tell me why this budgetless gay youtube series made for fun by a group of friends has the best editing and writing of anything i’ve watched in a year.
also tell me how this single scene can contain every single one of the top three most iconic lines in history.
not to be cosmic or anything but who was i before watching this?
get you a man like Palamedes Sextus. he just keeps collecting women for his bisexual wives:
i love this but are camilla and palamedes not canonically cousins
my friend, in the necromancy cannibalism genocide books with the slavery and twincest and vore, i think we don't need to be So Precious about second cousins who are very aware of their consanguinity and grew up in a radically different society when it comes to family structures maybe possibly fucking. especially now that they're the same person.
Travis Yellowjackets understanders know well that his status as a painfully straight teenage boy starts getting complicated and taken in some more gender-ambivalent directions after his forcible induction into the girls' otherwise homosocial group dynamic at Doomcoming. What is under-discussed, however, is the fact that his biological sex is not the only level on which Travis is set apart from his new peer group. In addition to being the only late-teen boy stranded with a bunch of late-teen girls, Travis is also the only nerd stranded with a bunch of jocks, back when that dichotomy still mattered in some American high schools. In this essay I will
if you have a custom domain set, DO NOT UNTICK THE BUTTON on blog settings. you’re not allowed to add it back. (nope, that’s not mentioned anywhere on blog settings itself.) if you switch hosts and need to update nameservers, congrats! you’re fucked
custom domains were a feature that’s been available over a decade, but they’ve been unceremoniously removed. the idea of “legacy” domains is a joke
this is doubly egregious because they absolutely could be selling domains for people that don’t have one, while still allowing those of us that already had a domain to keep using ours. they also don’t even allow you to pay to use your own. so if someone bought a domain specifically to use on tumblr, if they accidentally untick the button then poof! they’re fucked because they can’t re-buy their own domain from tumblr
it’s honestly pathetic how much of a transparent cash grab this is at worst, and how badly implemented this was at best. this is what happens when you accept incompetency as a modus operandi bc “lol quirky hellsite”
i highly, HIGHLY recommend not investing in this feature due to that incompetency and lack of transparency
shinzo abe day was incredible. still not over seeing all the rumours about what happened, joining everyone in wondering how the fuck a shotgun assassination could have happened in japan, and then seeing the first photo of the doohickey
Lemme look something up...
This is literally some Looney Toons level bullshit
Ah yes, the first Spanish astronaut
Hot damn. Great question, I'd love to tell you.
Look, this rainfrog is called Breviceps bagginsi, so I don't have a lot of choice, now do I?
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Also, I would go with them to the end. Into the very fires of Mordor.
Phyllomedusine hylids have a certain weird clown marionette vibe to them. Just look at these Pithecopus rohdei.
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The male Rhinoderma darwinii raises his tadpoles in his vocal sac.
Gephyromantis pseudoasper sometimes wear handsome stripes—very Space Age™
But more importantly, their calls evoke a battle with laser-blasters.
I filmed this calling male in 2017 at an obscene hour of the morning.
Trichobatrachus robustus, aka the Hairy Frog, has flanks and thighs covered in weird, hair-like outgrowths that increase oxygen exchange over its skin, and BREAKS ITS FINGERS TO STAB YOU WITH CLAWS MADE OF BONE
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Breviceps males physically glue themselves to the back-ends of females, and if that's not romance, I don't know what is.
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Nyctimantis arapapa are probably amongst the funniest-looking frogs out there.
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The 'poly' in Polypedates may be a double entendre
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Calyptocephalella gayi is a Galaxy Brain frog.
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Myobatrachus gouldii is basically what would happen if you decided to try to build a turtle, but you only had frog pieces in the kit.
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i rember when i was in high school, hearing a teacher say “lebron james is rich, the guy who hands him his paycheck is wealthy”, and i think that that’s a really simple illustration of wealth and class that a lot of young leftists these days do not understand
i see a lot of young leftists these days thinking that “having a lot of money = oppressor”, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding in how social classes and the dynamics of power in society work, and as a result they go after actors, athletes, even youtubers, but the thing is most actors, athletes, and youtubers don’t actually own capital. actors don’t own disney or warner bros or 20th century fox, athletes don’t own their stadiums or sponsorship companies, and youtubers certainly don’t own youtube or advertising companies that sponsor youtube channels
many highly successful actors, athletes, and youtubers DO start their own businesses once they’ve amassed enough wealth, but it has to be understood that the large majority acquire their wealth through paychecks given to them, rather than through owning the means of production, and it’s the owning of capital that really determines who runs society and who doesn’t, because it’s those who own the means of production who gets to decide the affluence or poverty of those who don’t
Beating every cisbian over the head with a copy of Stone Butch Blues and Sons of the Movement.
