Damar has a certain romanticism about the past. He could use a dose of cold water. 

why yes I AM making boop gifs from screen recording

FREEZE! EVERYBODY CLAP YOUR HANDS!!!

Oh…. Well, it’s over for Crunchyroll I guess

it gets worse: funi had an option to buy anime outright. but, it was bought digitally, and now CR has said that they're not going to honor that, so if you bought anything from funi digitally, CR are taking that away from you

This is absolutely insane but the part that I find funny is that there isn't a community on earth more dedicated to piracy than western anime fans. For ages the only way to even get your hands on anime and manga in the west was piracy. I literally don't think Crunchyroll could have picked a worse group to try the "we're a monopoly so we can charge you whatever we want" play on. I doubt there's a person over the age of 25 who saw that and thought anything other than "welp, okay, piracy it is then!" like honestly the Crunchyroll executives are out of their fucking minds with this one.

What I learn from Science & Technology Studies is that you shouldn't blindly trust science because there's a fair amount of fuckery (mostly unintentional but sometimes not) going on in the background, but you also shouldn't *not* trust science in the way that most people who don't trust science don't trust science.

Anyways, hope that helps!

So to be clear, science:

However, none of this, when taken together, should be interpreted to mean:

@weiszklee #out of all things you should trust science the most but still not thaaat much

To this I will add that while it is the best tool we have for distinguishing what's real from what we want to believe - this is true! - a lot of the time when you would need to perform such a distinction, practical pressures make a more-or-less faithful application of the scientific method impractical. One thing that comes to mind is emergencies. Remember that old truism about not rising to the challenge, but falling to the level of your training? It's true. You do not produce new knowledge in an emergency; you use extant knowledge. If in an emergency situation, you normally do not have time to do a proper application of the scientific method. All you've got is heuristics and hope that they're adequate enough to get you through. You either have a tool in your toolbox to deal with it, or you're screwed. Science assumes that you have time, access to peers, time, access to material, time, the ability to do follow up and quality control, time, did I mention - time? If you don't have all that, don't kid yourself: you're not doing science. You're doing your best approximation and hoping it's enough. Sometimes that's all you've got and that's fine. It's just not science. If that wasn't annoying enough, there's more: say you've got just the right scientifically-validated tool for your situation. However, the fact that the tool is scientifically validated doesn't actually mean using it will help. It just means it's a decent tool. It'll give you better chances, sure. But a misapplication of a good hammer or screwdriver will not help you fix your problem.

Science is a fantastic toolset. But like any truly good tool it has limitations, and it doesn't make its wielders immune to fucking up. And it's not the first life of defense in a crisis. That distinction goes to routines, training, and practice, which might be scientifically based -or not. But by the time you need them, it is usually far too late to wonder.

Honestly best doctrine when it comes to science is “trust but verify”

This. Another good rule of thumb is that, if science says that something *isn't* true, then it's almost certainly right. If it says that something *is* true, then you should be asking about data, interpretation, circumstances under which it ceases to be true, etc.

Okay, so I have seen that cat-paw x-ray a few times, and always assumed it was fake, but before posting to say that, I did some digging, and I am super glad I did, because the truth turns out to be way more interesting!

Here's an actual paw of an adult cat:

You can easily find a lot of images like this in a simple google image search for "cat paw x-ray." (A lot of them are contrasting the normal paw with a declawed paw.) This particular one is from the imaging anatomy website at the University of Illinois School of Veterinary Medicine, which is a study tool for students to review normal anatomy.

That same Google search also shows a lot of social media posts using this image or one like it to "debunk" the ridiculously fake-looking x-ray at the top of the post. But I noticed that I wasn't seeing anything like that that was coming from something more reliable than Just Some Guy--no news articles, and no social media posts from veterinarians/students, or organizations, or well-known public science education accounts, etc.--and no one was going into any depth about it. Just random users pointing at the obvious fake and yelling "fake."

So I kept looking, and eventually found some places where the top image was posted with context, and it turned out--surprisingly! I was surprised!--not to be a fake, but an x-ray of a very young kitten, where the bones are not fully developed, and therefore don't show up well on the x-ray. This veterinary reference source has x-ray images of a neonatal puppy, including this one:

If I'm reading the article correctly, it sounds like this image--and probably the kitten one--was done at a very low power, to minimize radiation exposure to such a tiny patient, which results in a lower-quality image with less detail, contributing to the cartoony appearance.

The kitten x-ray has also been cropped to leave out the forearm bones, which--being bigger--show up with more detail in the image and therefore make the whole thing look less ridiculously fake:

(The article has a couple of paragraphs of technical detail about equipment settings and techniques to improve sensitivity and get more detail; if the person taking the kitten x-ray wasn't able to use all of those tricks, that would probably explain why the puppy one is a bit more realistic-looking.)

So there you go! Turns out teeny-tiny kittens actually are mostly fluff with cartoony little bones! Now we know.

you know how people say soup is round and so it's messed up to put it in a square tupperware? that's how I feel every time I see a square watch

curious what your thoughts on this are then

It says guess bcs you're more likely to actually figure out what time it is that way.

How do you feel about Qlocktwo?

