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We are confident that we're doing it wrong, but are still trying to figure out how to do it right.

science side of tumblr, tell me your favorite fact or story about your discipline!

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and my back

what you learn from hobbies:

consistent practice opens up whole worlds of skill that you couldn't imagine

making mistakes in the process of learning is not only natural, it is also essential

activities that you enjoy can give you more energy back than you spent on them

wow everything is so expensive

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But wait until you read its poetry.

“eldritch horror beyond your comprehension” and it’s just a generic monster with tentacles and eyes

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Check my Patreon out if you’d like to support the comic, even a little bit helps. Or just to check out the reward tiers, there’s some neat bonus stuff and I tried to make them fun: https://www.patreon.com/waitingforthet

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Looks like reblogs and replies got turned off by the OP?

Just want to add that even when there's compass directions, the map need not have north at the top. Traditional Chinese maps had South at the top...a compass pointed SOUTH for them. Nor is there any particular reason for a map to have either North or South at the top. In a mountainside culture as Frothlad brings up, the top of the map could be the direction of the top of the mountain.

(In case the post gets deleted entirely and reblogs vanish, the point was the OP wanted to argue that directions are natural rather than social constructs, and most of the thread was either joking around or pointing out how socially constructed direction really is.)

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"Out, out damned spot!"

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Happy Spider-Man Day!

Spider-Man: MENACE

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It's like building a towering To Be Read stack that can't fall over and crush you in your sleep.

love downloading a pdf to never read. just in case. like lol. you’re coming home with me

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Too useful to leave in tags.

things I would do if you're a nsfw/kink creative now because I've been eerily prescient about every single wave:

a) get a personal site with your own domain you own. now. not a carrd or third party squarespace. not next week. now. get it online with ugly-ass html but get your links there.

b) if you have the money: join one or multiple of eff.org / cbldf.org / freespeechcoalition.com

partly because they're actively fighting this, partly because they have members-only Lawyers You Might Need. Hint. Hint. Canary.

c) Write Down Those Lawyer Contact Numbers in meatspace. phone number of a real human being especially on paper, On You.

I have been in contact with lawyers for a few months now as my doujin circle knows. this should be telling you Many Things.

d) www.ecrater.com is where i'm going to be tentatively testing a shop because i like the fact you can *not* have payment processes and order digital/physical products via purely mail order.

(... be prepared for this to fall through too in the next 1-6 months.)

e) friends and followers of nsfw artists who earn most of their income through it: now's the time to support them. they're going to need the grace and financial flexibility especially mental health wise. domain/shop transfer/refund/therapy bills ain't free.

check in on them, and often.

f) get a VPN, use it daily to acclimatize, have them on your hard drive, several VPN's preferable. this is for the age verification laws coming. Start reading up on secure, privacy-focused infrastructure (prioritize email > website > shop in that order).

eff.org has a *ton* of resources.

g) prepare for discord and tumblr to be hit in the next wave. have alternatives *and actively start using them* if they're mission critical platforms for you.

I've played with matrix though I quite fancy IRC. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I say these things not to fearmonger but to give yourself the maximum amount of time to prepare. the pendulum *will* swing back. it did with the 80's moral panic. it will for this too.

you just have to outlast the bastards.

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Dragonball is weird...

No, probably weirder than you think, unless you're familiar with the underlying ancient legends.

Imagine, if you will, a kids' show called Beast Quest. Ten year old Artie, his sister Morgan, and their friends Lance, Wayne, and Percy, are trying to track down a magical beast who is rumored to grant wishes if you can catch it. Artie has a magic sword, Morgan has a satchel of magic potions, Wayne is really strong, Lance is really brave, and Percy is comic relief. Along the way they run into various characters from Arthurian legend, if not always recognizable as such, and there's a rival group of kids led by Moe who are also searching for the beast. Occasionally both groups cross paths with an old man who goes by Paul Lenore, who has been searching for the beast for his whole life and tries to warn them to give up on a hopeless quest. They find the beast, Percy makes a stupid wish to keep Moe from getting his wish, and the beast vanishes.

Then, twenty seasons or so later, Artie's grandkids (he married a girl Gwen who he met in season 2) are fighting the Space Antipope to save the universe from Scucca's demons, who have acquired the Odin Stone. For some reason, Artie is a kid again, but neither Gwen nor their kids are. Also, Morgan is married to Sir Green, a knight and the main villain of season 8.

That's basically Dragonball.

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The illusion of rampant crime is reinforced by local news broadcasts, which will in the space of a half hour often show multiple crimes...from nowhere near their broadcast area. The goal is to scare the viewer, make them think a particular kind of crime is rampant (either for outright political reasons, as with Sinclair stations, or simply for the If It Bleeds It Leads moneygrubbing reasons). Three companies (Sinclair, Grey, Nexstar) own most of the local broadcast stations in the United States, and can dictate content to their possessions.

Consider someone who lives in a community of about 50,000 people (either a small city, a spread out rural region, or a region of a bigger city). If you only got truly local news from the local news sources, a particular horrible crime might only happen once in a generation (call it 30 years) and definitely be newsworthy.

Now, assume that "once in a generation per 50,000 people" is roughly true for everywhere in the country of 350,000,000 people. Now it's happening somewhere in the country 7000 times in 30 years, or 230 times a year...almost every day, somewhere.

If it becomes "trendy" to show off that kind of crime in the news (be it murder, sex slavery rings, carjacking cars with babies inside, whatever), there will always be a recent story from somewhere in your "local" news channel's corporate network to play every day. If it was a once in a century crime, then you get a couple a week. And newspapers? Almost all of them are owned by Gannett now, so most "local" newspapers will dance to the tune of that company.

