Is there really a point?

I'm the bird mom

[toasthaste]

according to An Immense World, apparently giant squid eyes are, like, UNREASONABLY large, even for something their size living at those depths. the next largest eyes on earth, blue whale eyes, are less than half the size, and swordfish, who live at similar depths as giant squid and have the largest eyes of any fish, have eyes that could fit inside a giant squid's pupil.

eyes hit serious diminishing returns wrt resource costs vs vision quality as they get bigger, so the question became: what the FUCK do giant (and colossal) squid need to see so badly that they couldn't see with swordfish-sized eyes that's justifying that massive energy cost? that nothing else in the deep ocean needs to see so fucking badly??

turns out the one strength eyes that big really have over much smaller eyes is: seeing large glowing objects in water deeper than 500 meters from an appreciable distance.

sperm whales are the primary predator of giant squid. sperm whales don't glow. BUT! water that deep is full of bioluminescent creatures-- these creatures light up when bumped into. something a sperm whale's size is continuously bumping into those critters, it's just surrounded by a glowing field all the time when it's swimming at those depths, visible from a distance-- if you have the right eyes-- as a massive glowing shape. so basically the only reason to have eyes the size of soccer balls is if you live in the deep ocean and your life depends on having a heads up when a hungry sperm whale lurking around

and also I gotta say, the imagery... the huge lurking threat betrayed only by the ambiguous glowing shape of its movements through the water, is really evocative, if spooky deep-sea games aren't already using that to make things extremely ominous then they should really start

[fagstaynight]

some people on the internet have only been on here for five minutes

[cowboyspones]

i will never get over this one i’m afraid

[tpwrtrmnky]

the real answer to almost every "does [identity A] belong in [identity B] spaces" question is actually just "these spaces are informal social groups and if you're cool you can hang, don't worry about it"

[tpwrtrmnky]

You can be Homer Simpson at the lesbian bar. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

[lizardlicks]

not without those fire exits I'm not. have fun in your death trap, ladies

[voidandradiance]

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

[booksandchainmail]

#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[issela-santina]

it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers

[lierdumoa]

Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.

[pacificnorthwhore]

[i-wear-the-cheese]

when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk

[weirdchristmas]

I am being perceived.

[andhumanslovedstories]

Now that I’m studying bio, may I just say how fervently I wish my primary association with the words “alpha, beta, omega” was literally anything other than what it is

[andhumanslovedstories]

My nutrition professor was talking about vitamins and said, “the only reason you all even know the words alpha and omega is because of sororities,” and I wanted so badly to raise my hand and be like “if you’re gonna be a dick for some reason, please let me explain to you in depth my immediate connotations for those words”

[birdthany]

I’m in training to become a phlebotomist and at my last class we did blood typing and let me tell you when I walked into the lab to see A/B/O written in massive letters on the whiteboard I felt six years come off my lifespan

[realitycheckbounced]

once I used a phrase alpha and omega of something during a lecture and one of the students giggled so hysterically I *knew* and I looked at her and she looked at me, and let me tell you, this was the most profound moment of horror and understanding I have ever shared with another person

[tucsonhorse]

That moment when you recognize someone from the Devil’s Sacrament

[the-haiku-bot]

That moment when you

recognize someone from the

Devil’s Sacrament

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[draconym]

i would rather see the information for an event handwritten in sharpie on a paper towel than see another AI generated flyer

[aj-living-life]

Saving this post to show my boss who I told the AI flier makes us look lazy and ignorant, and offered to hand draw one. She still printed tons of ai fliers and I'm tempted to make a better one just because it annoys me so much.

[aj-living-life]

Fun update: event was canceled because literally nobody rsvp'd to the AI flier.

[sharkfiinn]

🐈🐈🐈

[shinyjolteon]

im gonna cry this person is so sweet to their fish

[ellaandtheocean]

Humpback whales breaching: gorgeous, majestic, graceful, embodies all the strength and beauty of the ocean

Minke whales breaching: I will launch myself out of this ocean like a f***ing surface-to-air missile to seek and destroy my enemies

[gallusrostromegalus]

I remember an interview with a guy that did the camera work for nature documentaries and he said that baleen whales like these guys were the scariest things to shoot because “They’re the size of a train, they can suddenly appear out of nowhere in dark or murky water and they don’t make a goddamn sound. I was absolutely sure that one of them was going to hit me and well, ‘that’s all folks!’. Gave me a lot of perspective on how I handle myself when filming smaller animals now.”

