Stephenopolos

Somewhere beyond the sea

[kaiyves-backup]

what's your favorite space mission?

Oh wow, uh…

Well, I guess mathematically my favorite should be the one I have the most happy moments associated with cumulatively, right? So probably either Spirit and Opportunity together, or Cassini-Huygens.

Oppy and Spirit I was aware of from when they touched down to the ends of both of their missions. I wrote school reports and articles on them, drew pictures, and appreciated every new article and documentary about them that came out for years and years. Their photos from Mars were one of the brightest spots of my life during the darkest adolescent days of 7th grade, especially those eerie blue sunsets.

Cassini was always part of my life from the first newspaper articles as it approached Saturn, and it was up until it burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere 13 years later. When I went on a Student Ambassador trip to Australia when I was 14, I did a homestay with a family who lived out in the Bush at a fairly remote farm that had its own electric generator, and I marveled that they had recently gotten an Internet hookup and I was able to see Cassini’s latest images of Enceladus even there. Even though Cassini has been gone for almost a decade now, I still feel weird logging onto Tumblr and not having NEW beautiful pics from the Saturn system to scroll through because that was my experience on here for 7 years straight.

[stephenopolos]

Honestly, I still get a laugh over us naming Jupiter and the moons after Jupiter's consorts, and then NASA choosing to send Juno to go check up on them.

[beardedmrbean]

You'll want the sound on here, this big ole chonker is teaching us all a valuable lesson

[bearotonin-international]

Practicing to be a life sabear

[bearotonin-international]

on closer thought, we missed the obvious conclusion that Twinkle is demonstrating his skills as a trained bearamedic

[writing-prompt-s]

You can cure people by removing their illness and turning it into slime, which must be kept sealed in jars. The slime still carries the sickness, and if anyone else touches it, they can catch the illness themselves.

[stephenopolos]

Is this just a thinly veiled excuse for a Pandoras box story?

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[hawkin-byrd]

what is this from

[graceofgosh]

the titanic

[truder]

I FUCKING FORGOT I QUEUED THIS

For all who celebrate man’s hubris!

[gandalfthequeer]

the only time of the year this can be posted

[stephenopolos]

Suggested Title: Pounded in the butt by the physical manifestation of YouTube's age evaluating AI.

[pipistrellus]

when ppl act like leaving gifts for fairies is to get the fairies’ attention so they’ll be kind to you~~ when really leaving gifts for fairies is the supernatural equivalent of a mafia protection racket

[hellenhighwater]

gotta pay off the Mab

[taraxippos]

Did anyone ever like attempt to document and compile the variations of Barney the dinosaur murder ballads across the elementary school system in the early 2000s. Like legit it has always fascinated me as a phenomena and I would love to know if there were like traceable regional variations or what.

[taraxippos]

Looking at the tags so far I’m kind of fascinated by how much the ‘I Love You’ parodies vary in their phrasing/murder weapons but the ‘Joy to the World’ ones are nearly identical

[karvina]

here is my collection of barney murder songs as they appeared in the notes and comments of this post at about 4 pm pacific 7/25, somewhat arbitrarily color coded to show similar memes. it appears that "baseball bat and 2x4" is the mode configuration but there is so much variation that that exact phrasing only makes up a small part of the set. if i knew more about statistical modeling i would turn this into some kind of data tree that shows which phrases are most likely to follow other phrases.

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

Language is universal

[copperbadge]

I wasn't going to reblog this but every time I take a slightly too large bite of food now I think "mampf mampf mampf" to myself and clearly it and come into my life for an important reason (whimsy).

[ID: A screengrab of a social media post showing a photograph of a train from the front; the train has been stalled out by an enormous bale of hay, but the shape of the train and its slight tilt makes it look like it's having a snack. It is captioned "Hmmmm wer hat mir dieses Schmackhavte Heu hergelegt…mampf mampf mampf".]

[dignitywhatdignity]

I showed 4.75yo this picture and asked if the train was having a snack. He looked slightly perplexed and said, "Yes, but trains eat coal."

[copperbadge]

That's hilarious and also quite smart but did make me think -- you CAN burn straw to make steam, but it's much less energy dense and takes much more effort to grow.

Which means for a train, it's a low-nutrient, high-cost snack....it's junk food. :D

[startrekuniverse]

Jonathan Frakes taking over the moderation of the Star Trek Picard panel with Peyton List, Ed Speleers and Michelle Hurd on FedCon 33.

[stephenopolos]

Joke RR Toldyou

They woke up feeling horrible and told themselves they would finally, really, 100% go to bed early that night.

But they were, all of them, deceived, for in defiance of all laws of man and god, another late bedtime was forged.

[sri-fanfic]

Bad HP idea time.

