Incredible colorised footage from 1929 of construction workers on the Chrysler Building in New York.

I’m just impressed that it has audio

If you wanted solid, definitive proof that the past did, in fact, happen, here it is.

I’m surprised the structure was able to support the weight of every set of BRASS FUCKING BALLS on all of those construction workers. Pre-safety gear/OCEA was wilding man.

The Chrysler Building had zero fatalities during construction. But the osha violations hurt my soul

TERRIFYING

Many of these men were Mohawk Native Americans! The Mohawk had a reputation as ironworkers and worked on most of the big interwar-era construction projects in NYC, also including the Empire State Building and the George Washington Bridge.

Leather soled shoes…

Also note the first thing that one guy did after being told the video was running was to introduce his Union and their project.

These are Union men.

If Sherlock Holmes was Isekai'd to a fantasy world he would just deduce the rules of this world and get back to solving crimes. He'll find an elf girl sidekick,name her Watson, and pretend like nothing happened.

"If you look closely, you can see traces of chalk dust on the floor. Our murderer must have used a magic circle to kill our victim."

"Actually Holmes, this looks like salt. Quite unusual for a magic circle, since it can be scattered so easily..."

"It tastes like salt too. Good eye Watson. Let us start by visiting the fish mongers."

"Well I would enjoy some fried dragonfish, but how does this help our investigation?"

"A process of elimination, my long-eared friend. There're only two ways for the culprit to get salt in the city. They could have brought it in themselves-"

"But then they'd have to pay the tarrif!"

"Very astute! No, a much likelier option is that they bought it here. Either the docks or the meat market would be the place. And I have a hunch that our culprit is fishy in more ways than one."

"But Holmes, how did you know the merfolk ambassador was the killer?"

"An excellent question, the key was the footprints."

"But he doesn't even have feet!"

"He doesn't as of right now. But you forget, the magic circle."

"I see! The killing spell was a water spear, which normally requires a circle."

"But doesn't if you're already imbued with water magic like our scaly ambassador."

"So the circle..."

"To grant him a pair of feet. For just long enough to leave distinctive footprints in the scattered salt and to make us suspect a two-legged killer."

"By the Goddess, Holmes, you're a genius!"

Makes sense.

Anyway, getting sheer autism vibes from Holmes

Good. That means I wrote him in-character.

big dick energy

a few people have replied stuff to the effect of “damn this looks cool but i don’t know anything about Doom” and that is officially my cue to start nerding out about it

This is the Doomguy. Demons call him “The Doom Slayer,” but everyone who loves him calls him Doomguy.

Once upon a time, Doomguy was a security guard working for the Union Aerospace Corporation. He was stationed on a remote space base on the Martian moon Phobos. He used to be in the Marine Corps, but he was dishonorably discharged after his CO ordered him to fire on unarmed civilians and he responded by putting his CO in a full-body cast. He spent most of his time as a security guard jerking off to porn on the clock, according to the original game’s manual.

One day, his bosses at the UAC fucked up super bad when experimenting with teleporters and opened a portal to Hell. Demons quickly swarmed the base, possessed Doomguy’s fellow security officers, and started taking everything over. Doomguy thought that wasn’t very cash money of the demons, grabbed a shotgun, and started asking them politely yet firmly to leave.

Doomguy does this on Phobos for a bit, dies, finds himself on the Martian moon of Deimos which had been swallowed in to Hell itself, and gets right back to fighting demons. He rappels down from Deimos in to the depths of Hell, kills more demons, and then escapes through a portal in Hell to Earth.

When on Earth, Doomguy discovers that the demons killed his pet rabbit Daisy. This motivates him to power through a bunch of extremely difficult levels designed by American McGee, a bunch of really shitty rushed ambitious levels designed by Sandy Petersen, three expansion packs designed by fans, a short jog through some levels designed by Nerve Software, and an entire game that was exclusive to the Nintendo 64. During these games he kills a lot of demons, saves humanity, stops the demonic invasion of Earth, and resolves to stay in Hell for the rest of eternity to make sure this never happens again.

