They crashed my CSP, bastards (so it' the only colors I was left with)

I think they're neat <3

been stuck with a terrible feeling that one of the episodes in the new black mirror season is gonna end with a title card like "the program you just watched was written by artificial intelligence" and they're going to be so smug about it and we'll all have to talk about it for weeks

oh hey apollo

lol

I mean, that’s literally it.

It’s not even a thousand monkeys on a typewriter, it’s just statistics

The urban fantasy show I actually want to see is a hospital drama with a dedicated wing for supernatural illnesses.

Vampirism. Lycanthropy. Cheap spells gone wrong. A woman brought in for her prenatal has to be told her baby is a lindworm. Someone is literally being followed by the anthropomorphic personification of the Black Death.

Someone somewhere out there is having their perception of the world irreparably shattered by the knowledge that magic is real, and at the other side is a team of doctors who have to roll their eyes and pull out Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales because some high school kid tried to go Carrie with a cheap spellbook and turn all the kids at prom into frogs, and the doctors have to wrangle a couple dozen teenagers into admitting if they have a true love who can break the spell.

I want the hospital director to be some dark entity that feeds on human misery but figured out that if you successfully treat the source of the misery then instead of hunting you down as an abomination the humans start bringing more miserable people to your house en masse and things kinda got out of hand from there.

Grimm's Anatomy

Homestuck is weird bc if you just read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, it’s overly complicated and makes no sense. But if you read Homestuck from the beginning, it boils you like a frog. You don't even really notice how increasingly convoluted the plot is getting. Several Acts in and youre saying shit like “The doomed-timeline Dave that post-retcon Jade dated is a different version of the Dave that fused with an alien catgirl” like it's the most reasonable thing in the world

And you’ll be S4Y1NG 1T L1K3 TH1S, TOO.

#231.5 - To nest, Phanpy dig vertical pits in the ground at the edge of a river, marking the surrounding area with their dexterous trunk. Despite their small size and cute appearance, they are deceptively strong; even young individuals are capable of carrying an adult human on their backs. Their strength increases with age, as does the toughness of their thick hide. It is a moment of intense pride for Phanpy once their tusks begin to show. The longer and bigger the tusks, the higher an individuals rank within its herd. Phanpy and Donphan are known to use their powerful rolling attacks to aid in the clearing of rock and mud slides.

Named: Phanpy - Phantusk - Donphan

#984.? - Believed to be the ancient form of the modern-day Donphan, the Pokemon referred to as “Great Tusk” is savage, living relic of the dinosaur era. First catalogued in the Scarlet Book, this creature is aggressive and violent, with the large tusks and durable scales to match. Over many, many years, Great Tusk developed smaller tusks, facilitating the development of a brutal rollout attack. Though the Donphan we know today are significantly smaller and calmer than their ancient counterparts, they retain a similar temperament when they become enraged, starting a rampage that cannot be stopped until the Pokemon tuckers itself out.

Named: “Great Tusk” - - ? - - Donphan

- - - - - - - - - -

Follow for more In-Progress Pokemon evolutions!

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"One day Tumblr will have a working search function"

-- Neil Gaiman, world-famous creator of fantasy settings

— Pluralistic (via azspot)

So let’s take it back.

Be the funky-ass forest you want to traverse in the digital world…

people keep mourning the death of parts of the internet that very much still exist. “I miss forums, they were great” - they still are! you can find forums and participate in them, or even make your own! I have two small gaming forums I go on every day!

these hidden pockets are still here, and we can keep cultivating them. don’t treat them like they’re already gone!

*talking about forums* Sometimes, I can still here his voice….

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

me if meowing was a sin tbh

& heres me if meowing was illegal

But it’s not so enjoy

so true, here i am happy and free because nobody can morally or legally stop me from meowing

Sound of Mewsic

Our blessed tumblr

A holy site

Nah nah nah, you ain’t hiding this in the tags

Not one of the 7 deadly sins, but a secret 8th sin

sorry what

If you are on the East Coast and trying to figure out what all of these air quality warnings mean and what you should do, here is what the colors and corresponding AQI numbers mean. The updated AirNow map is at this link:

Edit: this was posted at 10:50am on June 6 2023 and the screenshots were taken around 9am.

