"grackle" really is a perfect name for a bird. knocked it out of the park w/ that one
Damn. That really is a grackle.
What a splendid bird!

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@thecurioustale
"grackle" really is a perfect name for a bird. knocked it out of the park w/ that one
Damn. That really is a grackle.
What a splendid bird!
Enlightenment, 2013, by Mi-Young Choi
@thecurioustale
Fallstreak hole! These "holes" in the clouds are uncommon but not truly rare; you should spot one sooner or later if you keep a lookout for them.
Perhaps more interesting is the fact that this image could only occur within the Torrid Zone between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, as the Sun is never directly overhead elsewhere, and it can never occur more than twice per year. The Tropics themselves will have this occur once annually at their respective Summer Solstice. Everywhere else in the Torrid Zone will have this happen twice a year, with each occurrence moving away from the Summer Solstice symmetrically, with the Equator experiencing it during both Equinoxes (i.e. 6 months apart).
Also, the disc of the Ocean being exposed to the Sun should be fully illuminated, not just illuminated at the periphery in a ring. Even if this were Special Enlightenment Light, that would still hold true. Unless... 🤔🤔🤔
Lastly, the level of darkness elsewhere in the painting isn't compatible with an overhead Sun fallstreak hole scenario, as it implies either a time of day close to twilight (and the Sun is only overhead at solar noon) or else a very thick layer of clouds to make conditions below the cloud deck so dark, and fallstreak holes don't typically form through thick cloud layers. The apparent thinning of the clouds immediately around the hole is also quizzical, and seems to imply that, on the other side of the clouds, a very thick cloud deck thins out on a slope before reaching the hole, which is also not how fallstreak holes work. So perhaps there is something Enlightening and/or Nefarious going on here, and the painting title does say "Enlightenment," so we should probably trust that the source of this phenomenon has Strictly Good Intentions.
Edit: I went looking and Wikipedia actually has a useful graphic for this:
I've been spending some time on an old message forum recently, but also checking in with their modern Discord server, and the whiplash is amazing.
Single-feed discussion platforms are INSANE. How did social media ever become a thing in the first place? Imagine having a neat little thread for everything and not having to wade through one gigantic mess!
O, how far we have fallen!
Zhiyong Jing, Insomnia
@thecurioustale
I was thinking recently about when last my town might have been completely empty; that is, no humans inside its limits. And my inductions basically came up with "Never." Other than the town's very beginnings as a settlement, when there might have been only a single-digit or small double-digit number of people in it, the statistics just don't seem to work out. Perhaps you could stretch the viable opening slightly longer in time by accounting for things like "the whole village went over to the next village for a wedding," or longer still by "the whole village evacuated due to fire," but I don't think either of those would last into the triple-digits of population. It could well be that I am not accounting for some various extreme scenarios, but I think it must be a pretty solid general rule that, once born, a town is never alone without its people until it dies.
Sleeping, however, seems achievable into a much higher population count: It is conceivable to me that all of the humans inside a town might be asleep somewhere into the triple-digits of its population. Now, it doesn't take much for at least one single human to be awake for any reason: a job, insomnia, sickness, a bad dream, a baby to care for (or to be awake as a baby), travel, an unusual sleep condition like my own, etc. But, given that there is a social cohesion pressure for people in small towns to conform, and given how many very small towns there are, I can easily imagine that the statistics have room on a fairly regular basis for hundreds, and certainly dozens, of people to all be a sleep together at once with no exceptions. Once you get into the upper triple-digits and low four-figures, though, this too becomes ever more vanishingly improbable. There's always going to be someone, an increasing number of someones, awake, alone together in the night.
A once-in-a-lifetime shot — the moon perfectly framed by a rainbow. Caught at just the right time. 🌈 🌕
Even the Moon’s like “Happy Pride y’all!”
Oooh...sublime!
River of light - Mt.Fuji, Shizuoka, Japan. Photography by N Shibuya on 500px
I'd like to think so!
