who was the fool who was tasked with naming the galaxy and the only adjective they could think of was ‘mmmmmmmmmmmmilky…’
scientist: (gazing up at space) scientist: ……….. it sure is a milky boy
NO
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND
ASTRONOMERS ARE THE SHITTIEST EVER AT NAMING THINGS I KID YOU NOT.
When it came time to name the two theoretical particle types that might be dark matter THEY INTENTIONALLY CHOSE THE NAMES SO THAT THE ACRONYMS WOULD SPELL “WIMPS” AND “MACHOS” I SHIT YOU NOT
THEY ARE FUCKING TERRIBLE AT NAMING ANYTHING
I just listened to a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson himself LAST NIGHT and he went on about this more than once.
“I’m walking down the street and I’m like ‘ooh pretty rock…’ and some Geologist is like ‘actually, that’s anorthosite feldspar’ and I’m like ‘Nevermind, I don’t want it anymore.’ Any biologists in the audience? [some clapping] Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The most important molecule in the human body, what did you name it? It has NINE SYLLABLES and it’s so long that even YOU GUYS abbreviate it as ‘DNA’!
But astrophysicists and astronomers? No, man, we call it like we see it. Star made of neutrons? NEUTRON STAR. Small white star? WHITE DWARF. You know that big red spot on Jupiter? Know what we called it? JUPITER’S RED SPOT.”
There is an infamous building on our campus, called “Montgomery House” or more commonly, “Monty.” Monty is the building for animation, game design, special effects, sound design, and basically everything that requires highly powerful, highly specialized computers and software. The building is infamous for a couple of reasons. It’s located pretty far away from any other building, for one.
The building itself used to be a coffin factory, no joke. Another is the building has no windows. None. There are also no clocks anywhere. Once you enter Monty, you are completely separated from the flow of time and the light of day. Probably the reason Monty is most known though is because students in the “monty majors” have to spend a lot of time there. A lot. It is not uncommon for somebody to spend more than a few days exclusively within the sunless, dark walls of Monty. If you go to the building, it is not surprising to see students sleeping on the floor, on the few chairs available, on the computers. Some bring sleeping bags and rations. Some just forgo sleep, buy espresso shots and work. The entire building just smells of coffee and sweat. It really seems like an exageration, but its not hyperbole.
Why I bring this up is because of something that’s started recenetly. Inside the building, the school has hung up artwork on the walls from other majors as is typical on campus. One of the artworks was a self-portrait painting of a man with long, scraggly brown hair and a full beard looking pensively off into the distance. The painting became known as “Monty Jesus.”
Students, in their desperation for their files to render, or the computers to work, began to offer prayers to Monty Jesus. Soon, they began writing their prayers and taping them next to the painting. The wall is now covered, completly plastered, in prayers to Monty Jesus for things like “Fix the wifi” and “let me live through finals” and more simply “help me.” Candles have been added. Literal candles are placed around Monty Jesus in hopes he will help them.
This is how religions are born. Monty Jesus is considered a “joke”, but people at Monty still hold…. quite a lot of superstitious faith in the concept. There is even talk of a “Monty Satan” that creates software failures. It might be in jest, but these students really are hoping for some force to help them. And they’ve given it a name, an image, and respect. Monty Jesus is real, and I’m sure of it. The desperate students have created their own spirit and their own form of worship, out of need.
Religion, spirituality, didn’t stop being relevant. It didn’t stop being something people need and want, and have the desire to create. It’s still happening, and it always will as long as their are people. The spirit of creation, new deities and new worship, is alive and well today and should not be ignored simply because it is “new” or “a joke.”
Monty Jesus is Real and Strong and Our Friend
SCAD is such a weird and magical place.
As soon as I saw “Monty” I knew this was about my school
I go to this school and I can confirm he is real. Another weird happening that occurred in the dorm adjacent to Monty is the smashed fly incident. Basically, someone smashed a fly on the stairway wall in the dorm and, because no janitor in this building ever bothers to thoroughly clean the place, the fly stayed there for a good few weeks. Eventually, one of the students wrote “ART” next to the fly with a sharpie, and a few days after that, someone made a tiny frame and name tag to accompany the art piece
Eventually some fool took this beautiful art piece down, and someone wrote a goddamn article about it in our school newspaper
which prompted several students to erect a mini shrine on the stairwell in honor of the smashed fly. Art school is truly a magical place.
Your school is a microcosm of how human culture develops, incredible.
[Note: When J. Elliot refers to her being classed as one of ‘your people’ in relation to black people of color, it’s based on her reputation of being an outspoken, anti-racism ally].
