I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
bat opens up their little bat wallet to find they are all out of moths. A worthless $100 bill flies out for emphasis
From top-of-frame, a month flutters into the wallet. Confused, the bat looks "up" to see an equally-confused human standing "above" her, holding an open wallet containing a single $100 bill.
Camera rotates to reveal bat has been hanging upside down above a human doing the exact same visual gag and each ruined the other's bit.
Laugh track.
i learned that in 1966, the Procrastinators Club held a demonstration in Philadelphia to protest the War of 1812 (x)
not me realizing that with tumblr moving the icons to the side, it eliminates xkit, which was situated at the top. what a scumbag move
xkit rewritten, which should be used instead of the shambling corpse of old xkit, lives in the addon bar of your browser! And it handled the new layout like a champ, removing all of the garbage (if configured to do so). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xkit-rewritten/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkit-rewritten/ehgbadgnkmeeldglkmnplolneidgpbcm
I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:
- Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
- The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
- The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
- The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
- Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
- The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
- Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
- He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.
This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.
Edit to add further developments:
- Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
- Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
- The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
- The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
- The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
- TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
- This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
- This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
- X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
- Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
- The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
- One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
- Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.
The sack of Rome, August 24th 410 CE, colourised.
Art by Psicochurroz
I have no idea what’s going on, but I dig it
rome being destroyed by the goths
That was somebody's mom whose dream had always been to be a restaurant owner but sadly she married into the mafia and she was like the mom of someone important and moms are like the one authority italians recognise so when she put her foot down and said "NO. We are going to make them great food and give them the most lovely evening!" Nobody dared disagree and thanks to op she got to live her dream for a night she probably remembers them as fondly as they remember her
Look at this point if something in a TV show feels off, my first, immediate response is, "who in the corporate office fucked them over?"
Wonky writing? Something feels rushed? Animation errors? First question should be, "Who was fucking over the production team? What were the censorship notes? Was this what the team actually wanted to do, or were they strong-armed?"
I think a lot of y'all are way too fast to blame the writers and animators for issues that wouldn't exist if the studio executives and the censors weren't fucking it up for everyone.
Pay the writers. Pay the actors. Pay the animators. And for god's sake, stop blaming them for industry-wide issues that the unions are actively trying to fight against.
CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it's part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators
THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS' UNION RECOGNIZED
this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!
BTW for anyone too lazy to do the math a wage of $125 a day works out to about $15/hour for an 8-hour workday so..... someone in 1923 definitely had a vision of the future
Dear tumblr staff,
stop. its ok. you don’t need to do these things. just focus on functionality(like the video player). we don’t need these little updates when somethings(like the video player) need your focus. thank you for your time but really, tumblr looks great. try to fix more important things(like the video player) so that we can all properly enjoy the features of tumblr(like the video player)
This post is a decade old this year.
Btw much as I love to make fun of twitter and reddit's business decisions, I have 0% trust in tumblr's management to not go a similar route so this is your gentle reminder that you should regularly go to your blog settings to export your blog. That's a fancy way of saying you can download a backup of your blog so if everything goes down you'll still have a backup of your posts & convos.
It's gonna come as a surprise to most of you, but if you don't want to do that for whatever reason you're allowed to not reblog this post. I'm not holding a gun to your head here I'm just trying to spread the word for people who do want a backup of their stuff.