Even in her slender mode. Maybe even especially, since that is Silence at her height!
i would never wish celiac on anyone but sometimes i wish i could give people the experience temporarily so they stop judging me for being so cautious around food. someone once gave me a hard time for only ever ordering the same thing at one of the few local restaurants i can eat at, and it's like.... well, i have confirmed that this one thing will not poison me. i have not yet confirmed that anything else on the menu will not poison me. i don't feel like violently throwing up today if i take a risk that pans out badly.
last year i got to eat at a dedicated gluten free restaurant, which i almost never get to do, which meant i got to ask the waiter to recommend anything from the whole menu. i got to order the recommended dish without asking any further questions or even looking at its entry on the menu. i got to have the experience of eating something i wouldn't have thought to try on my own. it was awesome. but i kept thinking about this person treating me as though i was boring, stuck in my ways, unadventurous--as though i was making a choice, as though i preferred to eat the same thing every time. and absolutely no judgment from me against people who do prefer that, but it hurts to have a restriction that was forced on me treated like a freely made choice. i would love to eat food without thinking about it. i would love to freely try new things. unfortunately, i don't think it outweighs the violent illness and the increased cancer risk.
do not even THINK about judging me for my unwillingness to try new foods unless you've actually experienced how exhausting and depressing this kind of mental math is.
I miss being able to order from the whole menu, or really even go out to eat at all. (Never mind the money, I just mean my food intolerances.)
I still think about it sometimes that that whole dimension of my life is just...over. There is no restaurant for people with my issues.
Going to a college graduation in Israel would explode pro-Pali brains
I will elaborate once I'm less sleepy but I had to make the post before I forget
Ok I'm ready for this now.
So a few days ago I got to go to a college graduation in Israel to support a family member. You know what I saw there?
Young men and women getting their degrees, supported by their parents. Older men and women getting their degrees, supported by their children.
Men in khakis and polos. Men in tzitzit and kippot.
Women with their hair down, or in hijabs and tichels.
Black grads, Asian grads, Jewish grads, Arab grads, grads who were combinations of the above.
The "apartheid" narrative falls apart when you see all of these people standing shoulder to shoulder graduating from the same institution in the same robes with the same degrees, from so many different walks of life. In Israel.
Imagine thinking you're on the right side of history while fantasizing about committing mass-casualty violence...
the problem with horror now is there is no men in little tank tops and booty shorts
Literally saw a 20-something skinny hairy male with a walking cane on the bus in short shorts today. It was such a rare sight that I remember thinking about it. The '70s were in it to win it!
For Fuck's Sake George Lucas
One thing that bugs me about return of the Jedi is that for visual shorthand reasons they just stuck a giant fucking comms terminal in the middle of the main corridor leading onto the bridge. In Empire they had a little nook for their exposition (where Vader sees the power generators), but in RotJ it was "Nope, stick it right in the fucking middle." And they have fucking Admiral Piett, the fleet commander (who is written more like a ship commander in this movie) personally clearing shuttles to land on the moon. What the hell?
Room Full of PhDs Really Excited by Things That Go in Circles
HOUSTON, USA — Dogs, merry-go-rounds, Loop 373. Nature is full of things that go in circles. Now we can add one more item to that list: a giant, flaming bucket filled with computers that talk to other computers, shooting over our heads 16 times a day as it makes a giant, repeating circle around the Earth.
The mood was one of intense elation in the NASA control room at Houston this morning, where nearly three dozen highly-paid PhDs, most of whom got here by studying humanity's most arcane mathematical and scientific principles for at least 15 years a head, gathered to watch something of their own making go in a circle.
At a salary rate of roughly $1 to $2 dollars per minute per person, the several hundred dollar outburst of enthusiasm was a veritable steal compared to the $380 million dollars that it had taken these same individuals 18 months to get to this point with the GOFAST Earth Circler Satellite, NASA's premier Earth-circling device and the latest human triumph in circulogical engineering after Mrs. Beasley's Lazy Susan kitchen aid was installed last week in Michigan.
