bellepullman

[bellepullman]

What are your thoughts on the new choreography for Cats? Personally I prefer Gillian's choreography to Andy Blankenbuehler's choreography. I feel like he took great moments from the show and watered them down. Honestly if it ain't broke don't fix it :/

Yup, very much agree. I like Blankenbuehler’s work in Hamilton - it’s so expressive and his story-telling is great, it meshes with the rest of the show perfectly.But he seems to have never even met a cat?  Cats intend to be elegant, graceful, dignified, they’re a non-Newtonian fluid :P Cats do make sudden jerky movements when they’re hunting and killing that poor innocent shoelace. They’re also ridiculous idiots who get into hilarious positions, but they always intend to be graceful and dignified.

Gillian Lynne got it PERFECT the first time round.  Her choreography is so ineffibly feline, I’ve seen my Cats make pretty much all the moves in the show! Honestly I kinda feel sorry for Blankenbuehler because he was given an impossible job - “Update this already perfect choreography.  The original choreographer is one of the most beloved and respected in the business and is heart-broken someone else is changing her work, but go for it!”  What chance did he have to do a good job?! And then he didn’t get to start from scratch, throw out the book and make it his own, make something new and original and different - that’s too risky. He was only tweaking bits and pieces, resulting in a patchwork of clashing styles.It’ll be really interesting to see this film, and if he did indeed get the chance to start afresh and truly make it his own.  Personally I’d rather Blankenbuehler wasn’t involved at all and the producers had more respect for Gillian Lynne’s masterpiece - but I’d rather see a true new take than the hodge-podge approach.

[bellepullman]

An SR-71 Blackbird once flew from LA to Washington DC in 64 minutes. Average speed of the flight: 2145mph.

[bellepullman]

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

Truly astonishing is the fact that apparently this crap was supposed to “double” the userbase by the end of next year. Boy, howdy, that’s not gonna work out well for them.

[bellepullman]

man the crazy thing about babies is that like, some people would think that reading a baby a book about farm animals is teaching them about farm animals, but really it’s teaching them about the concept of a book and how there’s new information on each page of a single object, but really, beyond that, it’s teaching them how language works, and beyond that it’s really actually teaching them about human interaction, and really really it’s them learning about existing in a three-dimensional space and how they can navigate that space, but actually, above all it is teaching them that mama loves them.

[bellepullman]

the sad thing is is tumblr thought they had to monetize through ads, so they had to do this so they could get reputable advertisers, but

like

if they had just hired some people to actually cultivate a good website and then asked us how we’d like the site monetized? we could have come up with something

on NPR today they were talking to The Guardian, the UK paper. Asking one of their execs how it is, exactly, in the era of dying print media, The Guardian stays afloat without charging to access their online content. 

And they explained that when it became clear that the industry was irreversibly changing, they asked thousands of their readers to come in over the course of a weekend and sat them down in groups and asked what they would like the revenue model to look like going forward, keeping in mind that the paper would still need to bring in a profit somehow. The overwhelming response was “I am willing to pay for this to be free for everyone”. So The Guardian is funded by subscribers who pay because they think it’s a worthwhile service, even though all the content is available for free. 

Which is also, incidentally, how things like NPR (and Maximum Fun podcasts) are funded. And how Wikipedia is funded. And how many people run their patreons - no exclusives. You just pay because you want to support the product. It’s how a lot of the best stuff in the internet age is funded.

Other online media (whether it’s patreon or podcasts or video games or w/e) offer tiny inconsequential but fun benefits for paying. Maybe tumblr donors get cute options for frames for their icons. Maybe they get access to extra themes. Pay more on this video game for a fun skin for your character that doesn’t change the gameplay. Pay more on tumblr and you can have animated icons. Something different could’ve been done.

I mean, for us to be willing to pay for it, they’d also need to try to build a functioning website. Something they’ve been royally fucking up for years now. Still no easy blacklist, limited search features, limited privacy features, links breaking everywhere… 

But if @staff had made a real good faith effort to create a good user experience that prevented bots and protected users and then asked us 1) what kind of site we wanted 2) what income model we’d prefer to support, I feel like we could’ve come up with something. 

