk

the moral of the story is that a breathable atmosphere is important to one’s general well-being

[thememedaddy]

[whatagrump]

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

[thewritinggrindstone]

And!

“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

Reblog to save a writer’s life.

[tiktoksformyfriends]

[siliquasquama]

[borkthemork]

Another example that humanity never really changed

[susiephone]

if i wrote twilight there'd be a kid in edward's class who Zones The Fuck Out and daydreams about a story they want to write, and edward would just tune in to watch like a tv show when he's bored in class and he gets genuinely invested and eventually he's like "i know EXACTLY how they can fix this plot hole that's bothering them but how can i tell them that when they don't KNOW i'm their first beta reader"

[ruffboi-mags]

genuinely more compelling than literally everything else that happened in Twilight.

[garbage-empress]

time smells bad.

[chrome--horse]

what Synesthetic bullcrap is this now

[garbage-empress]

Listen

I accidentally leave the milk out overnight.

Milk smells bad the next day.

Why does milk smell bad?

Time gets in it.

[garbage-empress]

@ryanthecynic

[larckla]

Just realised this implies that a fridge cancels or slows time down

[garbage-empress]

As a simple experiment I will put some plutonium in my refrigerator and see if it decays slower, brb

[garbage-empress]

The results are in!

I have radiation poisoning!

[lastvalyrian]

this time it’s the opposite of Greek philosophy because you used the scientific method

[titkoks]

[penny-anna]

The Fellowship & Bilbo + 19th Century Character Trope Generator

bonus Sam/Frodo

[penny-anna]

Lord of the Rings locations: Bree

The village of Bree had some hundred stone houses of the Big Folk, mostly above the Road, nestling on the hillside with windows looking west.

[southfarthing]

the lord of the rings is so honest. so raw. so sincere. so unabashedly from the heart. no snide fourth wall jokes, no attempts to alleviate the heaviness. it is is wholeheartedly earnest in its dedication to portraying hope and love and faith and loyalty and courage, and that is what makes it feel like home to so many of us. it's true to itself. it doesn't pretend to be cool and care less. it cares, a lot, and that is a rare, beautiful thing. it warms our hearts to care for a piece of fiction that was made to care about and be cared about

and we know we aren't going to be punished or ridiculed by the work itself for loving it! no characters killed off cruelly, no plotlines abandoned, no shrugging of shoulders and "well real life is like that. get used to it." we have always needed escapism, and we always will. and middle earth will always be there to escape to

[mistergandalf]

my thoughts on the rings of power teaser: overwhelmingly positive. here’s why…

1. first off, I say all this as an avid lover of tolkien, who has read not only the hobbit and lotr multiple times, but the silmarillion multiple times as well… and I’ve read a decent bit from the histories of middle-earth series, too. I know some elvish. I can write in tengwar. I could go a few rounds against steve colbert in trivia before he’d beat me. I am not gatekeeping at all, but I’m just saying I’m not a super casual fan and I know what I’m talking about.

2. LOVE the name. I think it’s really smart to preface it with “the lord of the rings” because let’s be TOTALLY honest—how many randos out there KNOW that tolkien wrote anything besides the hobbit/lotr? instant gateway for more casual fans. and the rings of power? fantastic. love it. looks good on a shelf or whatever. it’s a little repetitive but tbqh no one is going to use the full title, we’re all gonna end up calling it ROP or whatever anyway.

2. the fact that the teaser for the title is NOT CGI, but PRACTICAL EFFECTS, is very encouraging to me. it’s only the title sequence and they’re going balls to the wall? oh man sign me up. keep delighting me. my hopes are high that it won’t be a CGI-ridden mess. blows a kiss to the hobbit I love you very much but you know what you did.

3. the music. the MUSIC. very reminiscent of howard shore—not sure if he’s working on this show, but I have heard if it’s not him it might be bear mccreary who I would also trust with my life. I vibe to the outlander soundtracks on a regular basis.

4. GALADRIEL MY QUEEN. I love cate blanchett with all my heart, but her version of galadriel doesn’t have to be the only version. excited to see what morfydd clark brings to the role. I love love love the silmarillion elves and I really hope we get to see the younger, fiery, passionate side of the noldor elves, and not just a simple recreation of the all-encompassing mournfulness of the elves of the third age. I want to see more elves like tauriel! sure she was extracanonical, but she represented what tolkien showed elves to be like in the silmarillion more than any of the others.

