Important safety information about the eclipse on Monday

Zoozve, my beloved

"...we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club..."

This is my favorite line.

I have learned so many things from this.

it's good for your mental health to have mutuals who are wildly horny about kinks which do nothing at all for you

this is both as in. sometimes you will realise that actually these kinks do do something for you and that can be very eye-opening and liberating

and also as in. sometimes you will hear someone decry these kinks as indicative of moral failing, and being friends with people like this makes you immune to that sort of knee-jerk outrage

Also primes you for awareness that there are a lot of people who like a lot of things you don’t like or even that make you uncomfortable, and that is okay, has nothing to do with their character, and is also none of your business.

It’s always good practice. Remember that minding your own business costs $0 and has numerous health benefits.

“Having freaky friends to immunise you against moral panic” is a take so good I can’t believe I don’t hear it more often.

"I have been attending the Devil's sacrament with you perverts for three weeks straight and you haven't awakened a fucking thing in me."

just because someone can articulate their point better doesn’t make them right, it makes them articulated. 

and you aren’t stupid for having trouble articulating yourself.

In their defence, a lot of it is sand.

I'm starting to think that maybe Europe just isn't that big

no but because australia is close to the bottom of the map and the flat map is distorted to fit a square map shape, australia on the flat map is significantly smaller compared to places closer to the equator.

Thank you for being the one single person in the notes who understands map projections. Australia is big, but still significantly smaller than the US.

Australia is not significantly smaller than the mainland US, no. These are the real sizes, not a Mercator projection. I think you're misunderstanding what yanzinator said. The US does have significantly larger island territories than Australia, though.

The continuous US (so, not counting the islands and Alaska) and Australia are roughly the same size:

US: 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2)

Australia: 2,969,907 sq mi (7,692,024 km2)

And the person above has the impact of the Mercator projection completely backwards: North America and Europe appear much larger than they actually are due to their latitudes. Most notably Greenland looks like it is bigger than Africa! (It isn’t.)

In the picture below, the pale blue is Mercator and the dark blue is actual size:

And here is Africa vs Greenland:

There is a website where you can drag and drop countries on top of each other to see the actual size comparison taking into account projection

It's pretty cool and also Japan is a lot bigger than I thought it was

Steve Oster [producer of DS9] - about 4.06 - Rejoined

Reblog. This. Every. Damned. Time.

HA! Good.

This is why “family values” is usually such a load of bs. 

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity. 

via- @elidyce

One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.

Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever

the art of war is tedious and irritating when you read it as like, immortal prose by the most brilliant man ever to kick ass. but it’s incredibly fucking funny when you realize that sun tzu had to write every single one of those entries because someone somewhere did not know this ahead of time and made a really, really expensive oopsie doodles.

What's really funny to me in context are all of these tech bros and wannabe tech guru bros who talk about The Art Of War as if they, personally, were not the same exact kind of dude that Sun Tzu was talking to 2k+ years ago.

Like, no, really, sir. If Sun Tzu met your 'disruptive' ass he would absolutely hate you, personally.

some sort of love poem

This is the wildest result of one of my comics becoming popular I feel rabid

was just gonna reblog this bomb ass comic again bc it's a mood but the author's addition is hilarious. this is why your english teachers taught you to find meaning in a text

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

This is what's so goddamn terrifying about the Internet slowly collapsing into the same 3-5 websites--if Facebook deprioritizes you for saying "sex" and TikTok shadowbans you for saying "suicide" and Twitter X locks your account for saying "racism" we've lost a lot more than just the culture of the old weird internet

goth fashion is a parody of old money. the sooner you understand this the sooner you can unlock the full potential of your inner darkness. also stop buying from shein.

“goth is bougie” motherfucker goth is when you grab whatever you have within reach and slap it together to make it look old, fancy, and most importantly, OFFPUTTING! 

goth is looking at the medici family and going “i can do that too, you’re not special. wooowooo look at me i’m a centuries old generational plague on society.” 

your local thrift store, willingness to destroy, trust in the process, and audacity are your best friends.

fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely

The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this

The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn't the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter's. Titan's radius is 4.4% of Saturn's. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.

Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That's ridiculous. It's unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn't mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.

This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars's dumpy little potatoes wouldn't be able to move oceans the way our moon does.

Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.

Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.

what if the answer to the fermi paradox is that life cant exist without a moon like luna

I got a serious beef with the Fermi paradox. There is no Fermi paradox. There stopped being a Fermi paradox once the first radio telescopes went up, and we began to get a true sense of the sheer scale of the universe.

Space is big, empty, and loud. Sunspots can cause enough interference to affect global communications. We’re not even loud enough to talk over our own sun. On our own planet. We can barely communicate with Voyager, and we know exactly where it is and what its signal sounds like.

The Fermi paradox is like doubting the existence of Belfast, because you stood on a windy New York beach shouting towards it and didn’t get an answer.

i didn't realise we were drowned out by our own sun :(

She is screaming so loud

This is it. This is how far our voices can go. Anyone not looking directly at us with an insanely powerful telescope (and is less than a specific distance away) or isn't within this little bubble would likely not be able to tell that we are here.

Not that it brings me joy to give Rick and Morty any credit at this particular point in the timeline (it gets enough rabid praise, thanks), but there is the segment where they are looking for a new planet to live on, and people frequently share the odd planet where everything is on a cob, and that's a fun punchline in that it's just fucking weird... BUT knowing this already about the noise the Sun makes and how it drowns out our communication made the planet where the Sun is constantly screaming outrageously funny to me, for this exact reason.

What a year this week has been.

It’s Monday.

It sure as hell is.

The earlier in the day Monday you reblog the funnier this gets

I DIDNT EVEN NOTICE OH MY GOD YESSSSS

insofar as it is possible, have a very happy new year

if it is not, make the bastards pay for it