It's all about what the oligarchs controlling "local" news want to scare people with. And the oligarchs want people terrified of Crime so that they can strengthen their tools of social control.

Conservatives are so terrified of crime and so convinced we live in a Mad Max dystopia that they want to go back. To when crime was much higher. New York City is unsafe now but they want to go back to the golden age. The 80s.

They're absolutely quaking in their boots about how dangerous it is to live on the far right of the graph that they want to retuvurn to the big, beautiful upward curve on the left side of the graph

(For the record they believe that crime is much worse than it was during the Reagan years, but that over 90% of violent crime goes unreported for...some reason? And leaves no other trace of its existence?)

I think potentially people who will go on a multi-day whine fest about how scary it was to see one homeless person during a time of extremely low crime would thrive in the days of FEAR CITY but it'd be funny to watch them try

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I like the It.

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https://duboishistory.org/ is the current (as of July 2025) site for the DAHS.

View of the DuBois Brewery in DuBois, Pennsylvania in 1990. Abandoned since the 1970s, the massive Victorian era complex was demolished in 2003. The DuBois Area Historical Society has a nice write-up on the history of the brewery and its ultimate demise, including a surprising lawsuit against Anhaeser-Busch over the use of the “Budweiser” brand name.  There are also a couple of older photos from the brewery’s heyday…link: http://duboishs.com/index.php/dubois-brewery/

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I wonder how confused the algorithm gets at the fact my account is mostly subscribed to stuff like Transformers cartoons and an artist mostly known for YA stuff...but the account itself has been active for more than 18 years.

well this fucking sucks

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"There is no war in Ba Sing Se, but Professor Sokka's classroom comes close sometimes."

I think the most hilarious place to put Post-Canon Sokka would have been the university at Ba Sing Se. I think he would have made a great unhinged professor. Also, in true Sokka fashion, he should have completely dodged fame. Momo is more famous than he is.

He wants to demonstrate to the class how this thing called electricity works, so he's going to be bringing in a Firebender, so everybody be cool, we're all friends here... and in walks Princess Azula of the Fire Nation. One-time conqueror of the city. One of the students is currently writing an essay on how her brief rule of the city affected fruit trade. She says she considers the class to still be her subjects as she doesn't acknowledge any pretenders to any of her thrones, but for now you're exempted from bowing and "Your Highness" will do. It's a really interesting lecture.

"Okay, guys - hey, listen up, everyone - I won't be here next week, me and Aang are going to-" yeah right, sure, Professor Sokka knows the Avatar. Except, of course, the Avatar walks in sheepishly and says that Appa might have gotten into Sokka's hybrid crops, and then you all have to sit there and watch your professor chase the Avatar around with a sword.

One postgrad student is specializing in Water Tribe Cultures. She's currently studying the massive cultural shift that happened in the Northern Water Tribe at the end of the war - oh, and Professor, I absolutely know that you're from the Southern Water Tribe, but it's just that the shift started with Master Katara, and of course I don't think that every person from the South knows one another haha it's just that I need to ask her some questions and I thought maybe you could help me write a letter or write a letter of introduction or...

Sokka looks at her blankly and goes "yeah, she's my sister. KATARA!" which is followed by a faint answering "fuck you!" from Somewhere and to the horror/elation of our postgrad, Master Katara bursts in and is promptly beaned in the head with a rock by Professor Sokka. Her brother. her hero and her professor are siblings and currently brawling on the floor.

Sokka does not teach or study history, but he does sometimes sit in on lectures about recent history. Whenever he does, several doctoral students flock in to sit near him (even if it's an intro course) so that they can eavesdrop on his grumbling. (No matter how they try, an "overheard utterance" is not a valid source according to their professors. No, we have no sources on the Avatar's bison taking part in combat - sky bison are not war animals and...)

He gets regular deliveries with the Beifong family crest on them, and he goes "sweet, Toph must have found some new minerals" and at this point nobody needs to ask which Toph. He seems to have friends everywhere, literally everywhere. Wang was headed out to this massive swamp to study if it's one big organism, and Sokka told him to find some guy named Hue and "don't mind the loincloth." One time the university gets shut down because the Earth King wants to visit. Oh, visit the University? What an honor- Of fucking course not, he wants to visit Professor Sokka, who yells at him and his royal guards for interrupting his day. The Earth King and his many, many royal guards then sheepishly say sorry and file out.

The last straw is when - not a week after he yelled at the Earth King - the assistant head of the Political Science dept walks in to the faculty lounge to find Sokka having tea with a nice normal man dressed in Earth greens for once, and can't resist a little joke. "Let me guess, you're having tea with the Fire Lord." And then she can instantly tell that she fucked up, because both of them go stock still.

So when the two men awkwardly stand up and proceed to introduce the Fire Lord whose portrait she has in her office because she is the assistant head of Political Science as Li, a server at the Jasmine Dragon, she just says "hello Li" and leaves to find a bottle of something strong.

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It's weird how, possibly intentionally but probably accidentally, at some point Superman just sort of absorbed part of Goku's origin story (which itself was done as a sort of dark Superman origin to let them have a bunch of evil people with Goku's abilities show up).

For decades, Krypton was a benign place, if somewhat arrogant in their assumptions that they could solve any problem they faced, and Kal-El's basket in the bullrushes was a last hope for a doomed race. I don't recall who did the first "Kryptonians were actually conquerors and Kal was supposed to be an advance force" story, but it's mostly a 21st Century thing, well after the Saiyans were introduced. (My Adventures With Superman played off this sent-to-conquer theme but pulled a plot twist out.)

SUPERMAN (2025) dir. James Gunn