@waves314 / waves314.tumblr.com
Recently, while staring far too long at a potato chip, it occurred to me that the ridges could possibly be used to create a lenticular effect. So I got out some chip dip (and the smallest paint brush I have) to test it out. I started with a simple 2-frame illustration of a football and a basketball, then I painted a little sour cream and onion dip bird. 🥔🕊️ - via my new @brockdavisart instagram
Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
and this is why baseball is the best sport (see also: these baseball sidequests)
how?? just how?
this is the single best picture of an eclipse I've taken ever. it's not even close
bark bark bark bark
Sad day for Martians,
Ingenuity, the ‘little helicopter that could’, the first ever helicopter to fly on another planet is down. It took its final flight on the 18th of January where one or more of its roter blades were damaged.
We weren’t even sure it was possible to fly a helicopter on Mars before Ingenuity, and yet this tiny little shoe box of a helicopter managed to fly in an atmosphere less than 1% as dense as Earth’s, flying a total of 72 times in the last 3 years, far exceeding the 5 planned flights.
Having arrived on Mars hitched to the Perseverance rover’s belly, this little guy has spent these 3 years scoutting ahead for Perseverance. But now Perseverance will have to continue its mission without Ingenuity. For the first time since its creation, Perseverance is on its own in that endless red desert.
(images of Ingenuity were taken by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)
I don't know if this was obvious to everyone else, but I just realised that one of the reasons why the Hobbit is so effective as a children's book is that while Bilbo is an adult, the skills that make him a hero are all those of a child.
By human standards he's child-sized, which makes him unobtrusive and light on his feet. He can slip by unnoticed where bigger people can't.
He's good at playing games, and even cheats (successfully!) in a way that - let's face it - is not so different to how children try to cheat at games. He's polite in a way that's fully comprehensible to children (rather than, say, being able to perform courtly manners). He's quick-witted, but the trick of keeping the trolls talking is also one that would be achievable for a child.
He doesn't have magic powers, he's not a great fighter, and he's not some kind of Chosen One. There's not much that he does that couldn't be done by a ten-year-old, but the story shows just how valuable all those skills and traits are. It's very empowering.
Ruby Keeler & Lee Dixon dance on a giant typewriter in Ready, Willing & Able (1937)
So jaded by cgi that I didn't think this was impressive at all until I realised it was all an actual size set
It took me a solid few seconds to realize those type bars swinging back and forth at the top are actually peoples legs
Needless to say, I am HORRIFIED.
‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’
-Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher
fuck OFF
Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.
So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.
every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing
This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big.
FUCK OFF
Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are.
They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.
Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.
Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances.
It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.
Like seriously why the fuck y'all think everyone FREAKED THE HELL OUT when Dorothy fell into the pig pen in Wizard of Oz? It’s because pigs are HUGE and weigh a shitton and would crush her in an instant.
also dont they eat like, basically anything?
YUP. Pigs will eat people, if given the chance. They dgaf.
That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without fucking you up. The dogs wear body armour.
I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off.
how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?
…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”
Very carefully, I would imagine.
WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…
…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…
…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…
…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest - I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?
…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…
…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…
…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford, more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in the first a molet argent.
After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford was on the winning side…
It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.
Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…
…and modern…
…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…
So when Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him… now you get the resonance.
This post…it just really went places on me.
i feel like we didn’t spend long enough on the tuna
Rapists, and killers, too? Really? (Those on death-row?) The drug/prostitution problems are just a portion of USA criminals.
yes, all criminals. the moment you say “except X criminal” is the moment that people will try to convict their opponents as having committed X crime.
it’s the same thing as what’s going on right now with people equating drag to some sort of child exploitation. “but the children!!” they wail, and people listen because oh, if drag is harming children, then drag MUST be BAD, so we HAVE TO BAN DRAG.
do you understand what i’m saying? you can’t take away the rights of any category of criminal, because suddenly that category will be overflowing with people who totally 100% definitely committed that horrible crime.
The fact that Orlando Bloom (Legolas) and Andy Serkis (Gollum) both said that they based their performances in Lord of the Rings off of cat behavior really shows you the sheer range of what cats are like
Dress from the Art Deco era.
@bunnydiamond Tagging you here as well because my first thought when seeing pretty dresses is showing them to you 😂🩷
The Princess Bride is such a funny book to read after ONLY seeing the movie. Like Goldman made up a fake author from a fake country and proceeded to write the book as an abridged version of what the fake author wrote... and then he proceeds to add in notes to the "abridged version" mentioning all the boring world building stuff he skipped because it was boring.
Like shout out to William Goldman, man really did make an entire book that is just "the cool scenes you thought of in your head" and then made up a fake author to abridge so he doesn't have to connect them.
And it slaps
I used to work at a used bookstore, and had a group of three teenage boys come in wanting the "Unabridged Version" of Princess Bride.
They would not believe that it was a narrative device and the unabridged version didn't exist. Said no author would credit someone else for their own writing, that was ridiculous, and was there a guy who knew about fantasy they could talk to?
I grabbed a coworker and left him to deal with it. Heard him explaining the concept of a pen name as I walked away.