[a-book-of-creatures]

Fin whales breaching: sea serpent

[fleshdyke]

levitating minke whale

[plaguedocboi]

Sperm whale breaching: wjaht the fuck

[necronatron]

I have a feeling I have already shared this, but please, take the contribution of the northern right whale dolphin.

The humble eyebrow

[yume-fanfare]

modern social media should stop offering "sync with your phone contacts to follow them" options and start offering "block all your phone contacts so they never see your account" options

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Dino people, I am abusing my blogging power to ask a critical question. The image below is a reconstruction of Sue, the T-Rex skeleton at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This replica is considered to be accurate based on what we know thus far.

My question is this: How do we know this is the correct size of her eyes? Is it based on the size of her skull or something else?

[werevampiwolf]

They can see how big the eye sockets are from the skull. Also, most dinosaurs had bones called scleral rings, which are bones inside the eyeball. I don't know if we have any examples of T. rex that preserved them, but we do have other therapods.

(The info page is by @alithographica )

[werevampiwolf]

I'm reblogging again to add that this means that we know how big their pupils are, since the hole in the scleral ring is only a little bigger than the pupil.

It's also how we know that most dinosaurs had round pupils. It's pretty common for people to depict dinosaurs with slit pupils, probably because of Jurassic Park, mostly because it looks really cool, but nope, they were round. There are very few, if any, birds with slit pupils, which is further evidence for round pupils. And most extant animals with slit pupils are on the small side. Many people think of cats having slit pupils, and they do, but it's the little ones. Lions and tigers have round pupils, because slit pupils are most useful closest to the ground and they actually sacrifice some of their visually acuity for the sake of being better at judging distances in low-light conditions, and most animals with them are ambush predators that jump out at their prey. You ever seen a video where someone throws or bounces a ball towards a cat and it bops them on the head and they seem surprised? That's why; they struggle to track where the ball is going, especially horizontally. So for anything over a certain size, slit pupils are a detriment, especially if they chase down prey.

And yeah, if you've ever seen a scientific source say that a certain species of dinosaur hunted at night and wondered how the hell we could possibly know that, this is how. Their eyeball bones.

[leggywormy]

It's end of May, yall know what that means

[so-much-for-subtlety]

[magnusttsisgay-official]

Jarvis, pull up that variable meme.

[maplecinnamonbun]

i’m reminded of the developer of a mapping software who had a variable named ‘legend_handles’ that got refactored into ‘leg_handles,’ ‘leg_hands,’ and finally ‘feet’

[scarlct-vvitch]

grace, who has been alone for five minutes: oh my god. an alien! im not alone anymore! i hope he wants to be friends :)

rocky, coming up on 50 years of solitude, imprinting on grace in ways baby ducklings can only dream of: if you leave me to sleep where i can't watch your heart beat i am blowing up this tunnel with us both in it

[sevinohl]

Every fanart i see of rocky and adrian is just this and i love it

[spaghetti-gremlin]

[Image ID: a very simplified drawing of a large blue triangle with five short lines sticking out of the bottom of it, representing legs. next to the large blue triangle is a small rectangle, barely a quarter of the height the triangle. the small rectangle is coloured in brown, and also has five short lines sticking out of the bottom of it. /.End ID]

[aroace-ryland-grace]

so how many times do we think grace has tripped down these stairs

[aroace-ryland-grace]

rocky noticed he never ties his damn shoelaces and decided to teach him a lesson via lived experience

[bigfatbitchdotcom]

Endlessly diabolical how you can't say words like rape and suicide uncensored without either being criticised by idiots or punished by conglomerates.

[bigfatbitchdotcom]

It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.

[bigfatbitchdotcom]

And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.

[its-the-blob]

I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.

[ralfmaximus]

Use the real words. Words have power, and they matter.