White people get deeply offended hearing black people speak this truth, so maybe hearing Jane Elliot say it will cut through the white fragility: White people’s default setting is racism. Because America’s default setting is racism. That doesn’t mean they cannot unlearn it, but anti-Blackness is so ubiquitous in Western culture that unlearning racism is not something that just magically happens because you think you’re a good person. It’s not something you attain and then forget about. It’s a perishable skill.
Nobody becomes “not racist” by repeatedly declaring “But hey, I’M not racist” on social media. Becoming “not racist” is defined by conscious choice, coupled with actions—like listening to black people, calling out racism, and not saying or doing racist things—that prove you aren’t racist. Being “not racist” is something that needs to be worked on CONSTANTLY.
by Prachi Gupta on The Slot, shared by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd to Jezebel
Hours before Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new crackdown on sanctuary cities on Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago raided the home of Felix Torres and shot him. Torres was taken to the hospital and remains in serious condition.
Some of you are reblogging because you think its funny that programmers would talk to ducks. I’m reblogging because I think its funny picturing a programmer explaining their code, realizing what they did when they explain the bad code, then grabbing the strangling the duck while yelling “WHY WAS THE FIX THAT SIMPLE!? AM I GOING BLIND!”
AS A PROGRAMMER I CAN TELL YOU THAT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU FUCKING DO WE HAD TO BAN THE DUCKS FROM MY CLASSES BECAUSE EVERYONE WOULD FLIP THE DUCK OR THROW IT AT A WALL OR SOMETHING WHEN THEY FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM IN THEIR CODE
so that’s the function of a rubber duck
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I work at a startup and part of the onboarding package you get when you first start working here now includes a rubber duck. We also have a bigger version of the duck for the extra hard problems. Sometimes one duck doesn’t cut it and you need to borrow your neighbors to get more ducks on the problem. One time we couldn’t figure out why something wasn’t working right so we assembled the counsel of ducks and by the grace of the Duck Gods were we able to finally come to a solution. These ducks have saved many lives and should be respected for the heroes they are.
@elanorpam wow. Thats REALLY REALLY REALLY good art, but like…Why?
history is fucked up and it sucks because all the people in it who had great viable werewolf names weren’t werewolves. like what the shit. if you knew nothing about history or literature i guess or whatever you’d see names like “virginia woolf” and “oscar wilde” and be like. ah yes. these are definitely some prime secret werewolf poorly masquerading as human intellectual situations? but neither of those people were real live werewolves, factually speaking? they did not take advantage of that opportunity. and i think we are all worse off for it actually
I have a degree in history and I can say with some degree of scholarly confidence that you cannot definitively prove either of these people were not secret werewolves
Once upon a time there was a small desert village with a single well outside town. One day a young woman went to the well to fetch water, and the well heard her crying, and asked “What’s wrong?”
She stopped her sobbing and asked the well “You can talk?”
“Yes,” said the well. “Long ago, the witch who lives in this town gave me life so I could serve as a guardian to the townspeople.”
“Alas,” said the young woman. “I am the daughter of that witch. She lived in peace with the townsfolk for many years. But the new mayor, who is a violent and hateful man, riled the people up against her, and they burned her at the stake. I am young and still do not know very much magic. I tried to curse them, but my curses fizzled. Now I worry I will never avenge my mother’s death.”
“Do not be afraid,” said the well. “I will take care of this.”
The next morning, when the Mayor came to fetch water from the well, he heard an odd noise coming from the bottom. He peered over as far as he could to see what was happening. Then an impossibly long arm shot up from the bottom of the well, grabbed the mayor, and pulled him into the well shaft. There was a horrible crunching sound, and nobody ever saw the Mayor again. The townsfolk apologized to the witch’s daughter, and they all lived happily ever after.
Moral of the story: living well is the best revenge
look i have to bring this back because i want you all to take a moment to imagine being the guy who messed up his line so badly people are still laughing 2000 years in the future at your mistake
When you’re scared of messing up on stage and they tell you:“Don’t worry, what’s the worst that could happen?”
Just remember: even if you can’t slay dragons and shoot fireballs from your hands, you can step over small objects in your path, and that makes you more badass than a lot of video game characters.
I won’t speak for all liberals, but I’d like to see a future where it isn’t a big deal for a woman in full modesty garb to sit next to a drag queen in NYC. It’s become a bit of a sensation, but her and I were just existing. The freedom to simply be yourself in a sea of people who aren’t like you is a freedom we all deserve.
