i have some questions yet i find myself too afraid to seek answers

dear god not the tumbleweeds

completely justified response if you haven't encountered tumbleweeds firsthand (because most of us are only familiar with the loony tunes version) but in reality....

so the thing about tumbleweeds is they are in fact incredibly invasive. they cause millions of dollars of damage every year, and create serious traffic accidents and agricultural disruption. (they're also highly flammable, because of course they are.) the town in question was piled so deep, residents had to call 911 after being trapped in their homes. bulldozers and emergency workers had to be brought. it was wild.

tumbleweeds are also heavier than they look--they're made of wood after all. and they're big (most varieties top out at 4 feet, but there are larger ones that can reach up to 6 feet across. you know how the Emu War sounds absurd and fictional until you realize emus are 6 solid feet of clawed, beaked, avian dinosauric FUCK YOU? yeah, this is like that

in summary, tumbleweeds are thorny, pollen-filled, fire-spreading assholes (and they can spread radiation from old nuclear sites), which means we are dealing roaming packs of stabby, poisonous, radioactive fireballs of death that can appear out of nowhere coming at you top speed down the middle of the highway!

the more you know :D

in conclusion, please have this photo of the only tumbleweed i have any fucking fondness for (the South African Brunsvigia bosmaniae), solely due to the fact it's fucking PINK

is it as evil as all its cousins? probably! do i care? that just makes it sexier! and the bulbs contain hallucinogenic properties, which makes perfect sense from a single glance:

— comment on a MetaFilter post about AI: “My goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest.”

I got someone to ask it about the difference between two grasses I know well, Festuca ovina and F. rubra, seeing as telling them apart was a vital part of my job, just to see what it was like. It took me a bit of thinking really hard to tell exactly how wrong it was, despite the fact I’m literally an expert in telling the difference between the two. It wasn’t just missing out on freely available information on reliably differentiating them, but it made up facts about one of the grasses that were just incorrect. E.g. saying F. rubra leaves were wider than those of F. ovina (true), but then saying they were up to 6mm wide (extremely not true, they max our around 1.5-2mm if we’re being generous). But it sounded so right that I had to spend several minutes picking apart what was incorrect and it turned out to be most of it.

StackOverflow similarly had issues when it was first released with people using it to generate answers that sounded like authoritative solutions but were, in fact, utter nonsense.

And that’s the issue, it can mimic the shape but it’s not intelligent. It’s not good at being right, it’s good at sounding right.

A Cocktail Dress Made Out of 2,652 Pennies

Why blood? Because hemoglobin in our blood has a lot of iron and thus has a metallic scent, similar to the coppery smell of a bunch of pennies collected together.

People who do things like floor an entire room in pennies counsel that you really need to seal/varnish the finished surface otherwise the smell can be pervasive.

what if i want to smell like blood?

You want vampires? Because that’s how you get vampires.

Ralf, that’s the kind of reply you can post everywhere but Tumblr.

Of course they want vampires.

I actually learned this while considering making scented candles based on the various magic scents in the October Daye series, but copper doesn’t actually smell like blood! Copper alone doesn’t smell like much of anything.

Copper is just slightly corrosive to skin, so the blood you smell comes from handling the copper and is, in fact, just blood. You are just smelling blood. Your blood, and the blood of everyone who has ever touched the copper.

Which is why it is difficult to make a copper and grass scented candle.

1. We can’t actually smell metals. Metals don’t release enough molecules to hit our nose at room temperature for us to smell them. 2. Iron and copper actually react with oils on our skins and create molecules (aldehydes and ketones) which the human nose is highly sensitive to. 3. The researchers think that our ability to detect iron and copper is related to a vestigial capability to detect blood. Probably from our mammalian predator ancestors.

Item: fourteen-pound cocktail dress made of copper coins; discussion is ongoing about whether or not it attracts vampires.

Good morning to Banana the Lobster, and only Banana.

For a second I was really concerned that the lobster was transphobic before realizing the link is from the daily mail

apparently netflix is ending their dvd rental service at the end of september and letting people keep whatever dvds they got so. if anyone wants up to 10 free dvds uhh

wait if there's anything niche on there. might be good to order it in case it gets destroyed

end of an era, but at least they're reasonably open about it. they are not accepting new sign ups anymore, so if you don't already have a login you're outta luck

fyi

- Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

💝 Thank you for 1k. Special thanks to my lovely friend @sessjudoodles for helping sketch the line work for the Albertaceretops :)

i do not have the spoons to FULLY get into it, as it demands, but the one with the military haircut (he’s a cop, a “protector”, c’est la vie) is Jim Ellison, former Army Ranger, repressed fool. curly haired bb is Blair Sandburg, an anthropology grad student who realizes Jim is a Sentinel of legend, latches onto him like a remora, and Jim basically leans on Blair like a crutch all the while pretending he doesn’t care for him in a very “I made you a friendship bracelet” “ugh gross” “well you don’t have to---” “shut up I’m gonna wear it” way

they were handsy 

HANDSY I SAY

they STARTED handsy 

they moved in together in like. ep one. 