"This will certainly make the Chinese think twice about challenging us in the mastery of circles," speculated Chief NASA Scientist Dr. Jorge Galilei. He added, "Apart from the roughly 62,000 Earth circlers that have previously been put into circles around the Earth, no one has ever done anything like this before."
Minutes after the initial jubilation, the mood at NASA was dampened somewhat when a circulator engineer reported that the GOFAST Earth Circler Satellite was actually making a slightly imperfect circle, a geometric abomination known as an "ellipse," where one side of the circle is longer than the other side. But Chief Scientist Galilei took it in stride:
"The pattern is so close to a perfect circle that it's practically a rounding error," he said. "The difference we're talking about is narrower than a basketball in Miami hitting a split end on a human hair in Los Angeles." When asked what that meant, Galilei replied, "We struggle to put these sophisticated concepts into lay terms sometimes. But we're talking about a circle that is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly circular."
In Washington, D.C., the news was less warmly received. "I hear it's costing a lot of money," said President Scroob, who has frequently been dismissive of his own, recently-renamed Department of Platonic Geometry, formerly the Department of Circles. "I think triangles are a lot more efficient," he said. "I make really good triangles, and it's just...really the best...some people even call me 'The Triangulator.' They say, 'Sir, make me a triangle,' and I'll do it for them. It's amazing. And they say, 'Nobody makes better triangles.' Which, to be fair, is something I've heard all my life, so maybe it's true; I don't know. But all you crooked media people want to report on is circles, but behind closed doors you're always telling me, 'Sir, you make such good triangles.' It's unbelievable."
Back at the NASA control room in Houston, the scale of the day's accomplishment was best captured by a relatively new hire: a Junior Radius Technician named Millie Chester.
"I know a lot of people don't think it's all that impressive anymore that we can make circles," she said. "They look on TV and they see AI-generated circles that are mathematically perfect. But the difference is that our circles are really there. It's not easy to put a circulator in the sky. It took this entire room of highly-paid circle experts, and hundreds more at our other laboratories and factories around the nation, to get to this point. Nature makes circles so easily, but humanity really has to work for it."
And work for it they shall: Despite presidential misgivings, the next NASA Earth Circler is scheduled to launch in 2027, with the ambitious goal of making circles around the Moon—itself a noted maker of circles around our planet.
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All Ashore - Jack Standish
American , b. 1949 -
Watercolour, 21 x 25.5. in.
@thecurioustale
All ashore!
The much less common (nowadays) counterpart to "All aboard!"
I knew a person once who had a home like this, an old salt of the sea from the New England lobster fleet.
There is little in life that has ever been harder than being a mariner of old, except for those jobs of slavery and servitude and early industrialization where you were simply expected to die. Yet there is something deeply personal and profound to it, too. A romance that few would ever understand. I don't know that life, myself, but I think that in another lifetime I might have.
I don't want to over-romanticize it; I'm aware that just about any profession dominated by young males looking for money and willing to court danger in the search for it is subject to many of the crassest and worst aspects of the human spirit. But...not all mariners are the same, after all, any more than are the waters they travel.
It's literally so punk, so counterculture, to be fat and anti diet. People hate it. They hate it so much that you eat food for pleasure instead of weight loss. It's freeing
The Final Entries of the Ship's Log of the Airship Resplendent
19:13'07": Damage Control reports Holes in the main balloon from attacking enemy guns.
19:13'20": Mathematicians deployed to investigate the claim.
19:14'53": Chief Topologist thrown overboard by mutineers.
19:14'59": Crash sensors record catastrophic impact.
herron basque [she/her] for @spaginithethird !!
★ comm info ★
Now that is a well-fed tail!!
If only Lady Schala had been able to ascend the throne, where might we be now in history? Yet the future refuses to change, and we must make of it what we may.