This is my (generally) SFW blog. I make no apologies for my posts, what I say, how I say it, or what I find funny. I'm no longer young, have kids, am kinky and polyamorous, and live testily with various chronic health conditions. I enjoy intelligence, books, music, singing, and art.
If you like it, order your steak well done. Get your bagel toasted with jam and butter. Put ice in your scotch and ketchup on your hotdog. Get red wine with fish and white with steak. Who cares?
If you want to, listen to pop music. Watch blockbuster popcorn flicks. Read dime store novels. Enjoy them.
Dye your hair or cut it off. Paint your fingernails blue. Wear whatever the fuck you want on your own time (ie, when not at a job or school or whatever where you can get penalized for breaking rules) as long as you aren’t like welding or shoveling snow.
Anyone who tries to tell you you’re wrong? Say “okay” and go back to what you were doing. You’re not hurting them by enjoying yourself or having things the way you like them.
There are no caveats or addendums to this. No “but what about x?” Nah. You’re allowed the things you like. You don’t have to justify your taste or apologize for it if it’s not hurting anyone.
And likewise, let other people live their lives. We’re all dead in the long run, so tend your own garden before you become fertilizer in it.
I'm 54 and this is solid advice. This thing we're all doing? It's not a dress rehearsal, it's life; the real thing. So here I am with blue hair, an undercut, tattoos and piercings telling you to get your freak on, whatever that is. And don't be a dick.
this messed up vintage cat sewing pattern has tormented me since i saw it & like some other folks have done in that post - i tried my hand at tweaking the pattern to resemble the illustration (and my personal tastes) a little more. i've ended up with this, which i have only tested at a small scale and not this final version exactly (where i have done such things as further widening the cheeks and finalizing the leg shapes.) i bestow it upon you nice folks now 👐
go forth and make weird little beanbag kittens! pls show me if you do!
My first attempt! I made the pattern a bit smaller as I wanted it to be able to fit in a pocket, but then (accidentally but perhaps unavoidably) sewed it with a wider seam allowance than the resized pattern indicated, so the face is proportionally a bit too big and I lost some detail in the ear shape. I'm pleased with it though! It was fun to make something and to do some handsewing.
This artist’s impression visualizes a variety of terrestrial planets.
There are several ways to find a planet, but most methods are best at discovering worlds that are gargantuan, ultra-close to their star, or both. Those toasty, star-hugging planets are fascinating, however astronomers want to find more familiar worlds too. One of the most mind-bending planet hunting methods, called microlensing, promises to reveal planets like those in our solar system thanks to tiny wrinkles in space-time.
Microlensing is a light-bending phenomenon that occurs because anything that has mass warps the fabric of space-time, sort of like the sag a bowling ball makes when set on a trampoline. The effect is extreme around the heftiest objects, like black holes and entire galaxies. But even stars and planets cause a detectable degree of warping.
This animation illustrates the concept of gravitational microlensing. When one star in the sky appears to pass nearly in front of another, the light rays of the background source star become bent due to the warped space-time around the foreground star. This star acts like a virtual magnifying glass, amplifying the brightness of the background source star. If the nearer star harbors a planetary system, then those planets can also act as lenses, each one producing a short deviation in the brightness of the source. When astronomers find planets this way, they can measure their mass and orbital distance from their host star.
Here’s how it works. Light travels in a straight line, but if space-time is bent — which happens near something massive, like a star — light follows the curve. Any time two stars align closely from our vantage point, light from the more distant star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer star.
If the alignment is especially close, the nearer star acts like a cosmic lens, focusing and amplifying light from the background star. Planets orbiting the foreground star may also modify the lensed light, acting as their own tiny magnifying glasses. Astronomers see the effect as a spike in the star’s brightness.
This animation illustrates how a star and orbiting planet can lens light from a farther star when they align from our vantage point.
Even for powerful telescopes, it’s extremely difficult to see these little surges of starlight. For one thing, they’re rare — they rely on chance alignments between two widely separated and unrelated stars drifting through space. And the signals often only last a few hours before disappearing forever, so there is some luck involved.