This map shows wildfire locations:

(NASA Earth Observatory image of the Quebec wildfires by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview)

And if you're wondering why all these wildfires seemed to come out of nowhere:

While we are on the topic, since I've seen some comments in the notes! If you have been getting air quality warnings from your weather app but not much else of use about why the sky looks weird, or have otherwise been dissatisfied or confused about where to get reliable information about why the sky is orange, you should be aware that virtually everything that for-profit weather companies like AccuWeather and the Weather Channel show you is simply repackaged taxpayer-funded data from the National Weather Service (NWS) (and more broadly, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that is home to the NWS). Private companies have a vested interest in making sure they have a vital chokehold on the flow of weather information in the US, to the point of heavy lobbying about what and how NWS can communicate to the public; the former AccuWeather CEO (and Trump nominee for head of NOAA 😬) spent years arguing that NWS should be "entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of Accuweather."

To paraphrase Michael Lewis and his book "The Fifth Risk," which does a deep dive on the services that the federal government carries out, private companies that rely on publicly funded data essentially scam you into paying for the same information twice - once as a taxpayer supporting public investment into necessary services like weather monitoring, then again when you are forced to pay for the results of that investment.

I recommend you find your local NWS weather office and get set up so that you get your weather alerts straight from them:

It won't be as slickly packaged, perhaps, but all the critical information (and more!) is there, free of ads and free of the often bogus forecasts and sketchy content that these companies add on to attract an audience:

we were the liminal kids. alive before the internet, just long enough we remember when things really were different.

when i work in preschools, the hand signal kids make for phone is a flat palm, their fingers like brackets. i still make the pinky-and-thumb octave stretch when i "pick up" to respond to them.

the symbol to save a file is a floppy disc. the other day while cleaning out my parents' house, i found a collection of over a hundred CDs, my mom's handwriting on each of them. first day of kindergarten. playlist for beach trip '94. i don't have a device that can play any of these anymore - none of my electronics are compatible. there are pieces of my childhood buried under these, and i cannot access them. but they do exist, which feels special.

my siblings and i recently spent hours digitizing our family's photos as a present for my mom's birthday. there's a year where the pictures just. stop. cameras on phones got to be too good. it didn't make sense to keep getting them developed. and there are a quite a few years that are lost to us. when we were younger, mementos were lost to floods. and again, while i was in middle school, google drive wasn't "a thing". somewhere out there, there are lost memories on dead laptops. which is to say - i lost it to the flood twice, kind of.

when i teach undergrad, i always feel kind of slapped-in-the-face. they're over 18, and they don't remember a classroom without laptops. i remember when my school put in the first smartboard, and how it was a huge privilege. i used the word walkman once, and had to explain myself. we are only separated by a decade. it feels like we are separated by so much more than that.

and something about ... being half-in half-out of the world after. it marks you. i don't know why. but "real adults" see us as lost children, even though many of us are old enough to have a mortgage. my little sister grew up with more access to the internet than i did - and she's only got 4 years of difference. i know how to write cursive, and i actually think it's good practice for kids to learn too - it helps their motor development. but i also know they have to be able to touch-type way faster than was ever required from me.

in between, i guess. i still like to hand-write most things, even though typing is way faster and more accessible for me. i still wear a pj shirt from when i was like 18. i don't really understand how to operate my parents' smart tv. the other day when i got seriously injured, i used hey siri to call my brother. but if you asked me - honestly, i prefer calling to texting. a life in anachronisms. in being a little out-of-phase. never quite in synchronicity.

I imagine that the last generation to really feel this way, to really feel a before-and-after kind of world, was at the last turn of the century, which had 3 huge, life-changing inventions happen all at once.

In 1890, everybody rode horses, used candles to see at night, and communicated through letters.

By the 1920s (only 30 years later!), everybody had automobiles (or access to another form of 'self-driving' transportation like busses or trams) and nobody had horses. Nearly everyone had electricity in their houses. Nearly everyone had a telephone, or access to one.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine growing up, being taught by your parents all about how to ride horses and care for them and hitch them to a wagon, only to...not ever use that knowledge as an adult, because you have a car? Can you imagine learning how to make candles, finally getting good enough at it to be useful to your family as a teenager, only to flick a switch to turn on a light bulb as an adult?