You can download and read Sons of The Movement, here.
Adding on that Leslie Feinberg (z''l) made Stone Butch Blues free in perpetuity when zie died. You can also get a copy at-cost on hir site.
Evidently landlord and lawyer were some rough slander 250 years ago, maybe we still have some things in common with the founding fathers
my favorite thing about this movie is that it pissed off Nixon so badly (by having a song about how conservatives are obstructionist) that he tried to not only have the song cut but also get the negatives for that scene destroyed and they only added the song back in decades later
shout out to the film’s editor who back in the 1970’s completely hid the negatives for that scene for decades allowing us to have it restored for the 2002 re-release
"In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top--the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation--and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation." We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn--we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out."
-Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Okay so, it turns out that your cell phone battery is a basically a homunculus of an electric fish.
These are the same thing. Let me explain.
@fishteriously, a paleoichthyologist, told me that Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery after studying electric eels and rays. This sounded like a fun science factoid! I wanted to know more! I saw the claim repeated on any number of pop science articles from the last century or so, but none that quoted from primary sources.
The voltaic pile is one of the most important inventions, ever, of all time. Before Volta, electricity could be stored in Leyden jar capacitors, which would discharge in a single, brief burst. Volta's pile was the first method of producing a continuous electric current, which launched the modern era of electricity as we know it. His explanation for how it worked was incorrect, but it was still a massive breakthrough.
Batteries use the same principle to this day, just with different materials (e.g. cobalt oxide, graphite, and lithium salts rather than silver, zinc, and brine).
But is it a fish?
This is Volta's first schematic of a battery, or "voltaic pile" – at the time, "battery" referred to a bunch of Leyden jars linked in series, the term wouldn't come to refer to piles until later. "Z" and "A" stand for zinc and silver ("argentum"), with brine-soaked paper disks between. It does look a bit like an eel?
But is it a fish?
Surely, if Volta modeled the pile after electric fishes, I’d be able to find a citation! Wikipedia is usually a good place to start when hunting primary sources, but no luck. No mention of fish at all. I trust fishteriously more than wikipedia, however, so I went digging. Looks like Volta first reported his discovery in a Letter to the Royal Society in 1800.
Found the letter!
Aw beans, it’s in French. I haven’t studied French since high school.
BUT WAIT. WHAT WAS THAT.
Une commotion électrique? A trembling eel???
Okay so now I NEEDED to read the letter in English. I found an English-language summary published by the Royal Society, but it looks like the only English translation of the full letter was in the appendix an out-of-print book called “Alessandro Volta and the Electric Battery.”
So I bought a used copy. Let's see what Volta has to say about this:
"To this apparatus ... I have constructed it, in its form to the natural electric organ of the torpedo or electric eel, &c, than to the Leyden flask and electric batteries [battery = linked Leyden flasks], I would wish to give the name of artificial electric organ."
Yes! The voltaic pile was explicitly modeled after electric fishes – torpedo rays and electric eels. Fishteriously was 100% correct. Volta never even calls it a "pile," it is always "artificial electric organ." A significant portion of the letter is devoted to electric eels and torpedo rays, in fact.
But also, the rest of the letter is bonkers.
He wrote pages on painful experiments with the artificial electric organ – touching it, poking it into his eyes and ears, making other people touch it, generally just shocking the ever loving hell out of himself over and over. He routinely shocks himself so hard that he has to take breaks. And of course, he licks it.
But that's not the best part:
He says that the artificial electric organ can be turned sideways and submerged in liquid...
"...by which means these cylinders would have a pretty good resemblance to the electric eel ... they might be joined together by pliable metallic wires or screw springs, and then covered with a skin terminated by a head and tail properly formed, &c."
There you have it. One of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, and it includes a crafts project for building an authentic electric eel puppet.
In summary, next time you charge your phone, take a moment to thank the soul of the electric fish inside of it.
"If by chance there should be a small incision or bit of the skin rubbed off in the finger which I immerse in the water that communicates with one of the extremities of the electro-motive apparatus, I experience there a pain so acute, when, by establishing the proper communication with the other extremity, I complete the circle, that I must soon desist from the experiment..."
"Fun" fact, this exact stupidity (in the form of bare gremlin fingers stuck into running gel elecrophoresis box) is one of two times in my entire grad school career I screamed at a student. TAE buffer isn't toxic != you can shove your whole hand into it when there's 140V running through it. He didn't have any cuts on that hand, though, so it ended at a minor ouch.