The central irony is that this isn’t some hypothetical future–it’s just present day reality. This is a picture of two ordinary people going about their normal lives despite how haters want to politicize it lmao. So the underlying message is not “future liberals want” it’s “people conservatives want to eradicate”
the underlying message is not “future liberals want” it’s “people conservatives want to eradicate”
You know, if people REALLY believed that people should have to “earn a living” and “not get handouts” from anyone, and “work for what they have”
If they REALLY believed that, they would support a 100% inheritance tax. Don’t get to live off mommy and daddy’s coattails anymore, trust fund brats. Start pulling those bootstraps.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the new film by Martin McDonagh (writer and director of the wonderful dark comedies In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths), is about an angry, foul-mouthed woman named Angie (Frances McDormand, thank goodness) who erects, uh, three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, to bring…
at first i thought it was the same number then I noticed it said GB and damn
As one of the tech review magazines said a few years ago when the first 32 GB micro SD cards came out, “At last it is possible for a single human being to accidentally swallow all of the data collected by the Apollo Program.”
Bruh, if you don’t think that having historically significant events well documented from multiple perspectives is a good thing, then idk what the hell u doin.
Besides, like, that is literally a Giant Monster Rampaging Through The Town. What the fuck is the everyday person gonna do other than Tweet/Instagram/Post about it going “It’s the apocalypse you guys! Eyyyy lmao #apocalypse #deathrising #nofilter”?
And heck, even if your own death is inevitable getting information out could help save other people, even if it can’t save you. ‘Here are 20 livestreams of the giant tentacle monster including how it moves and attacks, how can we beat it?’ is way more useful than ‘an entire city got wiped off the map and things smell vaguely of calimari idk man’
reblogging for this perfection: ‘an entire city got wiped off the map and things smell vaguely of calimari idk man’
Point #1 on this here article talks about Robert Landsburg, a photographer who realized he wouldn’t survive the eruption of Mt St. Helens (too close to outrun the ash cloud) and used his own body to shield & preserve the photos and recordings he’d been taking during the explosion
these surviving photographs are still CRAZY VALUABLE to this day for the rest of the volcanologist community, since actual recordings of an in-process eruption are so dang rare
on-site documentation of any major disaster is gonna be VITALLY IMPORTANT to the people who are tryna figure out how to prevent that shit
tl;dr have your phone out, make your death-by-kaiju worthwhile to the scientific community
when they’re cleaning their feets and spread all their little toes out
when they smelled something weird and make a stinky face
when they walk up to you making little chirpy purrs of inquiry
when they get distracted by a noise mid-lick and a tongue blep occurs
when they see a bird and do that ekekekk thing
when they become possessed by the devil and tear around the house with demonic speed and then pause mid-vicious-attack of a scratching pole to whip their head around and fix you with their all-pupil stare of unhinged terror
I’m suddenly laughing at the idea of a cliche noir detective story written in the brutally concise style of Hemingway.
A woman walked into my office. She had legs. I noticed her legs. “I have a problem. I need your help,” she said. They always said that. I knew her legs weren’t the problem. I hoped she might want my help with them anyhow.
“Can you pay?” I asked. Of course she could. Her shoes were worth more than my rent. She could pay. “I can pay,” she said. Her eyes were wet. I wondered if anything else was wet. Probably not. I am not handsome. Not since the war. She was looking at my scar. Lots of people do. Most look away. Not her. She did not look away. She looked at my scar and I looked at her legs. There were two of them. I liked that about her. I liked that a whole lot. “Will there be danger?” I asked. There always is. This city bleeds danger, then drinks it right back up again.
“I’m afraid there might be danger,” she said. She had the voice of a beautiful woman. She also had the face and body of a beautiful woman. She was beautiful.
The light from the window was striped. It made stripes on my cigarette smoke. The end of my cigarette crumbled into ash. My marriage had also crumbled into ash.
“I can handle danger,” I said. I patted the butt of my gun. My gun was a Colt. My gun and my scar were all that was left from my time as a soldier. My gun, my scar, and the nightmares. I looked her up and down. “I am good at handling things.”
“It’s about my husband. He’s gone missing.”
She was not wearing a ring. It means something when a woman does not wear a wedding ring. Usually, it means that she is not married. “Seems your ring has also gone missing,” I said. I hoped her dress would join it.
Her red mouth curved upwards. She was smiling a little. “I don’t wear it outside. A diamond that large would only invite trouble.”
