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Intergalactic Bean

@intergalactic-bean

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.” -Vincent Van Gogh
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on a serious note regarding the wga strike and (as of 1:50 AM PST 7/13) upcoming sag-aftra strike, dsa-la has a fundraiser called The Snacklist which provides snacks and water on the picket lines here in LA. right now the funds they have will not last through the end of the summer, especially given the current and upcoming heatwaves necessitating more supplies. if you have a couple of dollars to spare it's a great way to directly support the writers (and potentially the actors) during this difficult time!

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happy first sag-aftra strike in 60 years to all who celebrate.

if you are an enjoyer of media (which i will guess based on your presence on tumblr that you are) please consider donating to the snacklist (linked above) or to any of the following mutual aid funds that directly support striking actors/writers, IATSE and teamster union members who are also out of work and by and large refusing to cross the picket lines, and nonunion PAs and assistants (like yours truly) who are directly impacted by the work stoppage. everyone in this industry works unbelievably hard to bring you the shows, movies, webseries, and variety programs that you enjoy and every worker deserves a fair contract. any support you can give is extremely meaningful.

The Entertainment Community Fund provides emergency financial assistance to anyone in the entertainment industry who is unable to pay their immediate basic living expenses such as housing, food, bills, and healthcare.

The Union Solidarity Coalition has been formed by members of the wga, sag, and the dga to help cover the cost of healthcare for IATSE and teamsters who will not get enough work hours to qualify for their coverage this year due to their refusal to cross a picket line.

The Hollywood Support Staff Relief Fund (also run by the Entertainment Community Fund but separate from the above link which supports all film and tv workers) offers assistance to tv and film support staff and assistants who are not protected by a union and have been displaced from low or entry level positions.

Drive 4 Solidarity is an IATSE organized event in August raising funds for all union and guild members. Tickets are available for those in socal but donations are being taken as well.

Humanitas Groceries for Writers fund provides WGA members with grocery gift cards.

Green Envelope Grocery is a grocery fund for all workers in the entertainment industry regardless of union status.

Touchscreens do not belong in cars

And gauges and dials should be gauges and dials, not screens

Door releases should have a direct mechanical link to a latch, not send an electronic signal to a servo

You should not have to have your phone alive to unlock your car

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Most touchscreens have a temperature resistance of less than 40°C (104°F). They do not belong on cars, toasters, ovens and stoves, any kind of safety equipment, or any equipment that requires precision of operation to maintain safety. They do not belong anywhere near a working engine.

I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.

In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!

Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.

Anyway dragonfly for admiration:

Calico pennant by nbdragonflyguy

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Everything is something’s habitat. You might as well not go outside for fear of stepping on some larval beetle.

This is hugely missing the point. The idea is to enjoy what’s left of our natural spaces while having as little an impact as possible. It’s not difficult to avoid intentionally destroying habitat. I recommend looking into the Leave No Trace principle which is very important for conservation. Cynicism doesn’t help anything.

You can read more about Leave No Trace here.

A few rock stacks here and there wouldn’t have much of an impact alone. But in parks that see thousands or even millions of visitors each year, when you have people like you saying, “sure, literal scientists and park rangers are telling me not to do this, but surely that doesn’t apply to ME,” the effect is huge. Please attempt to see the bigger picture. You are not so special that YOU get to ignore the rules and continue intentionally destroying habitat even after you’ve been told it’s harmful.

Benthic invertebrates in streams are a CRITICAL part of a lot of food webs — because they are so diverse, they have a lot of feeding strategies that move calories up the food web and nutrients into the ecosystem around them. Some consume oil-rich diatom films, a critical source of essential fatty acids throughout the food web, some shred leaves and twigs into tiny bits that decompose more easily, allowing streams to remain clear and flowing, some filter out particulates from the water making it clearer, some are predators, concentrating nutrients — and they do this as larvae, and then the adults fly out of the stream, bringing the nutrients and calories from the stream to the surrounding landscape. The whole ecosystem is richer because of the diversity of benthic macroinvertebrates — which is why it’s important to preserve their habitat, though this is more “maintain dissolved oxygen levels by protecting temperature and limiting sedimentation” and “have a mixture of shaded and unshaded stream reaches” day to day. I do think “Don’t destroy the physical habitat for art projects” is an easy action to take but like. It’s fine to do that OUT of the creek? Build the stacks of rocks on ridge tops, where they aren’t habitat for stressed critical species? (caveat: I am in western North America and I have limited understanding of other parts of the world.)

