using tumblr mobile and seeing people talk about a desktop layout change is like hearing a timer suddenly start ticking down. I am safe for now but I hear the danger
Allow me to elucidate, @a-sour-nectarine
When most people "roll their eyes", they flick their eyes directly upward, usually as far as they comfortably go, then resume looking normally.
When someone who learned the phrase before the behavior does it, they usually go in a circular (ish) motion. Since most eye movements are lines, it's usually pretty triangular: the key points are usually a diagonal up one way, then to the far other side, then to a diagonal low the first way. Thus, the eyes basically make a loop, so they "rolled".
I've found that when people who learned the up-down way first try the circular motion, they might risk motion sickness, so experiment carefully.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN MOST PEOPLE JUST LOOK UP
ID: a comparison betwen the mobile twitter and new tumblr menu layouts. They look almost exactly the same with the twitter/tumblr logo at the top followed by: home, explore, notifications/activity, and messages. After that the exact menu options are different but still similar. End ID
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:
"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"
Yeah, I remember. And I'm sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.
No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that's a very good thing.
see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles
International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.
Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.
We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.
We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.
On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.
Now it's time to do that thing again and make sure that we don't kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.
Holy fuck I reblogged this one year ago when it was a tiny weeny 100 notes post and look at her one year later
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!
Update and confirmation of Imminent Tree Law:
He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.
And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.
All this to be a Captain Planet filler villain to some writers. And yes, it’s currently just the writers officially picketing there; SAG-AFTRA recommended against it for petty bullshit like this and the suddenly necessary sidewalk construction.
I asked my dad— a retired arborist—about TREE LAW and he just kinda blinked and said (i paraphrase because Dad Tangents, amirite?):
"Worst and best case I ever saw was a guy who was caught in the act of cutting down a C&C tree by two Department of Urban Forestry supervisors while they were randomly driving around on a Saturday. Not only did he have to deal with the cops showing up and months of paperwork and bureaucracy, but he also had to pay the fines AND cover the cost of the tree removal + stumping + buying a new tree + planting the new tree + wages for the regular crew plus the extra workers they needed to get the jobs done. That tree ended up costing him upwards of $35K, and that was over 20 years ago."
So yeah, respect Tree Law or pay out the bootyhole.
Anonymous asked:
When I was little I LOVED the taste of blues clues kids toothpaste. I'd just straight up eat it. My mom thought this was unhealthy and would take away the toothpaste if she caught me eating it. Or threaten to switch to grown-up mint toothpaste (not as tasty). I would crouch behind the open bathroom door slowly squeezing out blues clues kids toothpaste onto my hands and eating it as quietly as possible
b0nkcreat answered:
It’s always been odd to me that there are not any ocean scavengers equipped to take optimal advantage of large carcasses.
Like…. in prehistoric times, the oceans were full of huge animals… was this a problem back then too?
That was a twist I was not expecting.

So I have worked on whale breakdown teams before and it is dirty exhausting work. Even a small dolphin takes multiple people working the entire day just to do one.
So I would assume that if a team of mermaids were to break down a whale, this would be a dedicated team maybe working on rotation for for a couple of months. And maybe even up to 5 to 6 months for a large sperm whale. So most likely from they would be contracted for a certain period of time. Maybe they’re only paid a lump sum after the whole contract is complete. Don’t know anything about mermaid economy or employment practices. But it seems efficient from a employment perspective.
I’ve only broken down whales on land, so you are either on a beach or in a lab setting. But I would assume that mermaids would be stationed on the drifting whale and working on it until the job is done. Maybe attaching some platforms are scaffolding to rest after work or take breaks.
Whale break down is also mostly manual labor. It is dirty exhausting work and I can see maybe young mermaids being conscripted for something like this, especially if they are poor and lack employment options or as part of punishment as a form of community service or terms of parole. The drifting carcass essentially functioning as a labor camp and the workers stigmatized by their role. Is there a such a thing as mermaid labor law? Perhaps the shifts are long, rations are tiny and working conditions poor. Got a typhoon heading in with rough seas? Suck it up. Gotta keep cutting. Blubber ain’t going to harvest itself.
Like I can easily see this as a premise for a young mermaid to try to join up with a passing human ship in search of something better. Maybe a young mermaid from poor family and a minor criminal record with nothing to look forward to other than whale salvage, joins up with a questionable human operation such as a drugs smuggling ship or some pirates or a slave ship or Royal Caribbean cruise line, you get the gist. Adventures ensue….etc
People don't like to admit it bcs cringe or w/e but Homestuck really did revolutionize the webcomic as a storytelling medium and I am endlessly frustrated that before webcomic artists could really stretch our legs fucking webtoonz swooped in, set a new, more restrictive standard, and then monetized and monopolized the ever living fuck out of the concept of The Webcomic until it drove away anyone who couldn't be a professional quality manga artist for free, and now the only webcomics that actually feel like spiritual successors to Homestuck are so obscure they're basically cult classics that you have to beg people to read.
Like it's just so wild to be in high school and see Homestuck be like "we're using like fifteen different artistic mediums to tell this story bcs we can" and be really fucking inspired by that, only to grow up and see basically every webcomic ever have to conform to One Single Standard or fucking perish.
Actually, I realized my real point here: we all need to make our art weirder. Please make weird art. I want more stuff like Prequel Adventure and 17776 and MyHouse.wad and I want it now. Capitalism thrives on conformity. We must be weird at all costs.
















