"You can't be a lurker on tumblr." Yes, you absolutely can. I've been quietly reblogging things since 2014 and I haven't interacted with anyone in years.
The Swedish warship Vasa. It sank in 1628 less than a mile into its maiden voyage and was recovered from the sea floor after 333 years almost completely intact. Now housed at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, is the world's best preserved 17th century ship
Kinda funny that the best example of its kind is the one that sucked as bad as it possibly could.
Oh, it was *ridiculously* bad. That initial post says “from the sea floor,” but that implies it made it out to sea.
So Gustavus Adolphus is king when Sweden is fighting wars all over the place. They need more ships, so he commissions four of them, two big and two small. The Vasa was supposed to be one of the smaller ones. Emphasis on “supposed to be.” Because Gustavus Adolphus keeps ordering changes. Like, add twelve more feet to the keel! Pile on the carvings! Add another gun deck for the hell of it! It got even worse when Sweden lost ten ships in a huge storm, so now they needed the Vasa *yesterday*. But Gustavus Adolphus is STILL demanding changes. So the shipwright scales up the measurements to try and make things work. Which might have worked, except the ship was being worked on by Swedes, Finns, Danes, Sami people. Communication is hard enough, but also it turns out that there are two different types of rulers being used by the workers. One is in Swedish feet and one is in Amsterdam feet. Amsterdam feet were only eleven inches long. (There’s a joke there I’m too tired to make.)
Anyway, because of that, the port side is heavier.
Okay, so you have to imagine the Vasa, with its hastily-scaled-up measurements, its *seven hundred* decorative carvings, its sixty-fucking-four bronze cannons. It’s a goddamn mess, AND its center of gravity is way off. Except that’s not something you could measure with instruments at the time. What you’d do is, you’d put it in the water, then have a bunch of guys run back and forth from port to starboard a bunch of times to test if it’ll tip over.
The guys who did this test could only do it three times before the Vasa was like, “I think I’m gonna hurl,” and almost tipped over right then and there.
Everybody there is like, “… uh-oh.” The admiral conducting the test just sighs and goes, “If only the king were here,” because Gustavus Adolphus wasn’t, and maybe if he had been he would have seen they fucked up and decided to pull the plug. Oh, and those bronze cannons? They weighed down the ship so much that the lowest row of gun portals was almost at the waterline.
But. Sweden needed the Vasa. It needed it to go to war. At that time, it was the most expensive thing Sweden ever spent money on.
SO. It’s August 10th, 1628. It’s the port in Stockholm. There’s music, there’s festivities, everybody’s showed up to see the Vasa off. A few ships tug the Vasa out to the current, let her loose, she drops four of her sails, and off she goes.
For about thirteen hundred meters.
Then, a light breeze blows. When I say light, I mean light. But that was all it took. The Vasa flops to port, water flows into the gun portals, and down it goes, still in the fucking harbor with its masts sticking out of the water.
So when that original post says “recovered from the sea floor,” it means brought up from the *actual harbor*. Like, within sight of the docks.
Oh, oh! But cool story about all this. Remember those sixty-four bronze cannons? Yeah, Sweden kind of needed those back, so about three decades later in 1658, the Swedes go down and retrieve almost all of them with a diving bell. Which is kind of badass.
It’s a Tree. There was a tree there. Folks cut down a tree, they usually don’t pull the roots, it’s like a Whalefall for fungus and burrowing invertebrates. They feast for decades.
It’s tree roots. I know that’s not cool and adventurous but I promise you it’s tree roots.
No, that's where they dumped the body of my good friend, Mr. Five by Five. We called him that because he was five feet tall and five feet wide. Perfectly spherical.
I love when my cat meows at me and I can see her little teeths cause she looks like this
My cat is being oh so meanies to me but I can't take her seriously because everytime she opens her mouth to yell at me she becomes a stapler remover
I love when my cat meows at me and I can see her little teeths cause she looks like this
My cat is being oh so meanies to me but I can't take her seriously because everytime she opens her mouth to yell at me she becomes a stapler remover
According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.
sheds a single tear
every august 18th my notifications break and i go, fuck, tumblr has failed me once again, but it hasn’t. it hasn’t failed me. it’s just the taking the hobbits to isengard-iversary. happy 12 years
Except you don't need to stick your faces together/use tongue for a kiss to be "good".
These are two middle-aged men who probably haven't had any experience kissing someone they love, so they're obviously gonna be a bit out of practice.