Telescopes on the ground also have to peer through Earth’s hazy atmosphere, which can make images too blurry to tell different stars apart. Put all that together, and it’s little surprise that less than 5% of known exoplanets have been found using this method so far.
A rogue planet drifts through the galaxy alone, untethered to a star.
But microlensing can reveal a wide variety of worlds, including ones too small or far from their host star for other methods to detect. While other techniques are biased toward bizarre planets, like lava worlds and hot Jupiters, microlensing is best suited to finding familiar ones — worlds in their star’s habitable zone and even farther out.
That includes ice giants, like Uranus and Neptune in our solar system, and even rogue planets — worlds freely roaming the galaxy unbound to any stars.
Most microlensing exoplanets discovered so far were found by ground based observatories, though our retired Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes found a few too. Soon our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will begin surveying the cosmos, and its wide, sharp view will take us from dozens of microlensing planets to more than a thousand! Who knows how many Earth-like planets will be among them?
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!
Shoutout to Nazgul, the 2yo Czechoslovakian wolfdog who ran onto the cross-country skiing course and across the finish line to the crowd's cheers.
No worries: He's a local pet, he's friendly, he didn't interfere with any athletes' results, and he was returned to his owners. Videos at the link. [X]
As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.
There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.
We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.
Here's something from Margaret Killjoy. Not cropped to annoy those of you that loved cropped screengrabs. Also not cropped because I have better things to do and found all of this on Facebook, where someone other industrious soul copied it from Bluesky. If you haven't listened to Margaret Killjoy's podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, I recommend it.
Okay y'all. So. I'm making a thing and it's going to be horrible, so obviously I need to share it with Tumblr.
For context, @kedreeva recently did a fun new year's ask game where they shared recipes from a cookbook. Most of them sounded really tasty! And then I saw... this one.
(recipe image from Kedreeva's blog)
My thought process was as follows:
That sounds like an absolute abomination
But...
I like salmon (usually)
I like mousse (of the dessert variety, ideally chocolate)
I generally enjoy things with obscene amounts of condiments (though a cup of mayonnaise, admittedly, is very iffy)
I have a group of friends who will go out of their way to try literally any weird snack they can find (we've eaten durian pocky and dill pickle cotton candy, but that's another story), and they'd totally let me force this upon them, and, most importantly,
I could finally use my fish molds for their intended unholy purpose.
Yes, the fish molds. My collection of seafood-themed vintage copper pans that occasionally get used for breads or cakes but mostly just hang on the wall because I have opinions about kitchen decor and one of those opinions is that there should be copper fish everywhere. These things are literally designed for horrendous '60s savory gelatin concoctions. So I figure I have to make one eventually. Y'know, for the sake of the fish. Savory mayonnaise jello is probably enrichment for them or something.
So basically, all of this is to justify why I'm making salmon mousse tonight and liveblogging the process. I suggest blocking the tag "crow's salmon adventure" if you don't want to see... well. Gelatin. Mayo. Canned fish juices. Et cetera.
No. No for the love of god do not grease the mold with mayonnaise do not tenderly rub globs of mayo into the cold scales of the fish mold with your bare hands learn from my mistakes and save yourself from salmon hell.
Going in the fridge now. You'll all have to wait until Thursday for the final unveiling, but I'll add an update tomorrow for the cucumber-dill sauce. Now it's time to sit on the couch and question my life choices for a while.
i was opening up the nature center and a little wasp flew by while i unlocked the door so i let him out. then i looked down, and there was a spider, a millipede, and two rollie-pollie bugs waiting at the door and they all walked out in a line like they’d been at a party together overnight.
it’s been two weeks and i can’t stop thinking about it.
Last month my mom sent me a link with a story about a pack of desert lions in Namibia that decided to move to the beach in a search for food, and I've been thinking about it since I read it, like
Imagine finding those big girls in a beach, of all places
A pack of desert lions in Namibia is adapting to the rugged terrain of the Atlantic coast, and wildlife photographer Griet Van Malderen is d