And… he does that. He spends eons traveling between Hell and parallel dimensions, putting a stop to demonic invasions across the multiverse. He does this for so long that the demons canonize him as a part of their weird demonic religious belief system, dubbing him The Doom Slayer. The demons chronicle Doomguy’s rampage in a collection of stories called The Slayer’s Testament. He meets an order of alien knights in Hell called the Night Sentinels, whose own home world was pulled in to Hell by the demons and who had become just as effective at killing demons as he had. He pals around with them for a bit but eventually the demons get the better of them all and all that’s left is the Doomguy. This pisses him off really bad, so badly that when he went on his latest rampage he didn’t notice that the demons were leading him in to a trap. The demons drop an entire temple on his head, knock him unconscious, and lock him in a sarcophagus.

An undisclosed amount of time passes, and eventually the UAC from an alternate universe busts in to Hell by accident again. The UAC starts pulling natural resources and artifacts from Hell and using those resources to power all of their technology. Turns out, using Hell Energy to power your electronics makes people go crazy, and eventually this turns in to another full-on demonic invasion. This is where DOOM (2016) starts, with the Doomguy waking up from his nap in a UAC lab where they had been studying his sarcophagus. Doomguy realizes that he’s in a “same shit different universe” situation and gets to work stopping the demonic invasion and angrily ignoring the input of every single person that tries to talk to him. He’s seen all this shit before countless times and is sick of hearing excuses and monologues. He’s through with the niceties of it all. Characters tell him to “carefully deactivate” all of the different science machines that let humanity safely use Hell Energy. He smashes them to bits with his feet. Characters assure him that this was all for the “greater good,” he knows that the greatest possible good for humanity is not fucking with Hell anymore. They don’t know what they’re messing with, he does, and he has to fix the problem in his own special way.

The clip above is from Doom Eternal, set to release March of next year. The clip of Doomguy casually strolling through his UAC base and just sort of asserting himself is the result of the character having experienced several thousand years of this bullshit and being just So Through with it all. He’s not gonna hurt these people because ultimately he’s fighting to protect humanity, but as far as he’s concerned he doesn’t owe anyone in this scenario the luxury of his politeness or respect.

The demons are coming from a portal at the core of Mars? What a coincidence, he’s on one of the Martian moons and there’s a gun designed to blow up planets right outside. There’s also a bunch of demons outside, so that’s gonna need to be addressed. This guy has a key to the door out? Sweet. He’s just gonna borrow that right quick. That guy has a plasma rifle? Doomguy always liked that one. It belongs to him now. Time to go outside and hit things until the industrial metal stops playing.

Bruh this was a fuckin’ sweet info dump to read.

If you don’t have the spoons to read the article (bold is the important takeaways):

1. The article says the biomarkers found ALL the people with CFS and none of the healthy people. It’s a small sample size, but that’s 100% accuracy/sensitivity.

2. They did this by testing how the cells respond to stress. People who had cells that weren’t able to handle the salt (literally-they were given salt) had CFS.

3. They’re also testing how the cells react when given different drugs!!! Basically, they add the drug, and then if the cell handles stress better that means the drug might be of therapeutic use.

I haven’t had enough coffee yet so my brain is still pretty foggy and I’m not sure how much sense my summary made, but y'all this is pretty cool.

Happy first birthday Knife-Wielding Tentacle..👍

dear god, it lives still

Save the date folks, Knife-Wielding Tentacle’s second birthday is November 16th.

HAPPY SECOND BIRTHDAY, KNIFE-WIELDING TENTACLE!

Of course he’s a Scorpio

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

knife-wielding tentacle is 5 years old today…………………

They grow up so fast. :’)

Happy 6th birthday now! Woo! How wild!

