“I don’t know what my goals are, no. Thanks for asking.”

@theartofmadeline
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
NASA

Love Begins

izzy's playlists!

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Jules of Nature
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
will byers stan first human second
Game of Thrones Daily
Stranger Things
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tumblr dot com

PR's Tumblrdome
Claire Keane
trying on a metaphor

tannertan36
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@yearningcloud
“I don’t know what my goals are, no. Thanks for asking.”
a snowy little sketch of these two 🤍
i’m imploring you bro!! dude i fucking beseech thee!!!
Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.
Shhh! Their favorite show is on 🤫🌍
Aziraphale and Crowley are watching over the new universe like the gardians of humanity they always were and this is canon to me now 🤍
The thing they don't tell you about dealing with ADHD is that sometimes when you really, really don't want to do something you absolutely need to do your brain will suddenly lift the barriers stopping you from cleaning or doing other chores you've been struggling to finish, and so you have to run around stopping yourself from doing all the dishes or laundry or deep cleaning the bathroom, which feels awful because you've needed to do all that for a while and you couldn't, and yeah you can come back to it after you do your thing you don't wanna do but then you'll be back in "I can't do this" mode because you don't have another task to avoid, so you just have to accept it and it sucks.
Brought to you by me not wanting to make phone calls so badly I had to actively stop myself from doing like seven other chores, which felt like being hunted for sport.
top 3 hobbies for young adults:
1. borrowing misery from future
2. carrying grief of the past
3. agonizing over the present
good omens poster i did a while back bc the movie traumatized the hell out of me
(i keep forgetting to post it😭😭😭)
I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.
stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.
bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.
mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:
The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."
The Useless Web
Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)
Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."
Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."
I used to love take me to a useless website
I wish I could go to a doctor and just list every single symptom I ever experienced no matter how small and unconnected they seem and the doctor is nice and patient and knows everything and they nod and smile and explain that every symptom I ever experienced is connected to like one rare and often overlooked issue that's sooooo easy to fix with like. a pill. and then I never have to worry about anything ever again.
Doesn't even have to be nice. Could be House MD about it. Just get it done.
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Also don’t think a
book is old because it’s in
the public domain
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Want audiobooks instead?
LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.
Public domain works in the US are:
Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change
https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30
Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:
And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.
And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.
This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
torrents work like this
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
please learn to torrent
An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over
always use qbittorrent, do not use bittorrent or utorrent.
“bits to use in everyday conversations”
I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don't know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they'd been all around us the whole time.
So that people don’t need to go through the notes:
- We have fossils of spider webs
- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of
- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa
- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)
If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.
We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.
We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
We know they had remarkable vision.
We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.
We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.
The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."
(Art credit Julio Lacerda)
Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.
(Art credit Vitor Silva)
This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.
We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.
We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.
We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)
We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.
As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.
If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)
Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of "thanks i hate it" and "stop ruining dinosaurs!"
Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health
@lusus--naturae
I can never be normal about Crowley and Aziraphale. I can't, because what do you mean they've been loving each other for thousands of years and could never so much as hug without fearing horrible repercussions?
What must it be like, to meet someone that is supposed to be your sworn enemy, everything you're supposed to stand against, and find out that they are... quite nice? And you get along strangely well. And it's a friendship that was never supposed to develop but it does and you both know that you'd be in trouble if your higher ups/lower downs found out, but they don't get it, do they? They're not on Earth. You two are. Two immortal beings mostly alone amongst humans, learning to understand, admire and love humanity in a way the other angels and demons don't.
And you trust each other. Over your fellow angels and demons, over God's plan itself, you trust each other's judgment, each other's kindness, each other's willingness to protect humanity - and protect your bond.
So the centuries pass, and the friendship grows into love, a love that is so impossible and so forbidden that you can never speak of it, never acknowldge it, except in hidden acts of kindness, in stolen looks that speak louder than a thousand words, but they're not words, are they? No, in words you've never met, you don't even like each other, you're not friends (and the last one is actually true, you haven't been friends in a very, very long time).
All this unspoken love growing and bubbling under the surface for centuries, as you stand side by side through history, burning with the desire to just be with each other while having to pretend not to care and dealing with the terror of being discovered and punished, or worse, being discovered and seeing the other punished.
What must it be like, to finally face your worst fear - Heaven and Hell finding out and trying to eliminate you both - and see how your loved one could have died, alone and surrounded by people who treat their death as a spectacle.
And then... what do you do with your newfound freedom? How do you adapt to finally being a team without feeling spyed on, after all those years? You stop hiding, sure. You go to the Ritz, you work together openly, you spend a lot more time with each other, but how can you bring yourself to finally say what had to go without saying for six thousand years? You are together and still aching because you're not together, the barrier is still there, in your mind, in the habit, in the fear of being rejected after so so long. You still barely touch, almost never intentionally, almost never meaningfully; a handshake, a hand on a chest in a crowded bar, never never never enough. Both wanting it so desperately and neither daring to just ask for it.
And then Crowley does, but it's the wrong moment, and after six thousand years it's all in jeopardy now, and you're still aching, but further apart than you've been in centuries or millenia or maybe since before time itself.
It's no wonder that they struggle to communicate, because for the longest time they just couldn't. And it's not wonder that their feelings towards each other are so deep and rich and complex, because after literal millenia, how could they not be?
when i was younger and stupid and in the (glass) closet i was dating the son of a pharmacologist. this man had made millions developing medications. he was fond of me and privately told me i was too funny and smart to be dating boys.
he also said that it was incredibly unlikely that sexism will ever be resolved in the medical field. that the majority of medications i will ever take - even some of which are "for women" - will not be clinically tested on my body.
the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved. to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant. once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about "the effects of New Medication on the body." instead, the trial would fail - the results would be "the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient."
it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus. that's how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.
at the time, i remember him talking about the ethical implications of testing on a developing fetus; how such testing could theoretically bankrupt a company if a lawsuit was filed. he talked about informed consent and about how long it took for any legislation to be passed about this - that in 1993; the year i was born, it finally became illegal to outright exclude women and minorities from clinical trials.
i remember him shrugging. "that's not to say it doesn't happen," he said. my ears were ringing.
i was thinking about how every time i have been rushed to the ER, the first thing they have asked me is if i am pregnant. when i broke my wrist at 16 years old - despite never having had sex - they made me wait three hours for the test to come back negative before they gave me pain meds. the possibility of a child haunts my health.
how many people have died on the table because they were waiting for the pregnancy test before treatment. how many people have died on the table because they were pregnant, and the only thing we care about is the fetus.
it is hard to explain to other people, but it feels like some kind of strange ghost. our entire lives, we are supposed to "save" our bodies for our future partners. but really we are just saving the body for the future child, aren't we? that hovering future-almost that cartwheels around in a miasma. you can't get your tubes tied, what if you change your mind? think of the child you must have, eventually.
who cares about you and your actual safety. think about what you could be carrying.
the commodification of friendship is the most annoying thing to come out of the internet in ages. like actually i love to break this to you but you're supposed to help your friends move even if it's hard work. or stay up with them when they're sad even if you're gonna lose sleep. you're supposed to listen to their fears and sorrows even if it means your own mind takes on a little bit of that weight. that's how you know that you care. they will drive you to the airport and then you will make them soup when they're sick. you're supposed to make small sacrifices for them and they are supposed to do that for you. and there's actually gonna be rough patches for both of you where the balance will be uneven and you will still be friends and it will not be unhealthy and they will not be abusive. life is not meant to be an endless prioritization of our own comfort if it was we would literally never get anywhere ever. jesus.