Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Mike Driver
Janaina Medeiros
trying on a metaphor
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
@theartofmadeline
NASA
blake kathryn
DEAR READER
titsay
dirt enthusiast
noise dept.
Three Goblin Art
No title available
Today's Document
JBB: An Artblog!
Cosmic Funnies
izzy's playlists!
YOU ARE THE REASON
if i look back, i am lost
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from Italy
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from Italy
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seen from Kazakhstan
@space--turbulence
“Where are the trans men in history?” See. When you're born a gender that was forcefully married off, who had to live most of their life indoors, when you had to raise children, and had a lobotomy if your family thought you were a tad too odd, it's kinda hard to come out as a trans man now ain't it.
forever my lineage would use his wrong pronouns but not me
We asked the waiter to take a photo of us at dinner
Superstition wildflower bloom
imhoff.imagery
*gathers all of the people in the world who write the number 7 with a little dash in the center of it so I can study them like little critters and find out what makes them do that*
There’s actually a lot of history regarding the development writing systems and why there are different visual representations of numerals, but the short answer is: it’s regional, and you probably picked up how to make your numbers look based on your parents or your primary school teachers
No. This is a terrible answer and also wrong. “Regional” is not an answer because all regional traditions had to be invented by someone, and they had to be invented by someone for an actual reason besides “I’m copying what other people did” since the person who invented it was the first person to do it.
And in this case, there is an actual, PRACTICAL reason to write the number 7 this way.
Back in ye olden days, people had to write numbers and letters by hand. And they had bad handwriting.
You could write the number 1 as a straight line, but then it looked too much like the letter l. What if you needed to jot down an alphanumeric serial number? How could you tell which was which?
You could put a little flag on top of the 1 to differentiate it from the letter l, but then it looked too much like a 7 in your messy garbage handwriting.
Solution! Draw a little line through the center of the 7, so that people know you aren’t writing a 1 with a little flag on top to differentiate it from a letter l.
a vampire's long term fwbb (friend with blood benefits) making an idle remark about how it was a struggle to handle the aphrodisiac in the bite venom for the first while but now they're used to it and know to expect it and the vampire saying "hey um. so I don't have any bite venom. like at all."
Nights in the Lavender Fields of Valensole, France
anthonynightscapes photography
this guy’s awesome fujoshi wife…
It's coming along. Wish me luck I'm about to use holographic filament for the first time.
ngl didn't realize this was unfinished at first and thought this was just a really weird shitpost
Tags via @imissthembutitwasntadisaster
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
The ocean is scary.
It's kinda funny when you get a bunch of likes but no reblogs like I enjoyed your post but I'd prefer if no one else saw it
where is the superb owl
I want to see him
tumblr users, overall, have low financial literacy. and like, I get it. it’s not shocking that a majority user base of chronically broke-adjacent people are intimidated by and/or think it’s useless to learn about financial systems. I’m not surprised by this. but I do think it’s really really important to have an understanding of business and financial concepts, even when it’s dense and scary, because it’s fundamental to how the modern world works. this post is inspired by the notes on this post about the idea of bankification and is for an american audience.
when you deposit a paycheck in a traditional bank account, you go online and see the number in your balance. to you, it looks like there is a single account that quarantines your money away from everybody else’s. you may think that when you deposit money in the bank, the bank is just holding that money for you, but actually, by depositing money is a bank, you are lending the bank company your money.
a bank company’s core function is to make money by bundling together the deposits that many customers have lent it, and investing that money in the stock market. the bank’s investments earn interest, which is the bank’s profit. if you have a savings account, you’re essentially telling the bank “hey, I plan to have this money sitting here for a while without drawing on it.” a savings account is a more stable investment base than a checking account for the bank, which is why the company incentivizes you to have one. when you earn interest on a savings account, that is the bank giving you a tiny kickback of the money they are making through investing your (and others’ blended) deposits.
the traditional banking system is insured by the federal deposit insurance corporation (FDIC), which is a government agency. if you took all your money out of the bank and hid it under your mattress, if somebody broke into your house and stole it, you will lose all your money. but the government insures money in traditional banks, usually up to $250,000 per consumer account. this means that even if the bank company’s investments all fail and the bank company loses all your cash, the government will bail the bank out, and you will not lose your money.
by putting your money in a traditional bank, you ensure your money is protected, you get a small kickback of interest, and you get access to the convenience of the bank’s online platform to track your finances. you also get a debit card to easily make purchases by drawing directly from your accounts. for the bank company, they get billions of dollars of interest-free loans, in the form of their customer’s deposits, to invest in the stock market. at its core, ignoring fees and credit cards and mortgages, this is how the banking system works.