You know given my dyscaculia this is actually easier for me to read than a regular analog clock AND it's giving old school cheesy secret agent vibes so I think it's so ridiculous that it loops back around to being cool again. Still, wish it was round.

Okay this one I think you will probably like then

Reveal by Projects

Super easy to read

I have an addition:

"How do these clocks make you feel?"

I love genuinely innocent “boys will be boys.” Just saw a guy come out of a frat house to poke a pair of jeans they’d left outside - they were frozen solid, and as soon as he confirmed that, like twenty more boys came rushing out of the house going “YOOOOOOOOOO”

I heard grunting outside my window the other night and there were four boys struggling to push this giant snowball (like 7 foot diameter) down the sidewalk.

I once lost my keys at a frat house.

My drunk ass had actually walked home without them, pounded on my apartment door, gotten let in by my rightfully-disgruntled roommate, and proceeded to pass out on the couch.  Apparently I puked in the toilet before passing out.  I do not remember this part.

The next morning, I schlepped back to the frat house.  I stood there, right in front of the front door.  This was a novel experience for me.  I’d never been at a frat house in broad daylight before.

A boy, presumably of the house, asked me what I was doing. 

“I lost my keys in here last night,” I called back.  “I was seeing if I could go in and look for them?”

He opened the door and gestured for me to come in.

“Go wherever you want.”

I’d never seen a frat house post-party before.  Wandering up the stairs and through the halls, I was surrounded by hungover and still-drunk frat boys stumbling around in their socks and sandals and gym shorts, seeking out food and showers like moths to a porch light.  A few of them threw puzzled glances my way.  I’m sure they thought I was some post-bacchanalia hallucination.

I entered one room where a boy was drunkenly watching some Old Yeller-esque movie on a tiny TV in the corner of his room from his bed.

“Do you like dog movies?” he asked, voice all mumbly from grogginess and also from the fact that his face was squished against his pillow and half-buried by his blanket.

I told him I did.

He mumbled again, pleased, and asked what I was doing.  I told him I was looking for my keys.

“Sorry, I haven’t seen any keys around here.”

I didn’t doubt him.

Twenty minutes had passed.  I’d searched just about every bedroom and nuclear-waste-dump-site of a bathroom in that house.  I’d given up on ever finding my keys and was prepared to beg my roommates’ forgiveness and get a new set copied.

As I stood there in the hallway, silently bewailing my predicament, a particularly-burly frat boy approached me.

“You need help with something?”

“I lost my keys here last night and I can’t find them, I’ve looked everywhere.”

“What do they look like?  I’ll put it into the group chat.”  He was already pulling out his phone.

No one ever checks a group chat, I thought, but what the hell.  It was worth a shot.  “Um, it’s just a ring of keys.  The keychain is a pink plastic cat, though, like yea big.  Like bright pink, you can’t miss it.”

He nodded, presumably typing this description faithfully into the group chat.

“Alright, I sent the message out.  Good luck.”

And with that, he turned and left.

A few moments later, I heard a distant thundering.  It was coming from upstairs, and it was getting louder and louder.  One assumes that how I felt in that moment was how Simba felt seeing the wildebeest stampede through the ravine as a horde of large young men all thundered down the stairs, making a beeling for me.

“Someone tell the girl!” One of them shouted, faceless in the mob.  “Girl!  Hey, GIRL!!!  We found your keys, girl!!!”

They circled around me.  I hadn’t felt that small since I was maybe eleven years old.  One of them split himself off from the crowd.

“Are these -” he pulled out a ring of keys from his pocket, “your keys?”

And lo, there was the distinctive bright millennial pink cat keychain dangling off the ring.

“Yes,” I whispered.  “Oh my god, yes.”

“EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!”

The cheer went up.

Turns out he found them in the bathroom upstairs.  I thanked them again profusely.  There was a scattered round of “no problems” and then, just as suddenly as they descended, they all dispersed, like ships in the night.

"stress" by yoan capote - made of bronze and concrete

This made me unclench my jaw

i feel like the boeing whistleblower case should radicalize more people. a major airline company is producing planes with less and less regard for safety and it's starting to get noticeable. man takes them to court, which would reduce profit at the cost of public safety. he fucking dies the night that boeings legal team asks him to stay an extra day. if nothing happens about this, i hope it gets through to people that america would literally kill you for a few extra cents

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

actually i'm reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.

There's people in the notes talking about "not basing your worth off numbers", and like. that isn't what this post is about. It's not a threat, either, it's a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.

Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.

Likes. Are. Worthless.

They don't do anything. They're a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn't even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don't. They're personal bookmarks and the only people who "get" anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don't keep the post in circulation, they don't keep it alive.

Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there's a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that's how posts stay alive and in circulation. It's like a contagion, but we're sharing creativity instead of disease.

And that matters. That "lifespan" of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it's not making it onto your dashboard. And if it's not on your dashboard, you won't see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn't have an algorithm like twitter and insta's and it shouldn't, it's the last bastion of chronological timelines.

Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or "threatening" to withhold our fucking work (you're not entitled to it! it's ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we're well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We're just stating facts.

also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ???? 

these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio

not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts

Trying to do research for writing is so dumb I’m literally on the Wikipedia page for rabbit