a mad lad and dangerous to know

films. books. good looks.

[serglesinner]

PLEASEEE turn on the audio

[alexmey-does-an-arts]

centipede god

bonus:

[ozth]

found this three year old draft buried in my files. is it funny? I don't remember

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

[keatxu]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[omikronsoul]

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

[justletmeremember]

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

[jollysunflora]

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality

[a-book-of-creatures]

So uh

They found a whole lot of the rest of Spicomellus, aka one of the oldest ankylosaurians

Turns out it's also the spikiest

And apparently sacral shields and tail weapons go all the way back too

(Image from Maidment et al., 2025).

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

whoa WHAT

this is the guy who was previously known from literally just This:

and was thought to be some kind of weird ankylosaur but WOW this is not how anybody expected it to look, that is WILD

“Bizarre” armoured dinosaur Spicomellus afer rewrites ankylosaur evolution | Natural History Museum

The world’s most unusual dinosaur is even stranger than first realised.

[lick-the-saltlamp]

New!!! Favorite!!! Guy!!!

[hidden-but]

Let me once again highlight the fact that this guy has bony spike on its ribs.

to quote the NHM article linked above:

“This is completely unlike any animal living or dead, and raises real questions about how this animal moved,” Susannah explains. “Normally, bones like the ribs are used for muscle attachment, but because of the spikes it’s hard to tell where the muscles could have gone.” “Frankly, we have very little idea about how this dinosaur would have moved at all.”

Like, the extreme spikes on the neck and above hips are one thing, and they hypothesize on their evolutionary origin and relation with other ankylosaurs, but wtf was it doing with a spiky ribs.

[pekingopera]

Kelly Pringle

[sighcomics]

[theinternetarchive]

cloth, in the center a figure of a woman carrying a cross surrounded by floral and vegetal patterns, italy c. 1700s.

[prokopetz]

Maintaining a diversity of ongoing personal projects is important because it enables you to procrastinate on one by aimlessly tinkering with another, thereby creating the possibility that you'll finish one of them by accident.

[kingcriccket]

you CANNOT read too much old timey fiction because I was playing Raft with the lads this morning and without a THOUGHT said we could sail over to another island "if the wind would consent to blow" & let me tell you. This did not pass by unremarked.

[rainyydoves]

[acardinalisred]

[rococo-the-clown]

Clicking the 'show sexual content' button to have my soul stared into like this was the emotional equivalent of falling off a chair backwards after opening a packet of Rice Krispies.

[evilwizard]

you can differentiate me from weevilwizard via subtle variations in our proboscis

[weeeeevilwizard]

We also have different color hats. Mine is a much more tasteful jet black, while yours is pitch-black.

[evilwizard]

ive gotta stop accidentally summoning gimmick blogs into existence

[elvis-official]

I know how you feel hummina hummina hummina. I can't say anything here without a new Elvis. Why are there so many Elvii. Why

[evilwizard]

you’re the only one who understands me elvis

[magicratfingers]

[elviswizard-official]

woah papas, your hunka hunka burnin love conjured me into existence

[cheaphalloweencostume]

i’m gonna say something that doesn’t feel good but you might need to hear it: bending over backwards being a people-pleaser, being conflict averse and not telling anyone your needs, and then being resentful and upset when your needs aren’t met is a You problem first

[cheaphalloweencostume]

not related but also just good advice: when you’re lowkey frustrated with someone and can’t quite figure out why their behavior is bothering you, i highly recommend examining if they have broken an imaginary rule or standard that you hold yourself to

[molombo]

Where's the African mythology?

The Kickstarter is live now!

[boycarofchilladelphia]

I know I have close to zero Tumblr fame, which I normally appreciate, but I would love it if this made it into the world and got fully backed. You can even pledge to get the digital content and send a real copy to a school in Africa or to a HBCU or community library of your choosing!

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

also the english are weird about folk culture. we are. we've relegated our folk dances and music to the zone of esoteric nerd shit that only weirdos do, and then we go looking for esoterica in the non-english parts of our heritage because we don't think we've got any of it of our own

[galadriel1010]

Okay actually this is really interesting. So one of the main reasons we have so much embarrassment about our folk traditions is actually the Great Depression. There was a lot before it: the Victorian antiquarians being their usual selves, the loss of huge numbers of dancers (who tended to be young men) on the battlefields of WWI, the general movement of fashion and fad, but one of the things that really killed off traditions was monetising it.

Clog dancers particularly used to draw massive crowds. There were competitions all over the world, and performers were among the biggest stars of the variety stage. But clog dancing is easy to set up. "If you whistle the tune, I'll fit the steps in" as one dancer once said. This meant that during the Depression, it became fairly common to see talented, competition winning dancers on street corners, trying to earn some money.

It became so stigmatised by this association that dancers stuffed their prize medal belts in the loft and forgot about them, and wouldn't even talk about them to children and grandchildren.

We owe the survival of our traditions to men like William Kimber, Cecil Sharpe, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and to the work of Maude Karpeles, who taught the dances to her Esperance Club girls in London and took the traditions around the world again. What we have now is a revival and a survival, and we wouldn't have any of it without a few dedicated nerds who collected and preserved what they could before it was all lost in war and economic decline.

[whybeaunicorn]

It was also World War I.

Take for example Molly dancing, the traditional dances of East Anglia. This was primarily danced by plough boys - with the joke being that in the winter when everything was frozen and there was nothing to plough they would come and dance in people's gardens until they paid them to go away.

Then a whole generation of plough boys went off to war and didn't come home. Molly as a living tradition died with WWI and had to be (and has been) revived from written and oral testimonies of those who remember watching the dances when they were kids.

Folk music, dance, song, they were all primarily working class traditions, shared during work, around hearthsides, in pubs. These are the people who are hit hardest by war and economic hardship.

[galadriel1010]

The impact was also particularly brutal where the hammer fell heaviest because of the Pals Batallions. The theory at the start of the war was that If you made up units of men who already knew each other, they'd support each other better. They made up the Pals, young men who grew up together, fought together, and then died together.

If the figures I've seen are right, Bradford saw 1 in 60 of the city's entire population killed or wounded on the first day of the Somme. Basically in the space of an hour. A generation of young men. Adderbury Morris Men had six dancers and a musician in 1914, and only one of them returned. He never danced or played again.

They learned from the Somme. For one thing, they didn't send 18 year olds to the front until the Spring Offensive of 1918, when they lowered the minimum age from 19 to 18 and a half. But traditions died in the trenches.

If you're interested in the survival of morris dancing, I highly recommend The Way Of The Morris. It's a beautiful and deeply moving film. Available through the BFI and apparently on Prime: https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-way-of-the-morris-2010-online