150. Dolores is so toad-like that some enterprising prankster students put one of Hagrid's chicken's eggs under her chair in the great hall… much to their astonishment it actually does hatch into a snake, just not a basilisk.

A ridiculous looking pink snake with pink feathers that goes, "hem hem" every couple minutes...

[sri-fanfic]

Follow up!

It's entirely part of the magic of the ritual, that the most successful examples of that rite ending in the hatched snake eating the toad that incubated it.

And, despite the similarities, the snake absolutely loathes Delores.

And, given the nature of the incubation it's a particularly venomous breed of snake. Harry promptly breaks out in a fit of giggles hearing what the snake has to say about her:

"What's so funny, Potter?" "That snake despises Umbridge. And she's got a mouth on her."

[stephenopolos]

but just imagine for a moment, the school is sitting in the great hall for a meal, when harry looks up and looks around cause he hears that hissing voice from somewhere, and then umbridge's dress/robes start to erect… one student yells, "Hah, I knew she wasn't a lady." Harry pales and goes, "Oh no, that's not what you think that is, it's hissing!" then umbridge notices and jumps off the chair revealing a pink snake with a little feather crest.

Harry starts cackling.

"Potter, I suppose you think this funny?" Snape yells.

"No, well yes, but no, I mean, I didn't do it, but remember I'm a parselmouth and that snake…" gasping and giggling. "The snake has a very very foul mouth, I think I learned a few new insults."

[sri-fanfic]

Random HP Fanfic idea

119. Unicorn Blood is actually mercury based; the "curse" for consuming it is magically induced mercury poisoning, (and the magic in the mercury prevents it from being filtered out by a bezoar or similar). How do they get mercury into their blood? they clean it from the environment... it's part of their purification effect on local ecosystems; their magic just sort of pulls it out of water and earth in miles wide radius around them.

Ironically, unicorns will sort of thrive in areas that have industrial mercury contamination as they absorb the pollutants purifying the land around them. Their natural habitat would of course be around natural geothermal hot-springs since those can be a source of natural mercury contamination.

[stephenopolos]

Keep thinking about this one and how a modern unicorn herd would love the heck out of modern industrial sites like pit mines and anywhere industrial waste exists.

[elvis-official]

hey Elvis is the glass half full or half empty to you?

Woah mama it depends on whether you're filling or emptying

[elvis-official]

Endless optimism is a foolish way to look at the world, unable to see the strife and suffering. Endless pessimism will never make anyone happy, especially not you. You need to take the good and the bad, the dark and the light, the full and the empty. Hummina hummina hummina

[stephenopolos]

getting life advice from the elvis blog was not on my bingo card for the day.

[speedlimit15]

why didn’t gandalf just carry the ring to mordor himself with these tongs

[speedlimit15]

like i’m picturing him being really careful and looking at it and carrying it exactly like this while walking or riding through the woods and across rivers and up mountains and through valleys and he doesn’t drop it even once except at the very end where he tidily drops it into the volcano. frodo sam and the crew and even gollum wholly undisturbed. sauron can’t find him bc of the meditative aura surrounding him which is generated by his immense focus on not dropping it

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

World’s most tense egg and spoon race

[green-great-dragon]

this somehow became the funniest thing on earth in my head and I had to draw it so

[guerrillatech]

[pyrrhiccomedy]

when people pop off with some ass take like "why should I have to put my pronouns in my profile or signature or whatever, my name is Tom and I have short hair and am wearing an oxford shirt in my profile pic, figure it out" I always think

so do you just not talk to people from other countries for your job, ever?

like, some people don't, and you can follow the flowchart to a different part of the argument about why pushing back about pronouns is stupid, but I e-mail people in Singapore and Dubai and Japan and India every day. A lot of those people have names that are probably their local equivalent of "Tom," but I have never seen them before and I have no idea if that's a girl's name or a boy's name. They usually have profile pics too. I don't know how common short hair is for women or long hair is for men in their country. I don't know if that style of shirt is more common for men or more common for women. I'm not writing this from some homogenous whitebread oasis, either, I live in New York City, it's just simply not possible for me to know the common names in every language of every country where the people I need to work with, live.

just put your stupid pronouns in your signature, some exasperated project manager in Mumbai will one day appreciate it

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I'm always teeth grit rolling the fucking dice on some Tsumugi on the Tokyo team rocking a pixie cut and a blue shirt, help me

you are that Tsumugi to somebody

[joomju]

I had an older, white, male coworker ask me over message:

"Hi, the Team Lead for our sister team... I need to ask them a favour. I've never met them in person, and their name is Chinese. Are they a man or a woman?"

And I was like "<Name's> pronouns are she/her"

This guy had never seen pronouns used in the wild before. He honestly thought they only mattered to people who flew the rainbow flag in their office. The look of dawning comprehension in his eyes warmed my heart for a solid week.