RIP to the Master.

chameleon chameleon

a comic about being bigender, and bisexual, by me! happy pride everyone.

btw I’ve found these stretches from the WAK blog very helpful when knitting a lot:

Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!

especially with gift knitting I know it can be tempting to push through it for a deadline, but it’s really not worth causing long term injury. (And anyone knit-worthy should be understanding of that, imho.) Stay well :)

Also good for artists drawing with pencils/on a tablet/with a pen!

Also good for writers

Make art, take care!

I mentioned it before but it is very striking to me that as of the last tumblr update, there are now no (0) ways to open someone's desktop blog from a dashboard post. like you can't access the url dot tumblr dot com page at all now unless you already know it exists. imo this seems like a canary that personal blog pages will be gone very shortly, which would suck, since to me that is one of the only good things this site has going for it

Correction: you can still open the top-level URL.tumblr.com link from someone's avatar on the dashboard (so, someone you follow). Actually, I should specify. Here's a post on the dashboard with seven ways to access a post:

So you can access the custom blog, but not a post on a custom blog, despite the plethora of links. Very annoying.

No, here’s the worst part: you can indeed get the link of the post you are clicking on and view it on the person’s custom blog!

IT’S JUST ON THE FUCKING MEATBALL MENU TIMESTAMP INSTEAD FOR SOME REASON I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS SITE

oh my god

June - Spiteful

hiccup from the first book (and toothless!!)

he is so adorable and cool

Something I’m really gonna miss from the OG Pokemon anime is Meowth giving helpful life advice to other pokemon while his own life is in shambles.

Are you trapped on tumblr right now?

Is there something you planned to do before you got trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Are you yelling at yourself to get up and do the thing, but you can’t, because you’re trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Consider this your save point.

Put tumblr down, stand up, stretch, and go do the thing you planned to do. Future you will be incredibly grateful.

Things people in the notes have been able to do thanks to this post:

I need y’all to know that you’re doing amazing, and I’m so glad that I was able to help you break out of a procrastination loop you did not want to be stuck in.

Helpful post I’ve added to my queue in case it helps someone else at the random point when it’s posted.

I was told that the novelization re-Harried Harry a bit but am delighted to see it also re-MJed MJ

A historian or a sociologist will say something like “technology doesn’t exist on a simply hierarchy like in a video game,” and I think people whose exposure to history is primarily through pop culture will go “huh? that seems like nonsense. I mean, an automatic rifle beats a sword. 21st century America is richer than 3000 BC Mesopotamia. Our medical technology right now, today, is better than anything in the Middle Ages. Of course you can ‘rank’ technology!”

But the real answer is still no; because no technology exists apart from its context, and the question you are forgetting is–better how? Better in what situations?

The Ancient Greeks knew the principles necessary to build steam engines, and probably would perfectly understand the principle of operation of a steam locomotive; but they didn’t build trains, because they didn’t have the metals to build trains with, and they didn’t have the metals to build trains with because the economy of the ancient eastern Mediterranean didn’t support the manufacture of steel; and it didn’t support the manufacture of steel because bronze and the iron they had solved all the problems they needed metals for, a king of ancient Greece devoting his city-state’s spare productive capacity to mining iron ore and turning it into steel would have been wiped out by neighboring states who didn’t waste time and energy doing that, and spent their time making a bunch of bronze swords and beating the crap out of that king and his soldiers. Even if the Greeks could have built trains, what would they use them for? Railroads are a solution to transportation when you have industrial quantities of goods moving around to support a highly integrated economy, a rich source of high-carbon fuel easily available, and (for instance) warfare based on massive formations recruited from a mobilized, industrialized population.

None of which ancient Greece had. If you Connecticut-Yankee’d your way into 5th century BC Greece, you would find that trying to bootstrap an industrial economy from the ground up would require first speedrunning 2300 years of intervening demographic and economic developments, as well as technological ones, and even then a modern Greece surrounded by a Bronze Age world would be a very different animal, along all those dimensions, than a modern Greece surrounded by a modern world.

If you wanted to go Alexander with modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare, you could–but modern combined arms tactics and maneuver warfare is a solution to modern arms, and you might find it was significantly cheaper to arm your hoplites with slightly upgraded versions of the old spear-and-shield, and invest all the materials and energy you would have spent on tanks in building up the wealth of your state–because remember, everything you spend on building a better tank you’re not spending on anything else. This is why German technical skill was a miserable failure in WW2–their overengineered bullshit was expensive, and for each fancy German tank they pumped out (from a much worse position resource-wise than the Allies), the Allies made many less fancy, good enough tanks, and the Nazis got overrun. To recall the earlier metaphor: your automatic rifle is only any good if the other guy is way over there. If he sneaks up on you with his sword, you might wish you had a sword instead, though that won’t help you if you’ve only ever practiced using a rifle, because it’s “better.”