The reason it hurts so badly if you have a cut is that your skin is an insulator that will protect you from lesser electrical threats, but your insides are functionally just more salt water. Conductive. Even then, pulling this shit with one wound is clearly survivable. What makes this really not worth the risk is if you do this with two wounded fingers, you can end up running a current up one arm and down the other. Guess what organ is conveniently between the arms and relies on its own intricate electrical signals to work properly?
Do not fucking do this.
On a lighter note, it turns out lots of fish are weakly electric! Of course things like the ampullae of Lorenzini in sharks can passively sense electrical fields, but species like elephant trunk fish (Mormyridae) actually double down on this by generating their own weak electric field and sensing the differences in it as objects or prey come into range. The really wild thing is that electrical organs have evolved something like eight separate times in fish, but passive electrosensing is probably an ancestral vertebrate trait that most of us went and lost later. Then again, considering that planarians can also sense electric fields it may actually be much, much older.
Going back to the big electric fish that can straight up kill people, though, the amount of "fuck you" a torpedo ray can put out is so impressive that the naval weapon is named after the fish, not the other way around.
Ouch! I agree! Do not do this!
But while Volta's first surprise papercut shock was likely an accident, it's worth noting that he did go on to do it on purpose, over and over again, in every way he could think of. Including jabbing electrodes directly into both ears (DEFINITELY DON'T DO THIS ONE) and up his nose.
Like. Maybe he should have gotten a safer hobby.
“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”
— ERIN BOW
So, so very much this.
fuck it, Toshiro Mifune fancam set to Kate Bush
hey op, what’s it like being a goddamned genius?
every so often, someone reblogs this from me and not OP (hi @majortomwaits!) and i get to look through the notes before i go cry bc mifune was So Handsome. highlights include:
the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck
this is what ancient greek philosophy is like
So I was just looking up Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron reviews, and WOW was it underrated at the time of its release, it got some pretty mediocre scores.
Anyway, I just wanted to make fun of this one review I uncovered by Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian.
I seriously wonder what he was expecting. Spirit's pretty hardcore for a kid's movie. Also, BAMBI, really?
This dude is way too concerned with seeing Spirit's nuts and joystick.
...I mean it's certainly not as comedic as Shrek, and it's not meant to be. But saying the movie's bland and undemanding? Seriously? The movie with the horse and the Native man being starved and dehydrated to try to break their will, and them both escaping and standing up to the U.S. army? That movie?!
Also this dude is still very concerned about the fact that Spirit's bing-bongs are missing.
How on earth is Spirit like Bambi, how did you reach that conclusion?! Because they both star animals? Like they're not even both TALKING animals, the most we get is some narration from Spirit, all other communication is through horse vocalization and body language.
Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, sweating: "I JUST WANT TO SEE SOME THROBBING, PULSING HORSE COCK AND GREAT, SWAYING EQUINE BALLS! BRITISH CHILDREN **DESERVE** LOVINGLY DETAILED CLOSE-UP SHOTS OF THE HORSE'S PENIS AND TESTICLES!! THIS FILM IS A DISAPPOINTMENT ON EVERY POSSIBLE LEVEL!!!"
The Guardian not accepting someone's gender unless they can see their genitals is pretty on brand.
i think some people aren’t realizing the mulch works because the mulch BECOMES the soil, that’s why it’s so universal. rot is just incredible, shout out to the forces of decomposition. can’t wait to meet ‘em.
Back when I worked at a greenhouse I heard some people complain that they had to buy more wood chip mulch or straw every year to re-apply it.
And yes! Good! It's working! The soil microbes and fungi are Feasting and turning that wood into humus! That humus is now becoming soil full of bio available nutrients for your plants...and the things in the soil...to feast on! Go to the county landfill they chip up trimmings into FREE woodchips stop buying the stuff here that costs $2.99 a bag! Talk to some tree care companies they'll be delighted to dump waste chips in your yard for you!
If your neighbors are Fools and rake up and discard leaves, grab that shit and use that too! And their grass clippings! Steal all that sweet sweet plant matter and let it rot into YOUR soil and enrich it! All Hail Rot, the one true god, which makes life on this ball of rock possible!
If you REALLY wanna give your plants a treat, when you're planting them dig the hole extra deep and plop some leftover chicken bones in the bottom of the planting hole. Cover with some compost. Plop your plant in it. Watch your roses go apeshit as they feast on all that tasty phosphorus and calcium!
I just want to hibernate through the summer. Wake me up in the Fall
Hibernation is for winter. Aestivation is for summer!
OH. I learned a new word today!
...Do we have a specific word for becoming seasonally nocturnal to avoid the summer heat?
eliza clark's new book, penance, is a literary masterpiece and a savvy examination of true crime entertainment, but it's also a nightmarishly vivid time capsule of mid 2010s fandom tumblr