A good addition that goes into more detail about WHY these critters are important to their particular ecosystems that I didn’t bother with on the original post because I didn’t think it would get so much traction.

But I’d say don’t stack rocks anywhere in parks. If you want to stack rocks on your private property, go nuts.

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wanna hear a wild story? my brother’s history professor is closing in on 80 and basically lives at the university. one night my brother visited him for a meeting, and it came up that my brother was gonna be performing as a court jester at the castle the following day. and his professor busts out: “ah, that reminds me of my youth!”

he then proceeded to tell the tale of when he and his friends went backpacking to greece back in their early 20s. then one day they found themselves completely penniless. so they decided that the only reasonable thing to do was to set up acrobatic shows in skimpy outfits on the beach at day, and then drink up the money at night.

after a week or so they gained some traction, and a gang of young greek men walked up to them like “hey y’all are cool as hell, can we join y’all for drinks tonight?” and my brother’s professor was like “of course! y’all have to wear these revealing outfits and do somersaults with us tho” and the greek gang said “sounds dope. y’all are invited to live with us for however long y’all want.”

anyhow, they proceeded to live like this for the better part of 3 months, doing shows, drinking, and sleeping at the greek gang’s apartment. but after a while they decided enough was enough, and said thank you for everything, but we’re going back to sweden now. and the greeks said “sure! love y’all have a safe trip xx”

half a year later my brother’s professor gets contacted by the greek police. they ask him about the months they spent in greece, and then informs him that their greek friends have been convicted of serial homicide and robbery. that the group of young greek men had joined up with several tourist groups for several years “for drinks”, and then killed and robbed them all, terrorising the beach city for several years. with one exception, of course, because “this one group of swedish acrobats in slutty strongman suits were just ‘so damn nice’”.

and that’s the story of how one swedish history university professor survived sharing a flat with a group of serial killers for several months by performing acrobatics in slutty outfits on the beach. moral of the story? be kind of heart, thicc of ass.

ERASE the idea that America saved lives by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan from your minds. ERASE the idea that it was anything more than a political move to scare Russia and also to satiate US curiosity as to the true ability of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military bases. They were heavily populated civilian cities chosen precisely bc the U.S. wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go. Japan was on the verge of surrendering, the U.S. literally wanted to test out their nuclear weapons on people that they deemed disposable. That is it. If those bombs were dropped by any nation other than the US veryone involved would have been tried as war criminals.

Also erase the idea that America was the hero of WWII and got into the war because they wanted so save people. They couldn’t have cared less about the victims of the Holocaust, proven by the fact that they turned away so many shiploads of refugees that went on to die at the hands of Nazis.

“the us wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go” oh really? Source your bullshit, asshole

i left out sources bc i figured most tumblr users know how to use google but ok 

- Report produced by the U.S Strategic Bombing Group (employed by Truman) to survey the air attacks on Japan concluded that: 

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56 

- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:

I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380

- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441

- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:

[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71

- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source

- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:

“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here 

- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:

I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source

- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:

I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145

So to recap: 

  1. A lot of American generals were against using the bomb as they felt it served an empty purpose.
  2. Those who agreed with its usage completely disagreed with dropping them on cities.
  3. Truman went ahead and had them detonated in two highly populated civilian cities anyway. Two cities that had remained mostly untouched by regular bombings throughout the war precisely bc of their lack of value to the Japanese war effort.  

Draw your own conclusions. 

I remember someone saying "mad scientists in fiction aren't scientists because there's never a control group"

I think if you've created an elixir that turns people into goat men you have sort have gone past the need for a control group. The control group is not going to placebo themselves into goat men. You can probably not run the control group, and safely assume that none of them would have turned into goat men. That said, having a control group for that would make the mad scientist seem extra crazy and be really really funny, especially if he was carefully testing them for goat like features from the dyed water they drank instead of the elixir

several years ago i found this post on some finnish humor site. it was in finnish so i decided to translate it bcs i wanted that others could enjoy it too (and no, the original finnish version wasnt any more coherent than my translation, the only mistranslation in this post is that the “paper” should probably be “paper towel”). then i posted the translation to tumblr. suddenly.. the notes kinda just blew completely and this got posted on whole bunch of other sites too. and it spread everywhere.

i still see people using half of this post as reaction images and i still see fandom specific edits of this floating around every now and then and it haunts me. this post haunts me. i will never be free.

op when they see edits of this post:

yeah