Maybe Life's too Short But the End Is Long

As utopian as the franchise is I don't actually want Star Trek to correctly predict the future cause that would mean in our time we get world war 3 with drug-addicted fascist supersoldiers. Real ones know Star Trek is post-apocalyptic actually

Me: haha the Irish unification of 2024

Also me: uh oh the bell riots, the eugenics wars, the nuclear bombs

Don't think I'll ever get over the fact that so much of star trek history is supposed to be a warning that "HEY THIS IS WHERE THINGS WILL GO IF YOU DO NOTHING TO STOP THEM" and then we did nothing and now the only difference between sanctuary districts and skid row in la is that the walls are made of law instead of concrete and they don't even adopt the pretense of it being to help the people living there

Star Trek said things are gonna get worse before they get better and rn we have to live through the getting worse part

#vacuum cleaner soulmates

via

BTW for anyone too lazy to do the math a wage of $125 a day works out to about $15/hour for an 8-hour workday so..... someone in 1923 definitely had a vision of the future

whoever said diamonds are a girl's best friend clearly has never met ibuprofen

Actually literally accurate. The song originates in the 1949 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, while ibuprofen was invented in 1961.

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

They existed *before beetles*

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

https://xkcd.com/1259/

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:



First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.

Just so we're all on the same page with the writer's strike.

If during the strike, it's announced about AI generated shows. We are not watching them. Not even out of curiosity. Let them fail every AI generated show they try make.

The human voice can not be replaced by AI. Don't let them try.

I am so ready for the gatwa era

This rapid slide from attempted machismo to sweet tender feelings is what happened to the show, too.

columbo teaming up with any detective is fun but the issue is that the one constant of columbo is that he basically knows the killer before he even arrives, so the mystery is less whodunnit and more about how columbo is going to catch this dude in his lie. therefore I propose the best columbo x detective crossover is not in fact columbo and benoit blanc or sherlock but in fact Columbo and the Scooby Doo Gang. In this essay i w-

He’d LOVE THEM!!! They’ve no clue who did it, they’re off somewhere setting up a literal trap and eating chilli while he’s making sure the killer is always just close enough to get annoyed with them and him, and at this point he’s trying to see if he can make them just outright confess before one of Fred’s contraptions go off, or if he’ll need to arrange a setup where the confession is after the killer’s literally been trapped in a barrel of molasses up to his hips. Either way, he’s having a blast looking after his nephew or niece and their friends! No, he can’t remember which one he’s actually related to, wether it’s from his side or his wife’s side or if he’s even related to one of them or not, but they all call him Uncle Columbo either way, so who cares?

obviously he’s related to scooby, on his dog’s side

I would need to buy an extra suitcase before I stepped into this store

@netherworldpost Atty you gotta see em, this guy sells halloween stamps based on vintage halloween art

Casey Rubber Stamps is the best. I got this Fuck Off stamp there

i’m sorry but outta sight outta mind i need to SEE the fics or i’ll forget

Tony Hawk’s Twitter is a gold mine honestly

We Stan this San Diego Man

this

C o m e d yy

Some recent gems:

And of course there’s

#where is race war tony hawk tweet thats my fav (via @laughingfish​)

I gotchu, bro:

i’m wheezgJmf stoP

Honestly every time this thread just makes me laugh. And new additions…excellent.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

How much you wanna bet the State of California will “prohibit” use of this system, because “reasons.”

If it’s in international waters they can’t do anything about it. And I’m pretty sure the federal government decides what can and can’t go on off our coasts too, not local or state.

Slat has been working on this since he was literally a child. I remember the first posts, articles, and I think there was even a fundraising campaign at one point.

I am so, so proud of him holy shit.

^^^ me too!! I remember the first news yeaaars ago that some kid had thought up a brilliantly simple method of cleaning up the oceans, and even that first prototype was amazingly efficient in solving a problem that the grownup world seemed to have given up on. It was so simple I couldn’t believe no scientist or engineer had thought of it before.

And he’s just been refining it and making it better and better? Amazing news!

Well done, sir, well done and thank you <3

My big memory of this is that every time he sent out a prototype, people would overwhelmingly go “AH HA! See? It didn’t work as advertised because a storm broke it/it didn’t filter as much as he predicted/etc.”

And every time, Boyan would analyse what went wrong, tinker with it, and send a stronger version back out.

There are still issues with it, like, but this guy isn’t some shitty billionaire - he’s a normal man walking the walk to clean up an international problem that everyone else is just wringing their hands over. I have no clue why everyone is desperately waiting for him to fail. He’s picked his hill, and he plods along, and if the latest design hasn’t met expectations, he creates a new one.

Their website is here, btw, in case anyone wants to have a look; they still accept donations

Lol whoops THIS is the website

if shes your girl then why have i slowly been replacing her parts until there’s nothing left of her original body? is she then still your girl?

They ship of theseus’d my girl

Can’t have shit in Detroit

this actually perfectly demonstrates the transitive property of memes: you can replace a meme piece by piece until it only structurally resembles the original, and it is, in fact, the same meme.

call that the meme of theseus thesis

tumblrites can have a little intertextuality as a treat

my naym is ship and when i’m broke the broken part from me they toke

replace the part had been the plan but in the morn hand door car man

*me shoving transitive properties into my purse* sorry, I have to go

We owe the reddit refugees an apology for making them see posts like this

no we don’t this shit is enrichment in their new enclosure

*slaps roof of Tumblr* This baby can fit so many rare vintages, you just have to go deep enough, there are some great memes in the cellar, come see

no, they actually do mean kites

as in, a loooooooooong piece of steel cable with the sail at the end of it

of course it's ~basically a sailing ship~ but you can't stick masts on a container ship, that is a disaster waiting to happen for so many reasons

you'd only really get one point to anchor the mast, and that is right where it meets the deck, the containers get it the way of any ropes you might wish to use further up

you'd have to build entirely new container ships or some sort of ... mast container frame to account for the fact that the ships are built to exactly fit the containers, and sticking a mast in the middle of it will mess with that entire system by not being the size of a container

loading and unloading around the masts is going to be hell for the crane drivers and there will be damage to everything given the speed they usually work with, so every harbor will hate you if their cranes even have the height to work around the masts

and if you still decide to stick masts on a container ship, they won't be easily and quickly removeable, so you have to recertify and reclassify the entire ship, and it's going to take ages and ages to do properly, and they'll have to figure out how to do it so it's either expensive as fuck or they may refuse entirely. a steel cable on a winch is by definition removeable (that is, uh, uprollable?) so you don't have to deal with any of this nonsense. hell, if you calculate the pre-determined breaking point properly, it'll even fail safely

this isn't ~ooooooooooh we invented sails! we're the smartest~

this is "hey, we finally figured out how to do this tried and tested thing in a way that works with the circumstances we're working under". it's a good thing, even if it is presented badly

Thank-you for that info ^ because this is very heartening then. Transport really is so awful rn in what it’s doing to our atmosphere. Looked this up and this is actually a really neat prospect for the planet if it gets implemented.

Also, do not discount what new materials, modern weather forecasting, computerization, and powered winches mean for wind power, including more-traditional sales. Kites are great for retrofitting, but there's likely to be a coming generation of wind-powered or wind-assisted ships that will include kites and more sail-like structures and be incredibly efficient.

help

So this showed up on Twitter and

And here’s that link you’re welcome

“if I cant have my dignity, at least I have something to read” <- put this on my tombstone