Happy 7th birthday knife wielding tentacle

Surprised the actual Tumblr staff answered!

ive watched this video 5 times in the last two days and it always makes me laugh til i get a headache & i wanted it on my blog but didnt find it anywhere so guess i gotta do it myself

You ever think about how crows are acting not unlike how early humans probably did and you're just like. Oh ok

I saw a Thing one time about how the earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur because that shows that we were taking care of each other because if we Didn't a broken leg would mean you Die because you can't. Do things

And I was thinking about this and I remembered also seeing an article about this one mated pair of crows where one of them broke its beak and thus couldn't properly feed itself on its own. So the other one helps

So basically I have connected the two dots ("you didn't connect shit") I've connected them

And also they not only use tools but teach each other how to construct them, so uh

Really makes you think

Realistically I know immortality would kinda suck but I'd love to see where crows are going with this

Fun fact, there is little info on crows (as far as species of interest go) because they're so good at evading human tactics for collection and observation. I had a friend who studied them in grad school. Not only do they describe humans to each other (so crows you've never seen before will avoid you), they also learn the precise distance of net cannons (for trapping and tagging) after 1 encounter and then stand at that distance the entire time (making naive researchers think maybe they can juuuust caych em). So basically you need to befriend them (a common strategy), or find a murder that's never seen you before (researchers wear presidents masks to throw them off, but then they remember and describe the cars). In this case, you have one chance to collect enough in the group to get good data. Whatever crow you catch once, you probably will never catch again, ruling out biosensing devices (like they use with other birds and turtles n junk).

The latest big finding about crows is that they have a grasp of knowledge breadth, meaning they "know what they know" meaning they are conscious (self aware), have subjective experiences and can reflect on their knowledge. (Source) This also implies they have an understanding of the unknown.

Look up Andreas Nieder and Jon Marzluff's work if you want the deep skinny.

Small correction for the part about crows describing humans to each other: that is a misunderstanding of the actual findings that I've seen pop up a lot (and that I had myself at first). What the widely referenced study actually found was that crows learn from each other by observing other crows' behavior - this is called "social" or "horizontal" learning. In the case of the masked study this basically means that crow A observed crow B, who had been trapped by a researcher earlier, be upset at that researcher, and subsequently crow A would also be upset at the researcher despite not having had any personal first-hand negative experience with the researcher. While this is very much not the same as crow A being told by crow B that the researcher is dangerous, this is still a very notable form of learning that not all animals are capable of. If you want to read the study for yourself, it's freely available as an open access paper!

Love me some tasty corvid knowledge

Have I told you guys about the Fake Alaskan Volcano Eruption of April Fools 1974?

*sits down* Gather round, kiddies. its Story Time with Viv!

Whoa you calling me Tori was really weird for a second, not in a bad oh god no kinda way, but in a “who the hell is Bucky” kinda way

ANYWAY, gather round friends, and I will tell you the only story you need to hear if you want to really understand my home state.

APRIL 1ST, 1974

Residents of Sitka, Alaska woke up to a rare beautiful clear day(it rains all the damn time in Southeast Alaska), the sun was out, the sky was blue, and black smoke was rising from Mt Edgecumbe

Now Mt Edgecumbe is only 18 miles from Sitka

And it’s a dormant volcano that hadn’t erupted for thousands of years, so to see this:

was very unusual, and rather worrying.

“Shit,” the Sitkans thought, “we may be Alaskans and pretty weird about responding to danger, but even we know this might be bad”. 

SO the Coast Guard was called!

They flew a helicopter up right away and guess what they found? 

Was it:

nope

Maybe it was:

Nuh huh, sorry

It couldn’t POSSIBLY be:

God no, but that would be hella rad

It was this:

(this is not an accurate image, there were only 70 tires in real life) 

Turned out that a 54 year old local dude named Oliver ‘Porky’ Bickar and some buddies had flown the tires up early that morning and he’d come up with the prank in 1970 but hadn’t been able to do it until ‘74 because all the other years had terrible weather on April Fools. 

(He’d woken up that day, saw the clear sky and told his wife, Patty, “I have to go do it today” to which she replied “Just don’t make an ass of yourself” which delights me no end)

Porky has actually warned the police he was going to do this and also informed the FAA (gotta get that flight plan approved to haul those tires up) but, and oh god I love this, TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THE COAST GUARD

Luckily for him the Coasties thought this was the funniest fucking thing they had ever seen in their goddamn lives, and as it turned out, residents of Sitka agreed!

The story ended up exploding(ah ha ha do you get it? because volcano?) and national newspapers even covered it.