I feel like that last huge change in technology is the same thing we are going through. I know how to read a paper map. I will never need to use this knowledge. But it's still in there; including the many patient hours my mother spent teaching me, and a lot of fond memories I have of her doing it. I know how to research a topic in a paper library, with actual books. Pretty sure I will never do that again. I memorize phone numbers, 'just in case'. In case what? The automobile (smartphone) gets un-invented? But I hold that knowledge in my head. It's there. It's part of me.

I wish I could speak to my great-great-grandmother, who had her first baby in 1900. To ask her, if what Millennials now are going through is what it was like for her Centennial generation. The absolute whiplash, from one way of life to another.

Kids born in 1890 knew how to make candles, and kids born in 1920 could not fathom why you would need to know this.

This is what makes learning Spanish so uncertain -- I get told some word by Duolingo, that contradicts what I learned growing up along the US-Mexico border, and neither agrees with the words my co-worker from Columbia uses 

:D

Guys I haven't even ever heard of 'steen papier schaar' I've been battling the people who say 'blad steen schaar', which we can agree is the common enemy we must beat before we can even start a schaar-steen-papier/steen-papier-schaar debate.

Sounds like an Anglicism. From ‘rock paper scissors’

Gay castles update! 🌈🏰

We have added extra illustrations to the number cards. Now, the 2s and 5s are no longer empty - thank you everyone for your feedback!

Usually the number cards are left empty but we wanted to do something special with them! The number cards (2-9), when arranged in a 2x4 grid, connect to form a pride castle, symbolizing the safe space and unity that the LGBTQ+ community offers. Each suit has its own theme: Hearts (♥️) animals, clubs (♣️) flowers, diamonds (♦️) gemstones, and spades (♠️) space! Here are the new pride castles! We hope you like them!

Also, the composition for the uncut sheet looks now more like this:

Uncut sheets can be framed and put on your wall as a piece of art. This is a great way to see all the art of the deck at once. Plus, each sheet will be hand-signed!

Preorders for The Pride Knights playing cards, art prints, and uncut sheets will be available from June 1st to June 30th! ⚔️🌈

*By the way, do you have any name suggestions for the castles? It would be cool to give each one a unique name!

the switch successor will be as powerful as 2 switches duct-taped together

Sorry these tags need to be acknowledged I think

waiting for the 3D double switch XL version...

im sorry you got stuck behind the funniest person on the planet

I feel like this is a person I’d like to have a drink with

1000 years ago, a great king had his soul infused with the crown so he may rule eternity, taking possession of anyone who wears it. But with each new ‘successor,’ the king took his extra lives increasingly for granted, until one day…..

The crown hit the floor of the blacksmith’s forge, the heavy ringing sound of gold on packed earth echoing long after it should have faded away.

“Melt it down.”

The blacksmith choked, glad that she’d put down the horseshoe she’d been working on. “What?”

“Melt it down,” the Heir repeated patiently.

The blacksmith glanced at the Heir, then to the discarded Crown of Helgrath lying on her floor, then back at the Heir. “Why?” she asked plaintively.

“That thing ate my mother,” the Heir said grimly. “My mother died thirty-nine years ago, when she first put it on, and something else stepped into her place. It’s soaked in blood magic.”

“Magic is forbidden in this kingdom,” the blacksmith said automatically.

“Probably because any halfway competent mage would take one look at that thing and know what it was.” The Heir grinned. “Probably the one thing old Helgrath never thought about; that a royal scion would learn about magic outside the Kingdom.”

“When you stayed at other courts, on your search for a spouse,” the Blacksmith said, horrified. “That’s - that’s heresy.”

“Not for much longer, if I have anything to say about it,” the Heir said, mouth forming a thin line. “Look, it’s five pounds of gold, it’s stupidly, neck-breakingly heavy, and it could be much better used to fund a clean water supply than it would on my head. Especially since I have no intention of being possessed by some greedy bastard who likes to murder his descendants so that he can hold on to power.”

“And fire will destroy the evil magic?” the blacksmith asked.

“Should do, fire destroys most magic. If not, we’ll figure something else out.”

The blacksmith nodded. “You had me at ‘clean water supply’.” Wrapping her hands in her leather apron so that she wouldn’t come in contact with the cursed crown, she lifted it into a metal bucket and swung it onto a hook over her forge fire.

The screaming coming from the bucket was a little disturbing, but it did prove the Heir’s claims.