“In my experience, trouble doesn’t wait for an invitation.” I looked at her legs again. They were both still there. “When did you last see your husband?”
people who complain about dinosaurs “not being scary anymore” because its been discovered they have feathers and are closely related to/ancestors of birds are so bizarre like
its not about how scary they are, they are/were real life animals and what matters is learning more about them, not how well they fit into your science fiction horror film lol
can you imagine a 13 foot chicken running at you with full intent to eat you??? thats fucking terrifying holy shit
peacocks are synonymous with vain, frivolous beauty and they will attack cars. they will attack you while you try to get to your car. they’re like six feet of useless feathers and they will destroy you. imagine if they were carnivorous and had functional spurs.
a t-rex could look like a gay disco ball and i guarantee that you would fucking book it if it had a problem with you
listen
listen
have you ever met a swan
if anything the birdier they get the scarier they are
Australia literally fought a war against giant birds AND FUCKING LOST
“Oh man, I can’t deal with birds ‘cause they’re dinosaurs and sometimes it’s like they get this glint in their eyes and they remember.”
“Have you ever interacted with a goose? ‘Cause those things are dicks.”
If chickens were still the size of a T-Rex we’d all be dead. No question.
Feathered creatures that give some serious lie to the idea that feathered dinosaurs ain’t scary:
This is a bearded vulture, or lammergeier. It’s four feet long and has a nine foot wingspan and it eats bones.
This is a shoebill stork. It dropped the duck without biting down shortly after the picture was taken, but if it had decided not to-
… it could have been the end of the road for that duck.
This is the last thing a fish sees before a macaroni penguin eats it.
This is a secretary bird in the act of demonstrating to Lord Voldemort that he came to the wrong neighborhood, ese.
This is a goose.
This is a vulture.
This is a cassowary on the attack.
Be glad I couldn’t find the actual gif of a pelican swallowing a fish, because it’s freakin’ Lovecraftian in its HEADS SHOULD NOT BEND THAT WAY factor. You’ll have to settle for the idea of a feathered dinosaur suddenly going GLORP and devouring its victims whole just like this lady here.
Steven Spielberg didn’t create these. These are the feet of an emu.
And this is what happens when a swan (this one is named Asboy; his father was Mr. Asbo, the first swan in the UK to get named after an anti-social behavior order in ‘honor’ of his tendency to attack boaters) decides it doesn’t like you. I should probably note that this one attacked a cow.
Respect the feathered dinosaur, yo.
Terrifying. The last two illustrate why you did not fuck around with the Children of Lir.
I suspected that a dinosaur could have been feathered after I heard that a T-Rex is the chickens’ ancestor.
For those who think dinos aren’t cool because they’re feathered…whatever, mutherfuckers. Evolution doesn’t give two shits what you think is cool or not.
You showed a cassowary on the attack, but forgot to show what exactly it’s attacking with. Their feet are nearly identical to the Emu’s, except for one minor, teeny tiny detail: A five-inch claw for killing motherfuckers, raptor-style.
This is like the “fuck birds master post” and I love it because Honestly, Fuck. Birds.
When a man claims that he would be delighted if the roles were reversed in harassment, he is not actually thinking of what it is like to be a woman walking down the street–he is thinking of what it is like to be a man walking down the street, with all the physical security and social privilege that comes with being a man, enjoying the compliments of what must surely be, in this scenario, women he does not find repulsive or threatening. In other words, a man with this response to street harassment is imagining only a formal reversal of roles, holding constant everything about his experience of being a man except for the fact that he is the object of sexual attention.
its kind of disappointing how everyone turns rey into some soft, clean aesthetic queen with glitter and pale pink fabrics when in canon rey is a greasy girl icon
fanon rey: soft, smells like roses, always wearing glitter, no bad angles, pale smooth fabric queen canon rey: doesnt know what a hairbrush or makeup is, steals fries off your plate, will fight you in a parking lot
If I hung out with Rey we would have fart contests
that is the best addition to any post, sw-related or not
please consider that poe thinks hygiene is wiping down with the least greasy rag and rey just kind of scrubs off with some sand when she gets too crusty and finn is used to an absolutely scrupulous twice-daily hygiene regimen with water and sonic and specially formulated deodorants because you don’t want Army Stonk building up in a spaceship, or, god forbid, your armor. so he like, he loves poe and rey to death. he loves them. but he just watched poe try to explain the Sniff Test to rey, unsuccessfully, and he is kind of screaming internally now.
both rey and poe are in awe of how soft and sweet-smelling finn is and he’s like “listen it’s an ancient stormtrooper secret called WASH YOUR SOCKS WITH SOAP.”
