USS MassDisaster

29. i can promise fashion but unfortunately i choose other interests from a dartboard and am very bad at darts!! who knows what i'll get into next.

[grumfy]

i had a 4 hour drive today so i put on the revenge of the sith audiobook and the part where palpatine tells anakin to kill dooku came on right around the time that i saw a cybertruck and for a brief and beautiful moment when he said "do it" i had the urge to ram my honda full on into that shitty ass car

[grumfy]

everyone who says that anakin’s fall in that movie was too sudden has never been so angry at an Elon dickrider trying to cut in front of you at a traffic standstill while a droning, pleasant British voice tells you that murder is okay and necessary. I’m sorry guys but I would have folded too

[wordsintimeandspace]

I bound a little copy of The Witch's Cat by Champagne / @temporalreplicsimile! The story was the perfect opportunity to try my first buttonhole binding and I love the result. It's such a fun structure!

[spitzonthefritz]

this is going around twitter rn but im also super curious: please tell me your top four comfort movies that you’re always down to watch bc my friend thinks mine are ridiculous and now we’ve realised everyone’s version of “comfort” is hilariously different

[cipheramnesia]

I'm really enjoying the cosmic horror reinterpretation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It gets to a lot of the ambient horror of the film - what is terrifying is almost environmental, and the sense that the Sawyer family expresses something bigger and worse and more rotten to the USA than simply being cannibals.

The cosmic horror and the social commentary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fold together like two clasped hands. Much of the sense of cosmic horror and social commentary were probably accidental byproducts, but not wholly unintentional because there is no way to detach from either and there are some clear touchstones for both. And the extrapolation of these into more complex ideas is 100% attributing a degree of artistic intent which we know on record could not have existed. Too much of the movie was improvised in the moment due to low budget. Too much exists because everyone was physically and psychologically exhausted due to the miserable working conditions.

But it's such a good read on the final product. Everything from the seemingly undead grandpa to the blood symbol on the van to the sunspots for opening credits to the proto industrial score from Tobe Hooper fits so nicely into that theme, the rest of it falls into place. The heat, the nightime sequence, madness as the conclusion. It's wonderful, and when you understand the incomprehensibly vast monster is the USA itself, I think it's a way of making it understandable to a non-horror fan like it never has been before.

In many ways, the sun is almost as much a presence as any character. And when you look to the other attempts to approach the material after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, that sense of unknowable worship is very noticeably absent. Outside the hands of Tobe Hooper, we're left with people struggling to find a way into the material by the signifiers like cannibalism, the saw, or isolated rural communities. But none of them consider the real secret ingredient is that Tobe Hooper's movies are in awe of the environment, and his Sawyers are not just cannibals, but worshipers and mystics.

[cipheramnesia]

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is almost infamous for its messy, grimy realism (in part because everyone was sweaty and couldn't take showers filming in the Texas heat), but those elements are like the costumes and casual nudity of The Wicker Man from 1973, set dressing to lend veracity to a story about something bigger.

[cipheramnesia]

It's one of those films that transformed horror films forever and never stopped being an influence on the genre, but for all that it remains difficult to convince both horror fans and non-fans that one of the reasons it has been so influential is because it was and still as a sincerely beautiful work of art.

[viktor-sbor]

A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.

[e-102]

damn that shit is light lmfao

[telltaletypist]

[vienna1954]

Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!

Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.

Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful

[ben-the-hyena]

I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons

[macleod]

In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”

Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.

Lens Rotation by Thomas Tag | United States Lighthouse Society

[sashaforthewin]

Ah to be a sailor in 1890 who has to turn to his fellow men and ask "is it just me or are the lighthouses flashing faster?"

[asteroidtroglodyte]

They had been slowly getting faster for decades.

It mattered for optics reasons.

Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.

The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.

This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.

What’s a little Madness, in the face of Progress?

[myth-myth-yeth]

mods are asleep, post the fresnel lens

[cass-without-the-andra]

The mercury baths are slowly being replaced by a new system, this video about it is super interesting and explains it way better than I can!

[anothercrankyblogger]

What they aren't telling these kids that's really dangerous is that if you do make it all the way to the heart of a Scientology building, the autosave will lock you into entering the Tom Cruise boss fight chamber, and you won't be able to leave until you defeat him in combat.

[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.

[leupagus]

Hey so not to be all "what the fuck, Youths," but...what the fuck, Youths

[tiredadventurer]

[noartnowritingsorry]

Oh no…

[autistic-speedbump]

[zelda-heritage-posts]

Zelda Heritage Post

[organicmatter]

guys i just found out about this site that does a daily guessing game, it’s phylogenetic wordle- so fun!!!

[chainofclovers]

Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that

Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated

[subaru-copilot]

it gets to a point that is just weirder if they didn't fuck

[subaru-copilot]

you did all this and it was not even because you wanted to bang him? weirdo

[dailynarnia]

is jake gyllenhaal gay??

why would you ask us, a narnia blog, this

[polespullspolls]

sexiest punctuation?

!

?

.

,

:

;

" "

( )

-

/

…

[ ]

Voting ended onMay 31

[cartoon-fanaticism]

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

[dragongirlsweetie]

ok i am curious. how long is the longest song in your library (not counting tracks that are like several songs in one file like a full album mix or symphony recording or whatever) (also if it is longer than 20 minutes say the name in the tags i am curious)

how long

< 3:00

3:00–3:59

4:00–4:59

5:00–5:59

6:00–6:59

7:00–7:59

8:00–11:59

12:00–15:59

16:00–20:59

21:00–24:59

25:00–30:00

≥ 30:00

Voting ended onJun 1

[dragongirlsweetie]

ok i would like to clarify it has to be music and it can't just be a short song that's been looped a bunch. that still counts as several songs in one file, it's just several of the same song in one file. no audiobooks no podcasts no plants vs zombies theme 2 hour loop

[alphacrone]

writers and artists everywhere all the time