But Porky’s favourite response was a letter he got after the Mt St Helens eruption in 1980 that read:  “This time, you little bastard, you’ve gone too far.”

I’ve been told, though I can’t find any sources to verify this, that when he died another fire was set in the volcano by the town to honor him. 

And that’s the story of how a man faked a volcanic eruption and became a state hero. 

The absolute best fucking costume ever, OMG 😍🖤😍🖤😍🖤😍

Wow!

SUCH a good horse friend too, because the rider says "he can't see shit" due to costume limitations. So they have to trust each other more than if he was fully sighted.

Be warned though, this strat can oneshot anything, including your GPU

via @xxaeris

The ruins of Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire, England, completed by drone lighting.

Blog: https://artifactsmuseumhistory.blogspot.com/?m=1

okay see this is what we should be doing with drone lighting, not bullshit commercialism. this fucks hard actually, i love being able to more fully visualize the complete forms of our historical ruins.

Hannah Jensen is a New Zealand artist who hand-craves images into layers of acrylic paint, a technique she created in 2003.

art_dailydose

…..

Two.

...

One

i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”

When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.

Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.

The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.

The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler - or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.

But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:

Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!

Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!

Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!

Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs… *insert iconic evil laugh*

Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).

And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.

::closes tab, shuts off computer, and proceeds to have the best day ever just by knowing this exists::

i will always reblog Evil Chancellor Traytor

Thinking about how Jonathan Harker’s role as the haunted vampire hunter-archenemy has been so thoroughly pushed onto Van Helsing's shoulders. Annoying as it is to see in so many adaptations and spinoffs, I can’t help King Laughing about both the comedic and dramatic potential of this misconception as it would apply to future supernatural shenanigans post-Dracula canon

Specifically, how hilarious and/or advantageous it would be to

All while Jonathan ‘Only Assertive Under Duress’ Harker is just sitting there, politely waiting for the chance to speak up and say, no, actually, that professor over there is Abraham van Helsing. His name is Jonathan H—

“Oh, Jonathan van Helsing? My apologies. Was it your father who did all that?”

Jonathan, sweating: “um—"

Van Helsing, not immune to a Good Bit: “No, no, it was him! My child, do not be shy on the matter of your so many harrowing feats! He brings such pride to the Van Helsing name.” :)

Jonathan, internally: (Why this???)

Mina, internally: (It keeps our name out of the wind and away from snooping supernatural ears, darling. I’d rather Mary not open the door on an angry undead horde because they knew where to find Mr. and Mrs. Harker.)

Mina, out loud, the Power of Prank Compels Her: “He really is too modest.” <3

I just think it’s a gimmick that could get some good mileage as a misdirection ploy and a feasible in-universe excuse for why Van Helsing keeps getting all the Dracula Nemesis credit

kelpiieee

I think that the real reason that Terry Pratchett is my favourite fantasy writer is that he’s the only one who really centres working people in his stories. I mean, Game of Thrones is almost entirely about the antics of rival aristocrats; Harry Potter is heir to two family fortunes and the subject of a prophecy and goes to an elite boarding school; even the Hobbits (save Sam) in The Lord of the Rings are minor gentry. Meanwhile, who are the main protagonists in Discworld? A recovering-alcoholic cop; an old peasant woman who lives in a cottage; a conman who was forced to take over the post-office. Pratchett writes entire novels about classes of people that other writers treat as background characters. He’s not condescending in his depictions; he’s willing to show enlisted soldiers as people, rather than arrow-fodder; and he’s aware that even ‘simple peasants’ know detailed information about things that wizards and knights can’t be arsed to care about; that everything about the world takes a hell of a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes and that most people never see, And he makes sure that you know this, too.

Oh my god. I need to share another story of my new friend making today. So my friends husband says, very casually, as we’re about to leave for the ren faire, “Yeah, it’s like my story about fucking a chicken.”

And of the four people present I was the only one who was shocked. The others all nodded as if to say, yes yes, we know, the chicken fucking.

So he explained, when a progressive person is analyzing a behavior they will typically use the metric, Harm/No Harm. They may not like things in the No Harm category but they wouldn’t object.

Conversely, a more conservative mindset used something like eight metrics. Authority/No Authority Moral/Not Moral, things like that.