Even the process of innovation is not like most people imagine it, I would argue. The bulk of innovation comes from incremential trial-and-error improvements in processes that accumulate over decades, if not centuries or millennia. Incremential improvement is hard; unless you have a wild overabundance of resources, too much experimentation is just going to waste scarce materials; the thing that drives major innovations is having a problem that needs solving, and (again, until a resource becomes superabundant) a reliable method that produces consistent results is better than wasting time and effort testing a new way of producing something that may or may not work.

If you want an antibiotic or to send a message across the world, or figure out what the Moon is made of, yes, modern technology is better for all those things; and there are periods of cultural and societal change that open up the space for innovations: the steam locomotive was impossible in 5th century BC Greece, and inevitable in 19th century Britain. But it only became inevitable because of economic changes that only became inevitable because of demographic changes that started much earlier; those in turn were dependent on factors beyond the control of any single person or state.

Technologies can be dependent on each other, or on other factors, in the way living organisms are dependent on each other or on environmental factors in a food web; but a shark isn’t “better” than a jellyfish because it has a more complicated anatomy. It’s solving the problem of how to be a shark, while the jellyfish is solving the problem of how to be a jellyfish. Even our industrial, “scientific” technologies can struggle in environments they’re not suited for, which more “primitive” technologies do perfectly well in–because even our best technology (and our best scientists) are constrained by the environments and assumptions they are developed in.

Unapologetic Wander gallery section

God I'm a sucker for characters who are so utterly loyal to someone that they're completely unhinged. Characters who have no moral compass except their overwhelming devotion to whoever they've chosen to listen to. That's the good shit

Congratulations on having the best reaction to meeting your cute, fluffy mascot in magical girl history.

a piece of media that is bad: mundane. effectless

a piece of media that is bad but had the potential to be so so good: unbearable. agonizing. soul crushing even

BANJO🎵

I was actually very interested in the descriptions. Couldn’t find any information online. So I tried to transcribe them myself.

Killer whale pod of many nations Odin Lonning, 2006 (carved cedar with acrylic) Created as a tribute to endangered killer whales and coastal tribes(?) from Puget Sound to Alaska, Odin Lonning’s Killer Whale Pod of Many Nations (illegible) symbolizes the enduring bond between First Nations and killer whales, regarded as sacred by many Northwest Native peoples. From left ot right, the whales exemplify Tlingit, Haida, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Coast Salish motifs This peace was made possible by a Native Arts grant from the P(illegible)ch Fund Text by Alan (illegible) & Odin Lonning Tlingit The Tlingit whale (illegible) how a (illegible) in the story of (illegible) or creation(?) of the Killer Whale Haida The Haida whale embodies (illegible) stories about the (illegible) Killer Whale and the adventures of Na(illegilble) and his wife(?) Nuu-cha-nulth The Nuu-cha-nulth whale signifies the (illegible) wolf(?) killer whale connection to the culture and communities(?) (illegible) Kwakwaka'wakw The Kwakwaka'wakw whale celebrates(?) the triumphant(?) (illegible) of K(illegible) when her(?) pod in(?) (illegible) First Nations territory in British Columbia(?) Coast Salish

The Coast Salish whale pays homage(?)to the indigenous poeples(?) and (illegible) of the Salish Lake(?)

i got you!

the artist Odin Lonning (his website) is Tlingit

this is indeed his piece: Killer Whale Pod of Many Nations (2006) (carved cedar with acrylic) which is displayed at the Seattle Aquarium

this paper (WHULJ, newsletter for the Puget Sound chapter of the American Cetacean Society) has an article about this work when it was dedicated: Killer Whale Pod of Many Nations: “Carving for a Greater Cause” By Ann Stateler which discusses the specific representations each whale embodies, as well as the dedication ceremony and the real life whales who inspired the piece

here is a better quality photo of the work, from a aquarium visitors flickr account :)

Semifinals Side A

Luna (Sailor Moon) vs. Kururun (Tropical-Rouge! Precure)

voting against kururun?!?!!!

his reaction ⬇️ fr...

Nooooooo!!! Save our Kururun!

some wander doodles