"a handful of dust" @uncloudedandsage - Tumblr Blog

hellopuns

The Monday Period: Part 1 of 6

Part 1: you are here

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

chaaistheanswer

I wanted to draw Edelweiss and Cassian together cos they were roommates back at Knight’s Academy. Funfact! Before meeting Erika, Edel had a crush on Cassian and even confessed, but the guy didn’t get it and only ever saw her as a little sister 🥲 It’s aight tho she got over it and found the gospel of wlw

chaaistheanswer

Extra!

hinamie

starstruck !☆

#jujutsu kaisen #kirara hoshi

chaaistheanswer

Fanart for @/so_sgoat on insta!!!!!!!! I really wanted to draw these two together........

yamino

Can't argue with true facts... 🔥🎀🧡

#sailor moon

mrhealyourgirl

hell yeah grandpa

dragonsareawesome123

"Thank you."

Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

#project hail mary

doubleca5t

One of the funniest reveals in recent US politics

serinemolecule

A lot of people don't realize just how much space car infrastructure takes up. So I've decided to provide everyone a visual aid!

I've presented two maps at the exact same zoom level, as indicated by the big red arrow. They also each have a red area circled, of approximately the same area.

In the first image, I've circled one of eightish parking lots at a US mall. A normal amount of distance for even Americans who drive everywhere to walk through.

In the second image, I've circled:

a subway station

a park

like twenty apartment buildings

like twenty restaurants

three convenience stores (which, being Japanese, can also handle banking, copying/printing, and a variety of governmental paperwork)

one grocery store (another two right outside the circle)

seven medical clinics, two pharmacies

a fire station

a post office

two preschools and three cram schools

a Shintō shrine

a Buddhist temple

multiple parking lots and a car dealership

This wasn't even a particularly cherry-picked part of Tokyo! I just picked the area around my house.

youzicha

I think it's a little misleading to compare a mall parking lot with a city block to show the impact of car-centrism. American malls are typically out in the middle of nowhere, where the land is cheap, so building a huge parking lot around them is basically free. The actual cost of the car centrism is on the other side, in the city center, when the people who live there need to store their cars somewhere.

But people in Tokyo do pay that cost! They have fewer cars, 0.3 per household, as compared to 1 per household in America and the rest of Japan, but they still have them. U.S. cities devote 22% of the area to car parking. If you cut the number of cars to a third and built housing on the freed space, that would raise the density by a factor of 1.17, which doesn't sound amazing. I think the bigger problem is that Americans just hate density in general, like if you look just next to the mall the buildings are like this:

The driveways for parking don't help, but they are hardly the biggest drag on density.

Conversely, I think a big reason Tokyo neighborhoods look so nice and walkable is that they don't provide street parking (forcing people to put their cars in garages instead), so the streets are really narrow and cozy. The U.S. could also do that! Or I guess we can't now, we're locked into our own insane system, but if we could go back in time that would have been a really good idea.

serinemisc

I think you're misinterpreting my point. I think a lot of Americans have grown up in America, and have heard some urbanist anti-car talking points, but have never really had a visceral sense of exactly what the alternative is, of exactly how walkable a walkable neighborhood is.

I chose a mall parking lot because it's a funny example of a distance drivers clearly consider walkable. I'm not anti-mall-parking-lot (not without caveats, at least).

When I wrote it, my friend in the room with me commented that it made her even more anti-car than she already was, because she didn't realize just how walkable Tokyo was. That was really what convinced me it was a useful post to make.

My original post is tagged "vagueblogging" because it's a response to a thread where many people seemed afraid that anti-car infrastructure would be too much walking, so I thought a worked example would help establish exactly how much walking it is.

youzicha

Oh I see! I didn't understand that's the point, but it makes sense now.

vinegarss

image that will be increasingly relevant in the coming months

depsidase

prokopetz

The real reason your sapient dragon character needs a "rider":

Dragons on the wing are vulnerable to being mobbed by smaller, more agile flyers, particularly in your large rear blind spot, like a bird of prey being mobbed by crows. Having a human armed with a long spear perched on your back helps to dissuade anyone from getting any funny ideas.

Breath weapons are impressive enough on the ground, but in flight they're really only good for strafing stationary targets; trying to use your breath weapon in an aerial dogfight is a good way to get fire up your nose. A real fight calls for sterner measures – and, concomitantly, a crew to aim and reload the cannons.

In today's competitive world, it's not enough to devour a flock of sheep and call it a day if you want to keep your edge. You're accompanied at all times by a qualified personal alchemist tasked with carefully regulating your internal furnace to ensure peak performance, and sometimes you even listen to them.

No dragon of any quality would be caught dead without their valet. It's not as though you can announce your numerous long-winded titles yourself when introductions are called for, can you? You suppose next you'll be expected to pick up the spoils of your conquests yourself, like a common brigand. Perish the thought!

mikkeneko

one-time-i-dreamt

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

red-mercer

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

sreegs

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

They didn't really get it.

noctumsolis

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

sreegs

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

virdigrishammer

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.

ralfmaximus

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.

cyle

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.)