Origami Around
Cosmic Funnies
Janaina Medeiros
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
No title available
Keni
Mike Driver
@theartofmadeline
NASA
Monterey Bay Aquarium
we're not kids anymore.
Show & Tell
i don't do bad sauce passes
#extradirty
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
ojovivo
No title available
Claire Keane
Game of Thrones Daily
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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@teddynika
Me, before I saw this: old timey dancing in cartoons has to be over-exaggerated for effect
Me, now: old timey dancing in cartoons had to be toned down to promote a sense of realism because they were too good at it
For anybody wondering, by the way, this particular dance is called the Hellzapoppin and it's a variation of the Jitterbug.
This is an awesome use of what is probably a master's degree if not a doctorate and I am 100% thrilled that she shared it even though it was embarrassing and she squeaked.
Thank you, adorable scientist, for making people's lives better.
As an Australian, THIS WOMAN IS A FUCKING GODSEND.
this is Hannah Fry, Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
light of Aurora, Anastasia Trusova, acrylic, 2021
What’s 17 more years?
Back on the “most good Mark variants died trying to fight their father”
American Kestrel | Raptors of North America
sketching!
"The was only one bed!"
[Characters from CTC]
And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?
Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu
Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF
They didn't really get it.
What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?
i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was
you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.
Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.
But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.
But first, some context.
See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.
Adobe changed all that with PDF.
Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.
Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.
Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.
Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.
Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.
If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.
(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)
So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.
The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.
"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"
Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".
@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.
the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)
Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.
This makes sense, I think.
They saw in tumblr potential for a universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms, and potentially becomes the dominant form of interconnectivity between platforms.
Except they fumbled it massively?
That’s my understanding of the above.
People frequently ask me why I’m still on tumblr and one of the things I tell them is the fact you can post anything on here. It’s not limited to one form of media. And yes you can post videos and reels or whatever now. But not back then. And gif sets are still best on tumblr. Sorry.
you know, the more i think about it, the angrier i get about how mainstream media and even people in general treated marie kondo when the life changing magic of tidying up got big. it's just so unnecessary and sad to me and i think the vast majority of people would love what she has to say if they just actually looked into it instead of maliciously memeing her to death? i'm not talking about the cutesy does it spark joy stuff but all the things portraying her as some bizarre evil cleaning dictator.
i actually read her book when i was about twelve years old, in the most shocking and probably only example of me ever being ahead of a trend, and even at twelve i really loved everything she said. at that point in time i lived in fear of my mother's threats that she would come and throw everything away while i was school, and my small and very adhd mind simply could not grasp the concept of "have less stuff". have less of WHICH stuff? how? i'd never actually been taught how to clean my room besides being told "pick up stuff" and "be organized", and as she points out multiple times, cleaning is not an intuitive thing. it's a learned behavior and skill.
anyways. her entire philosophy centers on surrounding yourself with things that you love, and only things that you love (or things that you absolutely need). she explicitly says over and over again that it is not about throwing things away, it is not about minimalism, it is not about "what is the smallest amount possible that you can survive on". she literally has a whole section where she talks about how hard it can be to throw things away when you've lived in poverty all your life and you don't have absolute confidence that you can replace something that you really needed if it gets thrown out, even though you're not likely to ever really need it--you've just been conditioned to think that because that's literally how you survive, when you're poor. she talks about how that mindset can serve and how it can damage. she talks about how minimalism is sort of a rich people thing, cause they can afford to throw everything away.
this woman really came out here and said "i want you to be surrounded by things you love and i'm going to validate your fears and your difficulties in getting to that place" and people somehow got mad at her. i don't understand it
The idea of hers that helped me the most was one of the more...shinto-y ones.
That we are the caretakers of the objects we keep and have an obligation to not only care for them, but also to *use them for their purpose.*
If you don't wear that jacket, no matter how cute it is, it is a disservice to let it rot away in your closet. Let it go on to be worn by someone else. It's not that you didn't love it enough- it's that you love it enough to let it serve its purpose, even if it's not with you.
And I think that's very freeing. It helped me, at least, with the guilt of letting go of "still usable" objects that I just wasn't using.
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
Atom Eve - skull_fraxr
𝐈𝐍𝐕𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐈𝐁𝐋𝐄 (+ 🩷 𝓐𝓽𝓸𝓶 𝓔𝓿𝓮 🩷)
In the years after the US Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the agency dispatched photographers to document pollution and contami
Formaldehyde, brick dust, lead, and borax once made grocery shopping a minefield.
Shit used to be wild, and this is just what I could find that had decent sources, I've heard a lot more horror stories.
I'm not excited to live in a word without regulation. 🙃
"Regulations don't exist because governments enjoy them" is an important statement here. The government has to spend money and labor to enforce regulations. The government has to be begged for years and sometimes threatened by the American people into even creating the regulations. The people with the money want you to believe regulations are "BIG GOVERNMENT INFRINGING ON OUR FREEDOMS" so you'll help them undo the regulations your grandparents had to force that same government to install in the first fucking place. They count on you being ignorant of the past so they can make another round of dirty money by poisoning you all over again.
Whenever I hear "cutting red tape" I think of food inspections and water runoff rules. Whenever I hear someone complain that it's not fair, how they can't compete as a business with all these "unnecessary" regulations, I think of the safety guards on various industrial machines I've worked. "It's not fair that I could be making so much more money if I was allowed to lie cheat steal and harm the public" is not actually a winning take, and yet
This is a bell curve meme to me
Because the obvious (and wrong) answer is that Magneto beats Tony easily because he can control Tony's armor and crush him
But the smarter (and wrong) answer is that Iron Man's armor isn't actually made of iron, it's made of a non-magnetic gold-titanium alloy.
But then the smartest and true answer is that Magneto beats Tony easily because Tony has metal shrapnel in his bloodstream that he needs a powerful electromagnet to stop from reaching his heart.
Reblog to give prev the power to write their fanfiction
