Y'all, I’m getting emotional.
One of my absolute favorite astronomical bodies is the Crab Nebula, or Messier 1. The Crab Nebula is a “planetary nebula”, which means it’s the enormous, beautiful corpse of a once-giant star. The star that formed the Crab Nebula went supernova and exploded in 1054, and was so bright at the time of its death that you could see it from Earth during the day - for almost a month. For that month, it was brighter than every single thing in the sky except the moon and the sun. Some of you have probably heard of it, or have at least seen this Hubble picture:
But how many of y'all have zoomed in?
Inside all of those lovely rainbow clouds is the supernova remnant - a neutron star. A neutron star is made of the densest possible material that we know of - any denser, and it’d collapse the rest of the way into a full-fledged black hole. Neutron stars are so unimaginably dense that they’re not even made of an element, not really. The star at the center of the Crab Nebula is one, single atomic nucleus 12 miles in diameter, made entirely of close-packed neutrons. One teaspoon would weigh 10 million tons. Imagine taking a passenger jet, condensing it down to the size of a mote of dust, and then filling a spoon with that dust. And it spins too - 30 times a second. That spinning causes huge jets of material to eject from the poles at half the speed of light. The incredibly powerful magnetic field traps any stray particles and accelerates them in circular paths through the nebula. Just LOOK at this shit! See the ghosty shadows of the jets, stretching from the top left corner to the bottom right?
But what’s really making me lose it is this Hubble timelapse. The star is making ripples. Its moving. Its been dead for almost a thousand years, but its still putting on its final, spectacular show.
It never ceases to amaze me that the things we call “dead” stars are some of the most dynamic, energetic, and awe-inspiring objects in the universe. Normal stars are downright STAGNANT compared to what these so-called “stellar remnants” get up to. Maybe we shouldn’t be thinking of them as dead stars, but as the next phase in a star’s life. Just as caterpillars “end” their mundane lives and metamorphose into something new and strange and capable of flight, these stars destroy themselves to leave behind something far more exotic, playing at the edge of the laws of physics in ways we still don’t fully understand.
Tell me about the first pulsar
deformutilated
Ice suspended around a tree trunk after flood water has receded
I can't be autistic bc I'm actually great at understanding social cues!
[Cut to my POV, a Terminator-style overlay analyzing word choice and body language while over everyone's head a bar labeled Are They Mad At Me shows varying levels]
worlds most compressed jpeg vs worlds crustiest pdf scan uploaded by an elderly professor. fight
they will have beautiful children
real actual PDF scan from an undergrad class:
it's the warping on the text that really makes this
bein able to reblog posts of deleted tumblr accounts is absolutely the best feature here
its feels like dragging a corpse around through a bacchanal along with its legacy
Tumblr 896 CE, colorised
Oh YES PLEASE let's make the Cadaver Synod a meme!!!! 😀
no clever caption this time - have another scum villain animatic !!
i am totally going to come across as a boomer in this post but as an engineer it's common sense to not build systems with a single point of failure. and i'm starting to realize that our usage of the smart phone is exactly that. a single point of failure. the calling/texting is the implied function of the smartphone, which is fine. that's what it's built for. but nowadays we don't think to keep a physical map or atlas or gps unit in our car because our phone has google maps. we don't keep address books anymore because it's all stored in our contacts. i serve customers who no longer carry a wallet/physical card because it's all on their phone. this is literally a single point of failure. if you lose or break your phone when you are in a foreign place you are fucking screwed. maybe you're still screwed even in your home town because so many people have become accustomed to using a smart phone to take them anywhere.
tv aziraphale is sooo funny. "oh woe, i used my angel word in falsehood, now i'm doomed to fall and go to hell" miss thing you already lied before. to god's face even
Clark Kent’s birthday canonically being February 29th is hysterical to me. Not because it’s meant to jokingly explain away how Superman is a timeless character, but because it implies Martha and Jonathan Kent found an alien baby in a cornfield, and when pressed to choose a birthday for their new baby, they gave him the most difficult birthday possible.
clark is clearly not a newborn and they're just going "well he is a leap day baby we don't really know how old he is! you know how newborns are, we lost track of time, the kitchen calendar got ruined by water when the upstairs shower leaked! he could be 1, he could be 2!"
wait i'm not done.
this man is an ALIEN. he meets Batman AS AN ALIEN BEING. imagine knowing Superman for like, a year or so, enough that this friendship is solidifying, and his age/birthday comes up (maybe because he insisted on getting something small for Bruce's more publicly known birthday!) and this adult alien who is NOT BEYOND pulling petty shit when it's harmless and funny, says with a straight face and no explanation, that he's six years old. what is bruce supposed to do with that? maybe kryptonians age differently! clark could draw it out for a while, letting Bruce think he's younger than Robin! and Bruce wouldn't have a good reason to disbelieve it unless he like, went digging for Clark's high school records or something (which he MIGHT do but then maybe he's trying to respect a little of the privacy of the one friend he managed to make, pre-intense paranoia days).
and then it was just a leap day joke
AND THEN KON SHOWS UP AND IS LIKE
"I'm six!"
AND BRUCE IS LIKE
"i'm not fucking falling for that again."
Reblog to give a trans woman a delicious Cuban sandwich
so I didn't know if female jesters had been a thing in the past and looked it up and was introduced to mathurine the fool, who gave one of the best burns in history in a silly little way.
also she apparently stopped an assassination?? amazing.
[ID: She was known for her extravagant costume as an Amazonian warrior, complete with shield, armor, and a wooden sword. She was famous for her sharp wit, and there were many anecdotes about it. One of them was an occasion, in which a lady in waiting complained that she did not like having a fool at her right side, upon which Mathurine jumped to the lady’s other side and announced: “I don’t mind it at all.” /end ID]
christian rock bands are a backbone genre in the amv scene
christian rock band making a song: i dedicate this one to you jesus
unwell 12 year old girl who is a couple years away from having a gender crisis: this is so naruto and sasuke
i want art to feel EARNEST. this disgusting, near pornographic level of tongue in cheek meta humor is making me sick to my stomach. i don’t know how many more movies i can take about clever subversions and the movie winking at you to say “we know it’s a little silly, but…” where is the whimsy? why can’t we believe in the pretend you’ve created? why don’t you have enough faith in it? in my ability to believe?
My (scalding) hot take here is that this is a byproduct of artistic cowardice in the face of unrelenting criticism.
It doesn't just plague mainstream media; this kind of tongue-in-cheek self-referential, self-deprecating "I know this isn't that good wink wink" is all over indie media too.
So many creators are deathly afraid of being criticized for their creative choices, so terrified of an increasingly volatile online audience, that they feel compelled to sell themselves short on what their intentions are, just to plant that tiny nugget of plausible deniability: maybe if I create the illusion of not taking this all that seriously I'll be more insulated from criticism.
If the thing they're doing actually *is* good and becomes well-received, then they end up looking like accidental geniuses who had a moment of inspiration amid a sea of shitposts, and if the thing they're doing is panned they get to laugh it off and go "well I wasn't taking this that seriously to start with! You're the one who's making a big deal out of it!"
If no one thinks you're really trying or that you don't wholly and fully stand behind your creative decisions, then anyone who tells you that you could be doing your craft better looks like an idiot, and that's the whole point.
A lack of earnestness is the perfect "get-out-of-criticism free card."
reject booktok culture. go to the library and get a weird little novel you’ve never heard of in your life and read it all in 2 days like god intended.