5. the multi-language title video had some TENGWAR at the end, and man oh man that delighted me so much. I don’t actually know much sindarin (my singular failing) but it looks like it says “hîr i chorvath | corvath bâl.” all I know is that “hîr” means lord lmao. so far so good? the part that REALLY struck me was that they took the TIME and the CARE to use beleriand mode tengwar as opposed to later tengwar, which shows that they did their RESEARCH on what would be appropriate to the second age. gives me hope. and to those who complain about “inaccurate translations”: tolkien invented enough sindarin words to cover less than 1% of the english language. you’re never going to get an accurate translation, ever. there aren’t enough words for that. sit down.

6. omg please please please give me sexy annatar (sauron) please don’t make him ugly make him beautiful he presented as a beautiful elf in the second age please

7. to the doubters and the haters, I feel you and I see you. I’m just hopeful based on what I’ve seen, and I pray I’m proven right. I will probably watch it regardless bc I am a tolkien whore but I really think this is going to go great!

[funnytwittertweets]

[invaderxan]

Tumblr burned down years ago, and now a tranquil meadow has grown from its ruins

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

Tumblr is that barren pasture in Costa Rica that was purposely filled with 12,000 metric tons of orange peels by conservation researchers. Initially, the orange peels decomposed into “sludgy stuff filled with fly larvae.” This led to accusations that the juice company providing the peels were “defiling the land,” and thus, the site was ultimately abandoned. But when researchers went back about 15 years later, they discovered “the arid landscape had been unrecognisably transformed into a dense, vine-filled jungle... as for how the orange peels were able to regenerate the site so effectively in just 16 years of isolation, nobody's entirely sure.”

And that, my friends, is Tumblr.

[rexidot]

(via @lastvalyrian)

[runrundoyourstuff]

@novantinuum

[arotaro]

Bad joke time

It can be frustrating when people confuse “aromantic” with “aromatic”, but hey, you know what they say: Aros, by any other name, would smell as sweet.

[bandvn-deactivated20190827]

First of all, how dare you

[queermaddscientist]

Get yourself a fabric store that will light your fabric on fire for you

No but legit I asked what the fiber content of something was and the guy didn’t know so he cut a chunk off and lit it on fire and felt the ashes and was like. Yeah this is mostly cotton with a lil bit of silk. And that was the moment I knew. This is it. This is the fabric store for me. Also that guy is marriage material. Not for me but damn some person is gonna be so happy with him.

[rawringthroughthetwenties]

Ok but this is actually one of the easiest ways to tell what something is made of! I did a textiles degree and one day as part of a class we all went outside with a pile of scrap fabric and set fire to the little pieces and recorded how they burned. We were given a chart that looked something like this to tell what each fabric was (it gets a little tricky is it's a mix of fabrics though). Why did we do this? There is very little regulation in the textiles industry so a lot of materials are mislabelled as something they aren't and sold for more than they should be, also sometimes people buy fabric second hand or discounted which doesn't have any label at all. If you have a fabric you are having doubts about, cut a tiny piece off and do the burn test and you should know pretty fast what you are dealing with. Anyways your fabric store should be lighting things on fire because this means that they are actually checking what the fabrics are and aren't trying to pass cheap stuff off as more expensive than it is.

[queermaddscientist]

Ooh! I knew it was a standard test but I hadn’t seen a chart as detailed as this thank you!

[lostsometime]

so if you’re looking for something flame-resistant, does that mean linen is the best?  since it takes time to ignite and is easily extinguished?

[white-throated-packrat]

No. Linen burns like paper once it catches. Wool, otoh, was used to make firefighters’ coats before flame-retardant synthetics were developed. If you need something actually flame-retardant, you’re looking at specialty fabrics.

[lierdumoa]

@lostsometime genuine leather. It’s way more flame retardant than silk or any plant fiber and way more readily available than specially engineered flame-proof materials. When I took a welding class we were required to wear genuine leather safety jackets and gloves.

We were encouraged to wear clothes made of natural plant fibers under the protective gear. If cotton jeans were to catch fire you could use your leather gloves/jacket to quickly slap out/smother the flame before it ate through the fabric to your skin.

On the other hand if you wore polyester pants, that’s essentially wearing plastic and it will melt right into your skin as soon as it catches fire, giving you way worse burns than you’d get otherwise.

[thesaltofcarthage]

@systlin​ I feel like this is relevant to your interests