sharkflip

SKY WHALE SKY WHALE SKY WHALE

No. Look at the position of the tail fins. They’re perpendicular rather than parallel to the ground. That’s a sky shark.

SKY SHARK SKY SHARK SKY SHARK

I’ve seen multiple people genuinely asking whats wrong with playing their music on a speaker/their phone in public rather than through headphones. While it baffles me that you can’t reason it out I’m taking it in good faith that you genuinely don’t know - so here’s a list of reasons you shouldn’t:

- It sounds bad. It doesnt matter if people like the song, you might be close enough to your phone speaker for it to sound largely as intended, but everyone else is getting a distorted mess. 

- Unwanted noise is extra stimulation in the already overpowering public space. Yes this is particularly bad for neurodivergent people but I actually want to acknowledge that this effects Everyone. Everyone has a stimulation threshold and unwanted music easily pushes people closer to it.

- Its distracting/disruptive. People want to focus on their own conversations, listen to their own music through their earbuds, or just be alone with their thoughts. Your music is intruding. 

- Differing taste. This one is less significant but people around you just dont always like the same music you do. In extreme cases they might actively hate a song you’re playing. 

- People have the right to as close to silence as they can get. If they’re in a shop playing obnoxious music they can leave, they can change the radio in their car, they can skip the song on their playlist. They have no control over what you are putting on and in bus situations they can’t get away from you. 

- Any other number of reasons; Maybe your music is offensive, maybe its uncensored and there are children about, maybe someone just got horrible news and your perky feelgood song feels like salt in the wound, maybe someone’s sick or hungover or in pain and your music feels like a drill to the skull.  You might think your music is good, it might make you smile after a hard day. Nobody is saying dont listen at all, just put in earphones. To everyone around you its the equivilent of a drunk guy singing loudly and off key at the back of the bus. Maybe it makes some people smile to think he’s having a good time, maybe some people are scared his lack of boundaries will mean he could act out, maybe some people wish he would just shut up. 

you are controlling an aspect of a public space which affects everyone in that space. That’s the jist of it. By playing music in public, you’re saying “my desired sound and its volume are all that matters, and nobody else’s”. That’s why quiet, beyond a reasonable speaking volume, should be the default in public. If quietness is unsettling to you, you can fix it by listening to something through earbuds without affecting anyone else, but if too much/the wrong kind of noise is unsettling to others, it’s much harder for them to block it out.

Shared spaces should be kept at conditions tolerable to everyone, where reasonable. That’s almost the definition of a shared space. If you dominate that space in some way, eg by playing music out loud, you are making it your space. You are making it unwelcoming for others. That is rude and anti-social behavior.

it’s the last one, really. just the last one.

king

King

sometimes while reading fanfiction it becomes obvious that the author has forgotten that 2012 is almost ten years ago and that technology was actually very different then. then I have a crisis about 2012 being long enough ago that some fanfic authors need to do research to have historical accuracy. 

Damn!

I looked it up, for those wondering this is how that exit is designed:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6119279,-122.3301383,16.85z

I live in Seattle and am familiar with this exit. There are a lot of really short off ramps in Seattle, but I think this one is the shortest I’ve encountered. You have about the length of a football field to go from 60-70 miles per hour to a complete stop. If you’re looking at your phone, you probably won’t notice the very understated sign warning you that there’s a light ahead. And if you miss that sign, you can’t even see the stop light until you round that 45 degree corner.

This is also exit 165B, which is just a few hundred feet before 165A. I suspect some of these people thought they took 165A and were expecting it to be a more straight-forward exit with more time to slow down.

This is also one of the exits that emerges out from under the convention center from a covered highway/tunnel, and a very distracting part of I5 right before the I90 junction where there is just a lot going on.

This is why she’s my favorite author.

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

You can really sense the tumblr userbase aging

There’s a lot wrong with me but at least I don’t treat a domestic violence court case as a fandom war

i went to go pick up my HORMONES from the chemist today and the guy was quite sweet and very well intentioned but clearly way out of his element... when i was leaving i did the standard “thanks have a nice night” and he responded with “you too enjoy your... (very very quietly obviously realising what he was saying was highly insane) gender...” and tbh i havent stopped thinking abt being a gender enjoyer since

Honestly “enjoy your gender” is the only proper send off in these circumstances

All this, and the fact that if the ocean had sharks as big as Megalodon and had enough of them to sustain the species at all, we would have found at least one Megalodon tooth washed up on a beach somewhere that wasn’t fossilized. More likely, we would have found hundreds of such teeth every year for as long as we have existed. “We didn’t know giant squid existed!” is a common argument I see from cryptozoologists, but it’s also flat out false. We did know. We knew there were giant squid for centuries because we found remains of them for centuries. We simply hadn’t captured or filmed a live one!

Okay, so I am well aware that this isn’t at all how evolution or natural selection works, but I still want a horror film that begins with a pair of scientists with dramatic music playing in the background as they pour over piles of records, until one of them turns to the other and says “it’s the whales. They’re becoming smaller, and more skittish.”

The other scientist looks out the window, over the sea. “Mother of god,” she whispers.

Alternatively;

We begin to find giant shark teeth washing up on shore. People freak out. “Scientists find evidence megalodons never went extinct!”

Then the lead scientist calms everyone down so they can explain. “No. It’s worse than that. If they never went extinct, we would’ve found evidence like this before now. This means… ” Dramatically takes off glasses. 

“They’ve just come back.”

“But they can’t just suddenly come back like that!”

“You’re right. Someone brought them back.”

PLEASE,,,

Jesus Christ Super-predator

I’m pretty sure that I was the one driving when we all got into this little circus car but now I’m wedged under the back seat and the clowns have just ramped us off the grandstands and directly onto the popcorn cart

🎶jesus christ!

super-predator!

won’t eat the lawyer first,

he’ll chow down on a creditor!

jesus christ!

jesus christ!

he’s back and now we’re all snack-rificed!🎶

do they warn trans girls about boob sweat? girls did they warn you

They don't warn us about shit.

I’m so sorry, queen

Alright kids, we're at the road stop of this long scrolling journey. Make sure to:

- Stand up and stretch

- Get a drink of water

- Grab something to eat if you're hungry

- Use the bathroom if you need it

- Unclench your jaw

You all done? Alrighty! Let's get back to the scrolling.

when the lover takes the beloved’s hand and presses it against their chest where their heart is. or when the beloved takes the lover’s hand and presses it against their cheek.. i was going somewhere with this

Day Four of “is this pollen and stress, or have daily false negative tests meant that I’ve been unknowingly infecting my family with the plague?”

FIVE negative tests, and now I’m suddenly positive for Covid. I feel selfish and foolish for not just walling myself up in the attic after I started feeling gross.

Uh… Um… Ships aren’t illegal.

Ships are ONLY ILLEGAL IF...

The Vessel switches off their location-transmission devices, thereby making themselves a HAZARD TO MARITIME NAVIGATION, in order to ENGAGE IN ILLEGAL ACTS.

The Vessel is FRAUDULENTLY DISPLAYING a national flag that is NOT OF THEIR REGISTERED PORT OF ORIGIN.

The Vessel is otherwise engaged in ACTS THAT VIOLATE SOLEMN MARITIME LAW, and may face fines and prosecution in admiralty court for their offense in their port of origin or nation in which the offense was registered.

Other than that, no ships are illegal.