You will stand, a vision

Cate, any pronouns, appreciating my 30s

[fidget-sinner]

En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.

[typewriter-worries]

The New York Times did a piece titled 100 Small Acts of Love and these are some of my favorites 💕

[draconym]

I've been in an evil mood for hours and I just discovered there was a piece of glitter stuck in my contact lens so I'm going to assume it was that the whole time and now the curse has been lifted.

[draconym]

yeah it was the eye glitter. I'm fine now.

[gardensandghosts]

What in the fuck did you possibly do to get hit with the modern day “shard of magical ice in eye that freezes your soul and makes you unable to recognize joy” curse? Like come back here that is literally how the fairytale goes, WHAT happened to you

[draconym]

Cast in a rock opera about vampires that is set in the 80s. There's a lot of glitter.

[gardensandghosts]

Oh that fucking slaps! It’s not Tanz der Vampire, right? What is it?

[draconym]

American Vamp by the Baltimore Rock Opera Society! Here I am playing an office worker getting attacked by a vampire:

We write all our own scripts and music so every show is something never seen before.

It's sold out and the Livestream was this past week but the video will be available in the Video Vault after the show.

[gardensandghosts]

OH HELL YEAH!!!!!!

@gothiccharmschool you gotta see this too

[gothiccharmschool]

OOOOOOH YES! I definitely need to see this.

[romancenjoyer]

“the possibility of rejection is essential to forming deep relationships with people” - chanté joseph for british vogue

[romancenjoyer]

[the-supernatural-atheist]

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

[the-supernatural-atheist]

where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*

[makaeru]

I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".

[marzipanandminutiae]

this is exactly why I love talking about historical passive heating and cooling techniques

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

(also public transit. the history of public transit in the US is infuriating, because we had it! and then we destroyed it!)

[deadbishop-blog]

[broken-horn-of-equius]

Evidently landlord and lawyer were some rough slander 250 years ago, maybe we still have some things in common with the founding fathers

[silencedrowns]

my favorite thing about this movie is that it pissed off Nixon so badly (by having a song about how conservatives are obstructionist) that he tried to not only have the song cut but also get the negatives for that scene destroyed and they only added the song back in decades later

it’s on YouTube now though! So you can watch the musical number that made Nixon do a whiny baby tantrum!

[beemovieerotica]

shout out to the film’s editor who back in the 1970’s completely hid the negatives for that scene for decades allowing us to have it restored for the 2002 re-release

[animate-mush]

It’s a banger of a song too

[lezbianz]

being a humanities major who’s friends with stem majors is so funny because you’ll ask your friends what they’re doing today and they’re like “UGH it’s so stressful i have to stabilize the reactor core for my nuclear power midterm and then i have to build the supercomputer from i have no mouth yet i must scream for my electrical engineering homework :/ what about you” and you’re like “oh well i have to read a fun little book and write an essay about gender.” and they still think you have it worse

[freakinflipflop]

Being a stem major who's friends with humanities majors is ALSO funny bc you ask what's goin on with them and they're like "oh yeah my day's pretty good! I only have to read 50 pages for this one class today and half a book for another one. It's much better than last week where I read three books and wrote a 10 page paper about their overlapping motifs for one class while also researching a niche period of time that our library doesn't have any resources on. How's it been for you?" and you're like "oh I have a lil packet of fun math puzzles due tomorrow." and they look at you like you're carrying the weight of the universe on your back

[tesria]

This is your reminder that just because something falls within the skillset you've practiced, so you can do it and you don't find it particularly hard or stressful relative to other things, it doesn't mean it isn't actually hard work you should be proud of yourself for accomplishing!

[3amfanfiction]

this applies to writing and art, too

[ilsa-fireswan]

Everyone always wants to talk about my sister's art and gets really amused when it's my turn to answer "so what are you doing" and I'm using the same hyped language about spreadsheets, filing systems, and taxes. I may not can art a picture, but I can logistics an art studio!

[thememedaddy]

[berylian]

[cherabby]

[sconesfortea]

RIP Anthony Stewart Head (1954 - 2026)

[plutoarttv]

prometheus: hot take,

the greek gods: no give that back

[permetutotheworld]

I shouldn’t have laughed that loudly

[truetgirl]

Car Trunk vs Car Boot: A clear win for US English, trunk was already a thing in which you stored items, frequently for transport.

Crisps vs Chips: I gotta admit, the Brits have this one. They're thin slices of potato that have been made crispy. No chipping of any materials involved.

Car Park vs Parking Lot: Equally matched. What's a car park? A place to park cars. What's a parking lot? An otherwise empty lot where you can park.

Elevator vs Lift: Both equally fail to address that the damn thing also goes down.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[beardedmrbean]

[yorgen-sh]

[okmoonkid]

[unliikelylovers]

it’s been said before and it’s not even close to the worst thing but it sucks how our current robber barons are such philistines. like these guys aren’t even building libraries or concert halls. they can’t even pretend to enjoy art, and they don’t see any value in signaling that they appreciate art

[higglety]

this current batch of the fithy-rich is BORING. They're BORING. Oh you have a yacht that's bigger than anybody else's yacht but functionally no different from one of your fancy houses? BORING. You have yet another fast car? YAWN. You ate a burger but like, a special burger? whatever. FUND AN OPERA ABOUT ANOTHER RICH GUY YOU HATE, DIPSHITS. How about you put a concert hall with your name on it in every city in the US and fund their operations for the next decade, if you're so rich????? unless you're too poor to afford that????? How many people do you, personally, directly employ, and what are their salaries? Do you pay well enough to command the loyalty and willing service of any masters of their craft? It would be so easy to win the absolute love and adoration of the masses in this climate but no, they wanna build bunkers and play politics in order to save a few more miserable nickles.

[mikkeneko]

@capriceandwhimsy reminds me of your rabbit hole about yachts

[jonnywaistcoat]

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

I love that and want to add my own.

The 20 Minutes Late with Starbucks hypothesis: They noticed us and want to meet us! But since they are several million light-years away and don't have FTL travel, they're just gonna take a while.

[nonasuch]

Personally I lean towards the First One At The Party Theory. Yeah, the universe is 13 billion years old, but our own life-supporting solar system is 4.6 billion and the majority of known exoplanets are younger than us.

It took about a billion years for life to arise, once our planet existed. If our galactic neighbors are operating on a similar timescale, there might just not be anyone out there yet who’s technologically advanced enough to make contact. Right now, the best we can hope for might be people at similar levels of development to us, looking out at the starts and wondering if anyone else is out there.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

don’t know if there’s an official name for this theory but I will call it the “We Can’t Talk To Fish” theory

because while I am absolutely positive that there is life out there (it seems highkey unlikely that in an infinite universe across billions of years only one planet got life), *even if* we were close enough to make contact and *even if* both sides were advanced enough to try to communicate… we might still not ever hear it because it’s in a form we don’t interpret as communication. we have trouble communicating with *other humans,* let alone other species. it’s like sending a probe underwater and hoping the fish talk back to you.