@kittymaverick / kittymaverick.tumblr.com
my favorite thing in the entire world is fiction that takes the concept of "space ship" to its literal extreme i'm not even exaggerating that shit rocks
pics that make you yearn for a life in a universe that only exists in your daydreams
pics that make you wish Treasure Planet was a more appreciated movie
Today is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. Before that, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence.
For perspective, I’ve been diabetic for about 25% of this discovery’s history. When my grandparents were born, this treatment did not exist. If you ask me, “what time period would be fun to go back to?” I can’t even speculate more than one hundred years back, because I know I couldn’t live in that world.
Today, I’m going to pick up four boxes of insulin from my local drug store. My endocrinologist is renewing my prescription, so I’m set for several months to come. I lead a more difficult life than someone without Type 1 diabetes, but I do live, and so do my relatives and friends with the condition. Thank you, Banting, Best, Macleod, and Collip (and all those dogs), for letting me do that.
One hundred years later, after insulin’s discoverer gave his patent away for $1 so as never to profit from the discovery, pharmaceutical companies are forcing people to ration insulin or go without entirely due to unchecked price increases. This is particularly true in the US, and is a major reason why I did not stay there after graduate school. There, and in much of the world where insulin is expensive and scarce, people are dying. Things are starting to change, but not soon enough. It’s been one hundred years, and we need to do better when the alternative is death.
Insulin is worth being grateful about, and its exploitation is worth being angry about. One thing to be aware of is that it is a treatment only, not a cure. Diabetes is still high-maintenance, and I still have a very complicated relationship to it.
Today, though, I’m choosing to focus on my gratitude, and being alive, and being able to go for a walk with my friend in the rain-scented air, do some trivia, see a show.
They say the change in the first child to receive a dose of insulin, 100 years ago, looked like magic.
Good post
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
“When Texas sought to enter the Union in 1845 as a slave state, federal law in the United States, based on the Missouri Compromise, prohibited slavery north of 36°30' parallel north. Under the Compromise of 1850, Texas surrendered its lands north of 36°30' latitude.”
Tell me more about how critical race theory shouldn’t be taught in school.
I am a grown ass man and I just learned about this 5 minutes ago. Fuck everything about trying to hide the sins of our past.
Critical Race theory, as it actually is, is a high level class taught in Law School. It focuses on how laws in the US that are supposed to be equally affect everyone, actually disproportionately affect marginalized people.
What the is displayed in OP's image is US history as it is related to slavery.
When certain conservatives are crying about "Critical Race Theory," they are complaining that they don't want certain kinds of history taught in school. Anything that might make people feel bad. Making history nice and palatable instead of actually acknowledging the messy realities.
The making of those past mistakes isn't the problem. It's the fact that so many people are unwilling to own up to those decisions. By making it problematic to teach about certain aspects of history, they will be able sweep under the rug atrocities that are still effecting people to this day.
There's a great book called "How the States Got Their Shapes" which goes into how state boundaries were drawn. Most of the later additions were pretty dull ("we'll just use this river and these latitude lines") but any state that came about pre-1860 involved one or both of the following:
1) Water access (river, lake, or ocean)h
2) the desperate attempt to keep balance between slave and free states.
This goes to show that a) the United States really is just fifty tiny nations in a trench coat and b) literally everything about the early history of the country was shaped by racial inequality and we need to stop pretending it wasn't.
Just ask a Jayhawker about that little chunk between Nebraska and Missouri!
Kevin the Kitten (Vanessa Stockard) animated by Jenni Pasanen https://www.instagram.com/p/CATfqhqgO1Q/?igshid=13vl67k4n0fue
this is the best thing ive ever seen and my eyes are 23 years old
It came out ok in the end. But the process came with quite a bit of nightmare fuel.
I first did as much as I could without having to touch the hair sim. I had no idea how to do hair sim.
But I “luckily” found a quick hair sim button in blender. So that was looking quite nice. However I was a fool. I hadn’t yet touched any sliders on the hair particle system. And i still needed to add colour.
This should have been my first warning. I had to hide the face plate, so i could remove some of the hair bits that were clipping it. I wasn’t prepared.
Then I decided I wanted to have another bit of light hair on top. simply add a square under the hair and press the hair sim button.
simple.
right?
I don’t know exactly how I managed this, but somehow i had made the particle system use the data from the gravity sim to generate more hair.
I made the mistake of zooming out.
…
and zooming out more
My computer didn’t like that. The hair, It just kept going, but the more I zoomed out the more my computer slowed down. So this is as far as i was willing to push it.
After fixing that issue I put a bit more effort prettying the model up. First I added colour to the faceplate and its different parts, then I cooked up a quick and dirty procedural texture for the eyes.
finally I made a front hair sim for the white belly, this led to another problem. at some point the baked physics started getting…
weird.
no mater what I did the hair would just start growing a few frames in.
I tried everything I could! I scrapped the physics bake, I trawled through all the particle systems sliders. I changed numbers randomly. I even did a full uv unwrap, which I had been avoiding. nothing fixed it.