they become partners in the cop sense, they do a lot of gift of the magi shit for each other, every time I start to think of the stupid shit they do for another I remember More Weird Shit, codependent fucking weirdos 

Okay, I absolutely MUST chime in For The Sentinel which NEVER gets the respect of its peers just because "the plots were a little convoluted" and the "central premise wore a little thin as the seasons went on." those men were in love. THOSE MEN WERE LOVERS!!!!!

What you need to know about The Sentinel is that the very first episode is about Jim Ellison acquiring mystical powers. YES I want to be clear, the way he acquires these powers is "problematical" and "not great, respecting indigenous cultures wise" but okay, so he's got these powers that make all of his senses amped up to dangeous levels. he can hear things no one else can hear, he can see things like he's fucking legolas, you get the deal.

so he goes to the doctor to be like "i feel weird" because of course, and Blair Sandberg, twink anthropologist to the stars, BREAKS SEVERAL LAWS to get in Jim's exam room and say—i know how to help you. i know what's wrong with you. i know how to make life better. and jim ellison looked at the little twink man and said yes....YES to love YES to life YES to living in a 1 bedroom LOFT apartment together. YES to being soulmates and life partners! YES I'LL MARRY YOU!!!!!!

This is the ORIGINAL big gruff german sheppard/lil yapping chihuahua pairing. And fandom looked at this show and said "this is good. i will build a kingdom upon this land. from now on, these are the two genders: big, angry, powerful, forced to their knees by circumstances beyond their control AND small, jokester, has skills INVALUABLE to Big, bad self worth. And then so the sentinel/guide aus RULED the pervert community, and everyone rejoiced.

And then SPN looked at this, and said "but what if the guides also had wet butts" and u kno what? innovation is CRUCIAL.

I am always fascinated how the sentinal au became so widespread and nobody knows it came from an actual show. I watched The Sentinal when it was new and I loved it and it was delightful to find sentinal fics and sentinal AUs when I found my way back to fandom.

The Riddler: Riddle me thi- Is that a fcking kid.

Dick Grayson, a non-native English speaker: What does fcking mean?

The Riddler: Fck- I mean sht- I mean it's a grown up word, ask your dad about it

[A Few Years Later]

The Riddler: Riddle me th- Is that another fcking kid

Jason Todd, raised in Crime Alley his entire life: Who the hll you calling a fcking kid? I'll beat your ass motherfcker, you and me right now.

The Riddler: Wow you are. Something.

[A Few Years After That]

The Riddler: Riddle me- Where the fck are you getting these children?

Tim Drake, raised in high society but also not raised at all: That's a naughty word sir.

The Riddler: At least you're polite

[A Few More Years Later]

The Riddler: Riddle m- WHY THE FCK DOES THIS ONE HAVE A SWORD!?

Damian Wayne, above silly things like Vulgar Language: I Was Expecting A Battle Of Wits, But You Appear To Be Unarmed.

The Riddler: WHY DOES HE TALK LIKE THAT???

maybe its bc i live in a place where forestry is one of the dominant industries but like tree planting rly isnt good. like the majority of the time its done by forestry companies to “offset” what they’ve cut down, and they almost always just plant fir & spruce monocrops and then they prevent the rest of the forest from naturally regenerating by spraying glyphosate, because they want to kill off the hardwoods that grow back since softwoods are worth more to the pulp industry… anything a company does that is supposedly “green” never is.

They aren’t actually replanting the forest, they’re building lumber farms in the middle of it and trying to pass them off as the same thing to people who think a forest is just trees because they live in a world mediated by images and have never been in an actual forest long enough to be able to tell healthy diverse growth from a struggling monocrop.

And unfortunately even choosing all the right trees and plants would not actually help either. Some naturalists I recall coined the term “ghost forest” to refer originally to “replanted” rainforests, in the same sense as “ghost town,” because it never brings back the same rich diversity of life or the healthy microbiome that took centuries to form.

And the average person doesn’t think about that at all, they don’t care that the layers of rotten leaves and insect colonies and mycelia are as much “the forest” as the presence of trees, and in fact the whole existence of that understory *is the actual benefit of the trees,* the actual reason the trees are important to all that wildlife. Companies are glad people don’t care about this, and as long as “replanting” is seen as a valid compromise, it means environmental regulations will continue to be lax and let them kill the majority of life in those habitats.

