SUPER_OFFSET_RHOMBUS on Tumblr

superoffsetrhombus

princeofmints

spacetwinks

superoffsetrhombus

get-thee-to-a-shrubbery

aurora-whisper

me neither amen brother

superoffsetrhombus

batgirlteeth

gamwthnzwhmou

Reblog if you had a Tumblr for 5+ years

chaosnightmare

superoffsetrhombus

joey-wheeler-official

mariacallous

meeedeee

Whether you’re trans or not, the gender police are coming for you too | Arwa Mahdawi

A man harassing a nine-year-old girl for not looking feminine enough shows the war on trans people is also a war on all women

the Guardian

superoffsetrhombus

protom-lad

superoffsetrhombus

nil-number

vital-dust

shadow-dio-sama

you can see the disappointment in every pixel of his low poly face

superoffsetrhombus

joey-wheeler-official

thethreemustyfears

two lessons from the gacha era:

epic stories with a female-dominated cast do, in fact, find audiences and make financial sense
unregulated casinos are a great way to make money

superoffsetrhombus

demimonde-semigoddess

branwenferchllyr

Crazy how our bodies are literally built for pleasure and overly ascetic patriarchal religions try to tell us that our flesh is evil. We have thousands of taste buds for enjoying delicious food and drink. Happy hormones are triggered when we dance. We can sing to entertain ourselves and others. Conscious, aligned sex with a good partner feels great and improves your health. We have beautiful eyes, figures, lips, hair to attract each other. We laugh so hard we cry and it feels GREAT. The smell of a rose on a warm summer breeze lifts my mood instantly. Our bodies are so so sacred. Nature is sacred. The Divine dwells in the earth and within us just as much as 'up there'.

superoffsetrhombus

demimonde-semigoddess

secretmellowblog

On the subject of the Titanic ‘submersible’ that was lost in the deep with all its wealthy tourists— it’s so insane/eerie in hindsight to read this article from the Smithsonian that interviews the CEO Stockton Rush long before the disaster.

Despite the Smithsonian supposedly being an organization that cares about science and truth, and the fact that there were SO MANY obvious red flags from the beginning and so many people criticizing the company…..the article is a puff piece uncritically glorifying the CEO’s obviously terrible submersible project. It compares him in glowing terms to Elon Musk. It is an article about how private ventures like those of Stockton Rush and Elon Musk can and should be the future of the world.

We’ve obviously learned now that there were whistleblowers at the company who were warning for a long time that Stockton Rush’s submersible was unsafe— only to be fired and then sued. It makes sense the submersible was so unsafe, because the CEO in this interview is open about how he has no background in underwater engineering and is annoyed by quote “regulations that needlessly prioritize passenger safety.”

A Deep Dive Into the Plans to Take Tourists to the 'Titanic'

For a handsome price, a daredevil inventor will bring you aboard his groundbreaking submarine to put eyes on most famous shipwreck of all

Smithsonian Magazine

Soon after, the private [submersible] market died too, Rush found, for two reasons that were “understandable but illogical.” First, subs gained a reputation for danger. Working on offshore rigs in harsh locations like the North Sea, saturation divers, who breathe gas mixtures to avoid diving sicknesses, would be taken in subs to work at great depths. It was the world’s most perilous job, with frequent fatalities. (“It wasn’t the sub’s fault,” says Rush.) To save lives, the industries moved toward using underwater robots to perform the same work.

Second, tourist subs, which could once be skippered by anyone with a U.S. Coast Guard captain’s license, were regulated by the Passenger Vessel Safety Act of 1993, which imposed rigorous new manufacturing and inspection requirements and prohibited dives below 150 feet. The law was well-meaning, Rush says, but he believes it needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation (a position a less adventurous submariner might find open to debate). “There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations.”

The fact that Stockton Rush (who was piloting the submarine when the disaster happened) is on record complaining about the evils of regulations that prioritize people’s safety, and the Smithsonian uncritically regurgitated that rhetoric in their glowing puff piece about how rich tycoons like Elon Musk and Stockton Rush are going to save the world is just…..in hindsight of how everything ended it’s just so much horrible black comedy? It’s like a satire about the dangers of uncritically worshipping the rich.

It is mentioned in the article that Rush chose to make his submersible in a different shape, and with a different (cheaper) material than is usually used for submersibles. The article frames this as a result of daring innovation, and not of negligence/ignorance. This passage in particular, which in context is supposed to portray Rush’s critics as joyless naysayers who were proven wrong by the noble tycoon, is pretty foreboding in hindsight:

Rush planned to pilot the sub himself, which critics said was an unnecessary risk: Under pressure, the experimental carbon fiber hull might, in the jargon of the sub world, “collapse catastrophically.”

And then!!

The exact problem that happened to Titan this weekend, happened on Titan’s very first test voyage to the Titanic! The experimental carbon fiber hull had an issue and it caused communications to break down!

The dive was going according to plan until about 10,000 feet, when the descent unexpectedly halted, possibly, Rush says, because the density of the salt water added extra buoyancy to the carbon fiber hull. He now used thrusters to drive Titan deeper, which interfered with the communications system, and he lost contact with the support crew. He recalls the next hour in hallucinogenic terms. “It was like being on the Starship Enterprise,” he says. “There were these particles going by, like stars. Every so often a jellyfish would go whipping by. It was the childhood dream.”

Both Rush and the article writer treat this as a fun quirky story, instead of a serious safety failure and red flag with his experimental macgyvered regulation-flaunting submersible.

Other highlights from the article include:

Stockton rush saying that if 3/4 of the planet is water, why haven’t we monetized it?
Stockton saying we will “colonize the ocean long before we colonize space”
Lots of weird pro colonialism stuff in general??? This article loves colonialism and thinks it’s cool
Rush saying he plans for this to eventually help find more underwater resources for the US to exploit and profit from
Elon musk comparisons. The article writer does not mention that Elon Musk’s rockets explode and therefore it would be a bad idea to get in one of them, because that would imply it’s a bad idea to get into the submersible
Stockton rush seeing himself as Captain Kirk
The article writer comparing the tourists who plan to join Rush to Englishmen who went on colonialist journeys to Africa as if that’s like, a good thing. So much pro colonialism stuff in this article
So many sentences about Stockton Rush being handsome when he literally just looks like some guy
The article beginning with an editor’s note from years later disclaiming that the extraordinary submersible they’re advertising in this article is uh. It’s now uhhhh

But yeah it really does just bring home how so many organizations that supposedly care about scientific truth or journalistic integrity are willing to uncritically platform propaganda for wealthy CEOS. It’s frustrating how easily people fall for the fake myths that careless wealthy people invent for themselves, and even more frustrating that supposedly respectable institutions will platform irresponsible lies that end up getting people killed.

Rush is such an obvious and simple example of this, and his negligence is “only” killing five people including himself. But to me it feels like a cautionary tale to bear in mind when it comes to uncritical puff piece media coverage of similar “daring tycoon innovations” by people like Bezos or Musk.