We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

Linux is a very good and powerful alternative.

reminder: you cannot Personal Choises your way out of an Intentional Structural Problem

Google continues to be a problem by rendering Google search as a useless thing, dominated by ads and other sponsored posts.

Reminder that adding "before:2023" to your Google searches will give you more stable (and ad free) results.

I was in one of the first years of the Chromebook in schools thing. Playing math games did open up porn pop-ups in class more than once. Kids these days will never know the feeling.

He hop!

Remember that "three items from the store to make the cashier most uncomfortable" meme? Apparently I accidentally found a winning combo tonight at the corner store, one of the usual clerks shot me a really weird look when I was checking out with these

Jimmy Budgett

Wasted away again in Meageritaville

i think that the "i do not control the ____" memes are generally tame and do not lend enough credence to the genuine absurdity of the original line that is

I saw this and remembered that I had this thread saved in a folder and figured this would be a good time to bring it out

READ THE WHOLE THING. I cannot garuntee that you will be pleased, but I can guarantee that it is one HELL of a rollercoaster.

nonbinary robots are cool and all but imagine a robot designed to be genderless and it sees a girl and is like “wtf girls are cute im a girl now” and the scientists are like u cant do this thing but she is already out the door 

The scabs got to em ✊😔

mmm not quite! it’s the same tune so I’ll give you half-points

Nah, it's always The Battle Hymn of the Republic*. It's like Hallelujah in that's a single song with a million different, often contradictory, verses, but it's still The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

*I'll accept someone who calls it John Brown's Body, but they'll get a serious frowning.

Tiktoker: "like the designer was like 'men are craving business casual and tits- how can we merge the two?'"

official boob post

*bisexual panic*

Once I get top surgery this is all I'm ever gonna wear

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

I am still very bitter that we haven't seen rudist reefs in Prehistoric Planet

oh true. oh fuck me the kaiju are fucking. oh that makes sense. cause theyve got exoskeletons too. ok.

i stroll into the little saltwater store in the city. a border collie comes barreling over and begins nibbling my toes through my open heels. the dude behind the counter introduces himself and asks me if i have any tanks at home or if he needs to set one up for me. i tell him that i have 16 tanks and ask him if he has any personal ones before he can comment on that number. he proceeds to say “yeah, i have a 120 in my office. it has a clam in it.” i cautiously respond “oh, a clam?” and he whips out his phone which already has a livestream up on it. it’s centered on the biggest clam i’ve ever seen, just chillin’ in this tank and taking up half of the available floorspace in a 120 gallon. “that’s my baby,” he says, and points at the unholy bivalve in case i didn’t notice it on my own. there are now two border collies snorfling at my toes while i stare in awe at this dude’s gigantic fucking clam

I found myself having, not exactly an argument recently, but a highly opinionated conversation with someone who did not believe my assertion that once upon a time there were official Hello Kitty vibrators. With the aid of the Wayback Machine, I found this article, and thought the world at large might enjoy it too...

#reading this post treating it like every other tumblr post#hello kitty vibrators yes of course that is the kind of thing you read about on tumblr#no surprises there#until i realise who op is#and have to laugh and laugh and laugh#i love neil gaiman#a true tumblrina if ever there was one

Fyi

( x )

Happy creating folks

You can see the video here where an asshole with a "My pronouns are find/Jesus" shirt asks if this guy supports LGBTQ rights or economic stability, and this king up here^ just keeps repeating, "Why can't you have both? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't have to pick one. I refuse the question." Conservatives have absolutely nothing but whataboutism, and when people don't play their game, they have no comeback. Good on this guy for refusing to go along with the bullshit question

I think people are just joking around, but the thing is that a lot of people will fall into the right's "DEBATE ME BRO" trap and wind up in heated arguments, and people lose sight that sometimes it really is a lot more effective at shutting down their arguments to just not engage at all

.. I feel like another big reason this is a thing/joke/question at all is the implication that this guy doesn't """look like""" someone who would support queer rights or refuse to debate conservatives and like

We can agree that's a shitty conclusion to leap to from appearances, right? Yeah? 😕

I mean, I just loved this guy absolutely refusing to entertain the bullshit question, and I would've gotten a kick out of this video regardless of his appearance because of how casual and amused he was about the whole thing. One of the people in the screenshots above said this:

So I don't think everyone was making fun of his appearance

my friend took in a stray and she’s the cutest kitty ever but he named her oil so whenever he sends a picture of her me and my other friends look like we’re roleplaying as the US military

in our defense this is oil

Hello???

the worms. closet heterosexuals.

ERASE the idea that America saved lives by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan from your minds. ERASE the idea that it was anything more than a political move to scare Russia and also to satiate US curiosity as to the true ability of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military bases. They were heavily populated civilian cities chosen precisely bc the U.S. wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go. Japan was on the verge of surrendering, the U.S. literally wanted to test out their nuclear weapons on people that they deemed disposable. That is it. If those bombs were dropped by any nation other than the US veryone involved would have been tried as war criminals.

Also erase the idea that America was the hero of WWII and got into the war because they wanted so save people. They couldn’t have cared less about the victims of the Holocaust, proven by the fact that they turned away so many shiploads of refugees that went on to die at the hands of Nazis.

“the us wanted to see how many people an atomic bomb could kill in one go” oh really? Source your bullshit, asshole

i left out sources bc i figured most tumblr users know how to use google but ok 

- Report produced by the U.S Strategic Bombing Group (employed by Truman) to survey the air attacks on Japan concluded that: 

“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” - page 52-56 

- Dwight Eisenhower future president and then Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces also said:

“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [the then Secretary of War] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” - page 380

- Admiral William Leahy, one of the highest ranking officials in the US army during WW2 wrote of the usage of the bombs:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. […] My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” - page 441

- General Douglas McArthur, another high ranking US official in the war:

“[When asked about his opinion on bombing Japan] He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” - page 70-71

- On September 9, 1945 Admiral William F. Halsey commander of the Third Fleet publicly quoted as saying:

“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment… . It was a mistake to ever drop it… . [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it… . It killed a lot of Japs.” - online source

- The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, speaking to President Truman:

“I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon [the atomic bomb] would not have a fair background to show its strength.” - diary of Henry Stimson which can be found online here 

- Even those deploying the bombs questioned the decision to drop them on civilian cities:

“I thought that if we were going to drop the atomic bomb, drop it on the outskirts–say in Tokyo Bay–so that the effects would not be as devastating to the city and the people. I made this suggestion over the phone between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and I was told to go ahead with our targets.” - online source

- Lewis Strauss Assistant to the Navy Secretary James Forrestal on the locations of the bombings:

“I remember suggesting […] a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood… I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest… would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. […] Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation.” - page 145

So to recap: 

Draw your own conclusions. 

Gonna be reblogging these posts a lot now that Oppenheimer is out and racist Americans are on their bullshit

has anyone seen my sharp rock? i left it in the river for 100 years for safe keeping and now i can't find it. its many uneven edges have sentimental significance