It’s the ecological equivalent of Weekend at Bernies. They made a corpse look alive enough that they aren’t being held accountable.

Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later

biblical quotes

[ID: first is a  close up drawing of gideon’s eye with a flower stalk connecting to the pupil. the text at the top says “gideon the ninth” and at the bottom “first flower of my house”.

second is a close up drawing of harrow, with her face paint, chomping on gideon’s cheek. the text at the top says “step six” and at the bottom “consume the flesh”.]

I've seen a number of people now say they don't get why the Liesel sex scenes were included, and I wanna come to their defense now.

I think the scenes make two perfectly valid points;

1) Casual sex can be good and healthy for you. I feel it was firmly stablished both times that El has sex with Liesel because she needs solacing, and sex is an uncomplicated way of making her feel good and grounded in her body. That's... literally it. El had sex because it feels nice. You don't need any more reason than that.

2) El and Liesel are bisexual. Very easy and direct way of stablishing both of these characters are bi. They are queer. They are into girls. I, for one, am fucking overjoyed. We love explicit representation in this house!!

I feel like the disconect is from people thinking sex HAS to be meaningful and profound? I, for one, think it's totally fine and sweet if sex is just something casual El does with a friend.

Which also brings me to my third point:

3) Liesel and El friendship arc! The first sex scene, El is convinced Liesel is doing this to get something out of her. By the second one, she knows Liesel is doing it just to help her. The sex is part of their mini-plot of becoming friends and allies, plus it ties into Liesel's mini character development arc of dropping years of obsessive revenge planning to go save the world with her new annoying hippie kumbaya best friend, and I, for one, think it's fantastic.

So I'd like you to meet my partners. This is the broken, this is the beaten, and this is the damned.

Here is the lover, theres the dreamer, and that one there on the right is me.

Just entered a new relationship. There's Paul, a real estate novelist who never had time for a wife, and Davy, who's still in the navy and probably will be for life.

Yeah, this is my new boyfriend and girlfriend. Yeah, he was a punk and she did ballet. What more can I say?

Yeah, just got a picture of our polycule back. On the left is the clown, on the right is the joker, and of course, stuck in the middle, there's you.

this is a photo of my ex, yeah is the one that looks kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an L on her forehead

Did you know that there's another Chocolate Guy called Kris Zhaokai?

Babes wake up, a new chocolate guy just dropped

NEW CHOCOLATE GUY

Campaign to make The God of Arepo an award winning work and win a literal brick as a trophy for the authors and for Tumblr community as a whole

As the artist for one of The God of Arepo comics, my version is up for consideration for the Ignatz Awards for Outstanding Online Comic.

For those of you who don't know the Ignatz is one of the highest industry awards that "recognize outstanding achievements in comics and cartooning by small press creators or creator-owned projects published by larger publishers".

The thing is, winning the award means winning an actual literal brick. Because the mascot is a brick-throwing mouse. So they have to make a bit where the trophy is a brick. Like. Look.

For a long time I thought it was just plain bricks they were handing out, but my friend who won a couple of bricks two years ago had theirs stamped (I saw the bricks in person at their house). So now I am obsessed with the idea of The God of Arepo winning an Ignatz trophy. It will have the honours stamped. On a freaking brick. That's the most Tumblr level meme trophy this comic/story could win (which is also a legit high honour industry award on its own btw don't get me wrong). But wilder than that, the brick allows me to do something. It allows me to smash that break into 5 pieces and ship one of each to the authors plus myself. Writing Prompts, sadoeuphemist, ciiriianan, stu-pot and me will get a piece of clay in recognition for our work with the farmer who built a temple out of stone. The full circle moment.

Imagine the value of this win to the lore of this Tumblr sacred text/folklore. This brick will be smashed and given to the creators, but as a collective folklore, it's also dedicated to all of us on this hellsite too. AWARD WINNING. If The God of Arepo wins I will document the entire process of smashing that brick here.

But we have to make this happen. We need to gather our collective energy and make this campaign work. Please help make The God of Arepo an award-winning story and vote for it in the Outstanding Online Comic category (link). You will need to request a ballot, then submit your vote. I recommend checking out the other nominated comics too. The Ignatz really shortlists good stuff. The voting closes September 8 2023 . LET'S GET THE GOD OF AREPO A BRICK FOR HIS TEMPLE!! LET'S GO!!!! REBLOGS HELP TOO!!

OMG YALL I forgot to mention that the winning comic also goes into the Library of Congress digital archive as historical material.

The God of Arepo in the Library of Congress.

Brick!!!!!! And library!!!!

G… gender roles? [I open my hand, confused, and reveal a fistful of dnd dice] Which one do I…?

You get it