bankification is the idea that non-banking companies are trying to operate like banks. this includes tech companies like Apple offering credit cards, but an aspect of bankification that is less understood is companies incentivizing consumers to give them interest-free loans. while banks are regulated by the government in exactly when and how they can operate within this business model, other companies trying to profit through this model are not always beholden to these regulations because their activities are not technically considered banking. let’s look at an example: loyalty programs.
in 2025, starbucks has an estimated $2 billion in deferred revenue from their loyalty program. deferred revenue is like a gift card; the company receives money because the customer paid up-front for the gift card, but the company is beholden to discount a future purchase by the pre-paid amount. there are multiple advantages to receiving deferred revenue for a company.
when a customer loads money onto their starbucks loyalty account, they are essentially buying a digital gift card. remember how banks encourage consumers to put money into savings accounts because it is a long-term holding account, which makes it a more stable investment base? once you buy a gift card, you cannot convert it back into cash. the money cannot leave the company, making a very stable investment base. starbucks offers a lot of benefits and discounts for customers who load money onto their loyalty accounts because starbucks recognizes the value of a captive investment base of interest-free loans. when many customers prepay through the loyalty program, starbucks is using that pooled money the same way a bank does: investing it to make even more money.
as a side note, two other major advantages of this gift card model for companies is inflation and breakage. money loses value over time through inflation. when you buy a gift card, you pay the money upfront, and the company can invest that money sooner at its higher value. breakage is the idea that if a gift card is bought but never redeemed, then the company essentially got money for nothing.
now, does this bankification through loyalty programs directly hurt consumers? well, not really. consumers who participate in these sorts of loyalty programs get benefits like discounts. the problem is indirect harms: that this money is uninsured for the consumer, and the deferred revenue investment base is less regulated than traditional banks.
if starbucks’ investments failed and the company died, any money those customers had paid into the loyalty program but had not yet used on purchases would disappear. the money is not insured, so the customer wouldn’t get it back. the same is true for keeping your money in any non-FDIC insured company, including companies like PayPal and Cashapp*. (*some services from those platforms, usually the credit cards, are insured because they have a backing partner bank. but a sitting balance in a free account is usually not FDIC-insured. don’t leave your money sitting in these accounts.)
because companies investing their deferred revenue is regulated and taxed differently than traditional banks’ investments, not only if there less protection for the consumer, but there is less protection for the wider economy. If a bankified company with significant investments into other bankified company fails, this can cause a shockwave effect similar to the 2008-9 financial crisis wherein all the interconnected bankified companies are destabilized. banks are heavily regulated to avoid that happening again, but bankified companies are not beholden to that legislation.
just cause it’s worth a mention, the predatory opposite-twin of the loyalty-program type bankification is buy-now pay-later bankification. buy now pay later is a more approachable way of saying financing. a mortgage is a type of financing; the bank pays for your house up-front, and you need to repay them over a period of years with interest and potential fees. again, traditional banks are heavily regulated in what they can do with financing. bankified companies offer financing on their purchases because they aren’t beholden to the same strict regulation, and they can set the time period, fees, and interest on their financing to whatever they want. bankified financing is often much more directly predatory to the consumer.
Whenever you see an industry that's heavily regulated and see companies trying to do what that industry does without being technically part of the industry, be very cautious. Non-banks playing bank, Uber and the like providing taxi-like services without being regulated like taxis, cryptocurrency pretending to be a stock market, that sort of thing.
Those regulations aren't there because somebody thought it would be fun to make everyone's life harder. They're there because of a history of scams, accidents, and failures that we looked at, as a society, and said "That shouldn't be allowed to destroy somebody's life."
This is why when conservatives wax poetic about deregulation I just blink in confusion. You… want people to get hurt… so you can have… slightly more money?
You realize people are real in a way money is fake, right?
It’s not that you have issues…… it’s that you have a tendency to continue using instincts you picked up in childhood that are no longer useful to you on your journey towards achieving openness and intimacy and reliability in your personal relationships w others. It’s not that you’re defective or difficult or incapable it’s just that what you learned to do to save yourself from the experience of abandonment or rejection or ridicule or failure is not helpful here anymore and you need to start thinking creatively and collaborating on better ways to cope with that instrinsic fear that you are not correct, that you are faking, that you will be found out and left, whatever it is
Both of these tags are right. I love when a cat will just put up with your silly human games. They love you and know you love them and are just happy with you.
i think of this ProZD video constantly its always so fucking funny
Huge torture enthusiast here to make your life and wallet miserable! Now going for only 4000 evil dollars!
They’re letting people born in 2005 be 21
There could be an ‘05 baby at the club and you wouldn’t even know. Terrifying. Please stay safe out there