As it is the site is in a downward spiral and that sucks.

[bellepullman]

How do you think I can find out what gender my nipples are?

Thank you for bringing this question to me. Much like chick sexing, determining nipple gender is a difficult and hotly debated issue. In the United States prior to 1896, specialists were paid thousands of dollars to sex nipples, so to speak, until it was revealed that most were charlatans that had no idea what they were doing. One would make a run of the western territories for a bit until another came along that claimed to have some sort of contraption required for nipple sexing, and then the first would claim that one was only 96% effective and that his new contraption was 99.9% effective, and so on it would go. Truth be told many people have lived and died without ever know how their own nipples presented.

With the advent of black light, determining nipple gender presentation became a relatively simple matter, though it still requires some expertise. By shining a black light on the nipple, a word is revealed on the underside of the nipple in the areola—if you’ll allow me to demonstrate with this male-presenting nipple diagram:

Now, of course, the word itself is not in English, but in Latvian, for reasons which should be obvious, which means you’ll have to consult a Latvian dictionary or native Latvian speaker to determine what gender your nipple is presenting. That shouldn’t be too difficult in the modern internet era, though.

Back to your original question, if you’re like me, you neither have a black light nor ready access to a fluent speaker of Latvian (well, I mean, I do, but I no longer need her services, as I long ago determined the gender presentation of my nipples. I don’t think I would have survived my 20s had I not known). But worry not! The encoding remains even on images of nipples. Thus, all you need to do is the following:

Take a photograph of your nipple (the closer the better, as the writing is small).

Post it here on Tumblr.

Have as many people as possible reblog it in hopes of finding someone with a black light.

Have the black light holding individual shine a black light on the screen and take a screen shot and post that.

Reblog until you find a Latvian speaker who can tell you the gender presentation of your nipple.

Simple as that!

Now, under ordinary circumstances, both nipples will present the same gender, but in 15% to 20% of cases, an individual set of nipples will present different genders. In case you are one of the 15% to 20%, it makes sense to put up images of both nipples—just to be certain.

Now if the black light doesn’t reveal a Latvian word, there may be a chance that the particular black light used falls outside of the nipple gender presentation revelation spectrum (certain common varieties of black light used by clubs in the 90s are like this, as they were very cheaply made. You get what you pay for!), so if the black light doesn’t reveal anything, don’t fret! It just means you need to find someone else with a higher quality black light. Soon your nipples’ gender presentation will be revealed, and you’ll be able to rest easy—unless your nipple gender presentation changes (which can happen every 20-30 years).

Thank you for the question, and best of luck!

[bellepullman]

Let’s be honest. We’re all here because posts are still in chronological order.

[bellepullman]

[bellepullman]

reblog if you’d end a date if they said they voted for trump

[bellepullman]

Jaw drops.

Very rare photo of Freddie attending a Japanese production of the musical Cats. at the Osaka Shiki Theatre during a trip to Japan in 1986. 

[bellepullman]

Tumblr, circa December 18, 2018

[bellepullman]

computers are so fucking dumb in general i wouldn’t be surprised if everyone got permabanned for having pictures of armpits or some shit 

[bellepullman]

Flags

I have had 3 mineral posts flagged as adult content today. They contained a tourmaline, a muscovite, and a galena. On Friday I had 3 fossil posts flagged as adult content, including a fossil fish, a fossil tooth from a mastodon, and a Tyrannosaur vertebrae. I’ve submitted appeals for each. This has been getting worse over the past month, apparently most of geology content is now only for adults. 

[bellepullman]

RARE PICTURES OF EEYORE SMILING

[bellepullman]

[bellepullman]

An autistic friend of mine just said this to me “The harder I work at communication the more people expect from me and the less they are willing to compromise.” and it is the most fucking heartbreaking thing I’ve heard.

[bellepullman]

There’s this girl at my school and she’s really nice and I remember sometime last year at one point she would carry a clicker around and click it everytime she had a happy thought/something good happened/she laughed etc. It was always kind of cute how you’d just hear the little click every once in a while throughout class it always made me smile knowing that it was bc something made her feel happy idk