I really didn’t want to end up with something not a furby at the end of all this work. so i kept looking for a solution.
Then i found out it animated.
In the end I just saved the file (I’d realized I hadn’t saved once up until that point. almost had heart attack when it froze for a few seconds while saving), then closed and reopened blender. Of course the old, “turn it off then on again” worked perfectly.
So there you go, I now have a slightly cursed furby 3d model.
Tactoon-cat Cartoons
With each I was like “Surely the cat doesn’t actually look like that in the image. surely this is an exaggeration.” but then I scrolled and yes, the cats are liquid
Video by @贝贝爱贝贝 on douyin, showing the backstage changing process at an outdoor Chinese opera performance. English translations added by me :)
All under tight time constraints; this should have the Mission: Impossible theme playing.
Date Of UFO Sighting: March 26, 2020
Location: Montréal, France
Source: Jean-Michel Tenac
UFO World TV
The moon for this planet is a hollow space lab
That is the Japanese moon mapping mission. It had three satelites that work in unison.
the Japanese SELENE mission to the Moon launched in 2007 and instructed to impact on the lunar surface near the crater Gill in June, 2009. it was the largest lunar mission since the Apollo program, featuring three spacecraft, Kaguya, Okina, and Ouna
these gifs were taken more than a decade later
ALSO, the size of those objects would have to be magnitudes larger than any spacecraft we’ve ever built. I mean, look at the scale of these things against the (known) size of the terrain features below them. we’re talking dozens of kilometers long…
…as perhaps more noticeable in these photos I took on November 20, 2018:
the Moon is 3500 kilometers in diameter. look at the size of those things!
and they’re booking it - I took each shot through my telescope a couple seconds apart
those are not human craft (and, no, bugs on the mirror don’t focus like this)
anyone else get photos like this?
if your hobby is currently causing you stress, this is your permission slip to take a guilt-free break
it’s okay if someone is waiting for your creation
it’s okay if you promised yourself you’d finish it by now
it’s okay if it’s not as good as you want it to be yet
log off, step away, put it in a cupboard. come back in a week or two with a well-rested brain and a fresh perspective
the pressure you’re putting on yourself is your own choice, and you can choose to step away from it
hobbies aren’t jobs. they’re fun. have fun with it.
Caravaggio living paintings by Ludovica Rambelli Theater
This never ceases to amaze me, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.
[psst. hey. it wasn’t the trauma that made you stronger, kinder, and more empathetic.] [it’s how you handled it] [that credit is yours.]
@thecinnamonkitten put this gem in the notes
👏THIS SENTAMENT IS SO IMPORTANT! 👏
I feel like saying “trauma made you this person” encourages people to attach their trauma to their identity to an unhealthy degree. And then even when you escape the trauma, you still can’t fully separate yourself from it, because then who are you without it?
The trauma tested you. The trauma pushed you into a corner where you had to change yourself or let the trauma change you. And you are still here because you chose not to let the trauma change you. Your own strength is what pushed you to becoming a better person.
My five month old daughter just bit down on her own fingers and hurt herself, then as soon as I got her calmed down from that, she did the exact same thing with her other hand. Like, good on her for checking to make sure it wasn't just the ONE hand, I guess?
We finally got her redirected to her teething toys, but damn.
The Ring: If I had a quarter for every time a hobbit picked me up, I’d have two quarters. The Ring: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Of all the bearers of Sauron’s ring, 4 of them were hobbits.
I was wrong. It’s 5. Not 4
The lineage of ring bearers is as follows.
I love how Deagol counts as a ring bearer even though he had it in his possession for all of like five seconds
He held it for the rest of of his life!
[Image description: Tweet by @banalplay saying “but something happened then that the ring did not intend. it was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a hobbit, the same fuckin thing that just had it for like 500 years.” End Image Description.] Link to original here. Otherwise reblogging for the final rb there, which made me cackle.
From the ring’s perspective:
1. Home, the finger of my creator and other self.
2. Well, I don’t like it but I can work with this. Cause some trouble, get some revenge, find my way home, this is fine.
3. What the fuck is you?
4. Right personality, wrong species, I don’t know what you are but I hate you and I don’t know why you’re so resistant to my powers.
5. NO NO NO there are goblins everywhere how did I find another one of THESE horrible things. This one’s even more resistant than the last one and also disgustingly nice. I suffer.
6. Listen, I’ll cooperate, just get me the fuck out of this hellhole full of small cheerful people my power doesn’t work on properly. No, not like that. I hate you. Please stop.
7. FUCK
8. (Frodo again) I still hate you with every molecule of my mortal form but at least you’re not number seven. Think I’m starting to get through finally.
9. (Smeagol again) YES it’s you I actually missed you now get me back to the Master and NO FUCK NO I HATE YOOOOUUUUU…. *fzt*
you CHAIN The One Ring?! you chain it like the prisoner?! oh! OH! trauma! deep psychological trauma for hobbits for One Thousand Years!
...I can hear the goddess that created the halflings chuckling...