I know that it was passionate and sweet, and they deserve that.
is this post real. can other people see this. this feels like a fever dream made reality
i live in the most haunted house in the northern hemisphere because i keep buying cursed dolls and cracking them open like pistachios to release the ghosts inside em. see i've got this business idea and it's to unethically harvest their ectoplasm and sell it in little jars like honey. unfortunately i've hit a snag, namely that ectoplasm tastes like shit and also if you ingest it you permanently lose the capacity to feel joy. so now i've got a bunch of unsatisfied customers who are literally impossible to please banging on my door at all hours. it doesn't really matter though because the ghosts are already constantly slamming all my doors and cabinets so it's just a wall of sound in here at all times anyway. i'm pretty sure i've got tinnitus now but on the upside i've got this new business idea where i repair old dolls with kintsugi and sell them at a ridiculous markup to etsy women in cuffed corduroy pants.
dude.
i knew a surgeon and he once told me “nobodys insides look like how the textbooks say they will. you never know what you’re going to find in there once you open them up” and that was easily the most ominous thing anyone’s ever said to me
when i was taking my first year anatomy lab, we’d occasionally find a cadaver where things would branch off or attach in the wrong order, and when we’d ask our prof about it, he’d just shrug and say “they must not have read the book”
This is just The Magnus Institute.
Nope.
They have a gas-based firefighting system instead of sprinklers for obvious reasons. It does lower the percentage of oxygen in the building, but not enough to kill anyone.
I found this by googling “Yale library fire oxygen.” It was literally the first result.
Fact-checking is your friend.
It’s true. It’s not the fire suppression system that kills you. The Librarians come and personally murder you for starting a fire in a library. But you didn’t start a fire you say? No matter. You are collateral damage. Everybody gets killed to show that arsonists have no chance of escaping justice
an orangutan traveling at non-euclidean speeds erupts from the aether to clothesline you into another dimension
god im trying so hard to decipher that last addition and im coming up empty
what’s not clicking
the thing about me is i get hannibal and hamilton confused
yeah so i just thought to myself, it’s wild how there’s a musical about the guy who eats people
THATS WHAT SWEENEY TODD IS ABOUT?
enough. i thought it was like a boy who was a ballerina. idk where that came from
Anonymous asked:
You're a slut, you're a whore, you're a dick, you're a bitch
and with your help i could be president too
You guys I just realized that what I’ve always wanted out of werewolf fiction is a story where lycanthropy isn’t a purely human condition
Like this dude wakes up from his wolfbender and his room is full of all these fucking chickens from local farms that he initiated into his pack. They all start clucking and crowing at the moon and when it’s full they all transform into these tiny little weird bipedal wolves with wings.
I don’t remember making this post but it’s going around again and I’m losing my shit
Imagine becoming a werewolf because you got attacked by a fucked up chicken
A wildlife rehab centre discovers that one of its patients is a lycanthrope when the full moon hits and their wolf transforms into a slightly different wolf.
its been said many times before but the joy of having a little beastie that loves you in your house all the time is unparalleled
One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence
Example: silk moths as a base species
Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.
Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.
Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.
Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.
Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.
everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see
Octopus aliens, specifically, giant Pacific octopus.
You see, they mate at the end of their life cycle. Then the male sort of shuffles off to die in a corner, while the female locks herself in a cave and starves herself to death while blowing water over her eggs to ensure they survive. If the hunger pangs get too bad, she eats her own tentacles.
(No amount of extra food provided allows them to survive, it's been tried.)
But they are highly intelligent and can live for years. They are born entirely able to look after themselves, the only differential is size.
So they live full rich lives that are entirely platonic. The second they start to feel any kind of romantic attraction it is greeted with the same horror aging is in humans. Their horror and romance genres are the same thing. Their gods are dead, sacrificing themselves to bring forth the species as all members of that same species will eventually do in their turn. Their festivals involve leaving gifts on their graves.
I have been wanting to yell about my Giant Pacific Octopus aliens!
They’re fantastically intelligent, living in bodies that apprehend the world through changing their own color and shape. They’re solitary, avoiding all other members of their own species - until the time comes for them to mate, go mad, and die. They do not remember their parents. They will never see their children. They shun their siblings. They are each a single self-contained universe, endlessly curious, constructing a unique framework of understanding that contains and reflects and expresses the world as they know it - that will perish with them.
Do they communicate with each other? Have they learned to write - is that what they have instead of a society? Do they leave messages for each other - each inventing language from scratch, each learning it from context? What happens when they learn about the fate that awaits them?
Their gods were the ones that did this to them.
What a Fall that must have been! What glory was sealed off, what horror was prevented, when they were forbidden, on pain of death, ever to know their own parents or children?
(In this world, they’ve figured out what it is that makes the octopus self-destruct after mating - a cholesterol precursor secreted by the optic gland. What if we figured out the single factor that destroyed these glorious creatures? What if we humans could cure death, not for ourselves, but for some alien species? Would we have the right to withhold that knowledge? And if we switched off their self-destruct mechanism, would we then discover just why it was they were built that way in the first place?)