So, he posited if you want to sound out someone’s mindset (and you’re willing to live with the repercussions) you can ask: if a man buys a dead chicken from the store, cleans it thoroughly, then fucks it, and then eats it himself…?

I listened in dawning horror, both rapt and disgusted. But into the growing pause I whispered, “No harm…” because it really has no effect on me or anyone else if a man fucks a dead chicken. I don’t like it, I think he’s a weird dude, but like. That’s his dick. But a more conservative person will hear that and object on moral grounds despite not being harmed.

It’s been haunting me all day, so please enjoy.

This is also a handy probability scale for who's gonna be wearing your skin in a week.

I know you’re joking but this joke is absolutely the point. You’ve assigned a moral judgement to the act, rather than acknowledging it as not harmful.

In the current climate sex has so many moral judgements applied, and I can tell you that perfectly bland every day people do some Crazy Sex Stuff. When I worked at a sex shop they’d tell me all about it. It didn’t preclude them to murder or being serial killers. If someone wants to fuck a warm cantaloupe or a dead chicken it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t harm me or anyone else.

Your morals should not be applied to anyone else’s sex life unless there’s actual harm, and a time where public indecency laws are rearing their heads again creeping toward the immoral queers, it’s something to actively push against.

To read more about the serious research underlying this, look up Moral Foundations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory). The original hypothesis has five or six axes, along which different people make different value judgments:

One of the features of conservative populism is that it leans heavily on Sanctity/Degradation for its emotional hook. You can see this in their revulsion at queer sex acts, for example, but it's also a feature of propaganda that casts some races/ethnicities as "dirty" or "filthy" or "animals". Mis-casting these feelings of revulsion as something they should have the Liberty to put into law - rather than something which writing laws about would constitute Oppression of others - is a key feature of modern conservative/traditional movements.

Dr. Jer Clifton has done similar work on a 26-dimensional measurement of attitudes that he calls "Primal World Beliefs" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_world_beliefs). In one sense these theories are both really reductive... but in another they're incredibly useful for understanding what makes an argument so compelling to others when it sounds preposterous to you.

One more reason you should care: the people who build the structure of political campaigns absolutely have read these theories, and use them to structure their broad arguments.

Tactical reloading of things that don’t need tactical reloads

(cc: @petermorwood) (per so many discussions)

I'm obsessed with court jesters in fantasy stories so have another story concept about it:

A new person is introduced to the king's court, and as soon as they walk in the court jester announces that they are a thief and a fraud and rode in here with stolen horses. And just as the newcome member is about to retaliate, they're advised not to, and explained that nothing the jester says is true, ever. He just says completely baseless and wild shit, recreationally. The newcomer looks at the jester, who is currently bemoaning that the king won't kiss him in public, as if they are lovers. The king looks irate, but leads by example and ignores the jester's idiotic claims.

The more one learns about the court's inner workings, the more apparent it is that the jester really does do that. The false claims and absurd rumours that go around aren't regurgitated by the jester as often as they are apparently started by him, and are proven false on a consistent basis. The only way to make yourself a worse clown than the jester himself is to get defensive about it, or make any attempt to disprove him. Once a drunken high priest embarrasses himself completely by stripping down in front of the court to prove that he does not, in fact, consist of two smaller men standing on each others' shoulders, concealed by the priestly garb.

"And the king is fucking the jester" has become a standard sarcastic retort that people say to imply that someone is a naive fool who believes in wild and false baseless rumours. Along the lines of "You think the old marchioness' handmaid is actually secretly her personal assassin? Do you also believe that the king is fucking the jester?"

But if one could wiggle their way all the way through to the deepest bottom layers of court scheming without getting killed along the way, it turns out that there are a handful of these claims that actually are true, but nobody would ever believe them - or believe you if you told them about it - because the truth is disguised as such open-faced blatant lies that you'd look like a fool trying to actually prove them. And all of these most outrageous things are schemes that re-inforce the power of the throne or directly benefit the king. And the system is so sturdy that the jester could flat-out say that out loud and nobody would believe it because it's the jester saying it.

Because the truth is, the king is fucking the jester.