Prone to melancholy

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
narwhalsarefalling
thecuckoohaslanded

I can’t stop thinking about crocodiles for some reason so here’s some cool pictures I found of probably the second largest one in captivity, his name is Utan:

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isn’t he beautiful

listen to the SOUND when he bites

and that’s not even a real power bite, that’s mostly just heavy bone falling on heavy bone from his jaws and the air rushing out from between them

specsthespectraldragon

2000 pounds of Good Boy

thecuckoohaslanded

you get me

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thecuckoohaslanded

I honestly expected like 5 notes, what HAPPENED here

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thecuckoohaslanded

More tags on this ridiculous post:

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cn123017

Wait, thats the 2nd biggest crocodile? Then what does the biggest one look like?

thecuckoohaslanded

That would be Cassius, a very old Saltwater crocodile who is estimated to be around 114 years old and lives at Marineland Melanesia in Green Island, Australia.  His official measurement is 5.48 meters, which makes him the largest in captivity currently.  Because Utan is only slightly smaller and much younger, (only in his 50s), he will likely break Cassius’ record eventually.  But for now, Cassius holds the title:

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He is NOT, however, either the largest crocodile ever captured in Australia OR the largest ever in captivity.

A slightly larger crocodile has been reported (though not yet comfirmed) to have been captured at 5.58 meters.

And while the famous Brutus of the Adelaide River was estimated to be just slightly larger than Cassius at 5.5m, he was driven out of his territory by a younger and even larger crocodile, who as a result has been given the name, The Dominator.  He is estimated to be just over 6m.

This is Brutus, with an appropriate caption:

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It is believed that he lost that arm in a fight with a Bull Shark.  

The Bull Shark lost.

THIS is the crocodile who kicked him out.  The Dominator:

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And that’s STILL not the biggest.  

The largest living crocodile ever reliably measured was Lolong, who for the 1.5 years between his capture and his death was the largest crocodile ever held in captivity, at a whopping 6.17 meters (20 feet 3 inches) and 1075 kg (2,370 lbs).  He had been feeding on both humans and very large livestock in the Bunawan creek in Agusan del Sur in the Philippines.  It took 100 people all night to drag him to shore during his capture.

And here’s why:

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Also, to prevent credit from getting buried on a separate reblog, I have been informed that the above image of the crocodile with the cartoon eyes and halo was made by @rashkah!  (And it is wonderful and I would like to thank him for its existence, because it perfectly captures my feelings about terrifying giant primordial reptiles.)

the-haiku-bot
keplerbyte

Rio is out walking or something and sees Miles and Hobie hanging out and she is shocked bc who is this punk? She watches them for a bit and sees the way they’re acting and is like “omg my son is gay” Later she comes up to him and does the whole “Miles you know you can tell me anything.. right” and he gets freaked out bc he thinks she knows he's spiderman

"I'm sorry Mom I was going to tell you from the start but I just-"

"Miles it's fine, you don't have to apologize-"

"No, I should've told you I was just so scared..."

"Scared? Honey, I would never treat you differently because of this... just, yknow, introduce him and-"

"What? Introduce who?"

"? Your boyfriend?"

"My- I'm sorry WHAT are we talking about right now-"

the-haiku-bot

“I’m sorry Mom I

was going to tell you from

the start but I just-”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

blatantescapism
bodhrancomedy

I’m writing a modernised version of an Indiana Jones style adventure film: which aspect of it is the most fun concept for you?

Platonic male-female team

Our heroes help rob the British Museum

Diverse casting (queer, poc, disabled, Jewish, socialist MCs)

Queer rivals to lovers

Punching Nazis

Sensitive man-whore and practical action heroine teamwork

Brother-promoted-to-parent-because-father-abducted

Turning down offers to “fix disability” (deaf nonverbal autistic)

Dudes in distress, never damsels

Actual discussions on who owns artefacts/colonialism/fascism

They’re all in there, I just would like to know what’s the most fun idea.

numberlover1729

8, and the disability was/becomes crucial to the mission

everythingcanadian

I love all of these. But c'mon. The Brit Museum has gone on for too long.

bodhrancomedy

I will clarify that the robbery of the British museum is only planned by one character - the other two leads just pitch in when it goes wrong and they realise that the target is also wanted by their hated enemy and he’s just going to be handed it. Their work keeping artefacts out of the British Museum is typically preventative.

But, yes, disability is CRUCIAL to several plot points, from a special interest coming in handy to track someone down and giving an advantage in the final fight.

reanimatedgh0ul
sporesgalaxy

just for the record, I dont think a character-driven dramatization is inherently a bad way to represent the nuclear arms race. The issue is that Oppenheimer is inevitably going to be sympathetic to the U.S. Military and sympathetic to complacency with the U.S. government's actions. If it were a tragedy about how easy it is to justify atrocity to oneself even as a highly educated person, if it sought to encourage audiences to reflect philosophically on themselves and their government, that would be cool as fuck I think. But it was never going to be that lol

blatantescapism
burndownmiddletown: “ mr-hoodrat: “ roe-your-boat: “ disparition: “ afloydianslip: “ fencehopping: “ Electron microscope video of a needle on a vinyl record. ” H O W like you can tell me all you want how the sound is stored in the grooves but fucking...
fencehopping

Electron microscope video of a needle on a vinyl record.

afloydianslip

H O W 

like you can tell me all you want how the sound is stored in the grooves but fucking H O W 

HOW DOES THAT GET INTO THE NEEDLE

HOW ARE THE VIBRATIONS TURNED INTO MUSIC THAT YOU CAN HEAR???

H O W

disparition

The vibrations aren’t “turned into” music, they are music. When vibrations occur inside your inner ear, your brain processes this as sound.

The grooves in a record are an analogy for these vibrations, a method of remembering them so that they can be recreated later on. 

Put your hand on a speaker while loud music is playing and you’ll feel the vibrations. Those are exactly the same vibrations happening inside your ear when you hear the music. 

But how do you capture that? 

Take a surface that vibrates strongly when a sound is played, like the skin of a drumhead for example. Connect that surface to a little tool - when sound causes the surface to vibrate, the tool digs a little bit into some wax, leaving behind a pattern that matches - in proportion - the vibrations of the surface caused by the sound. This is your analogy (hence: analog music). 

Now, when there’s no sound playing, you run that little tool back over the pattern. This causes the skin to vibrate again, this time in response to the tool running over the pattern instead of because of an external sound. The vibrations should match, proportionally, the original vibrations of the music.. and thus these new vibrations, if you were to amplify them, would be a recreation or “recording” of the original music. 

That’s oversimplified of course and things have changed a lot since the days of wax, but that is very basically how the process of recording music worked at first, and the general idea of how sound gets from a groove in a record into your brain. 

roe-your-boat

(reblogging for Disparition commentary) 

mr-hoodrat

Thank you Science side of tumblr

burndownmiddletown

I hugely appreciate people taking to the time explain stuff like this, as it helps put an end to the “wow, science is magic!” trope that’s become far too common.

blatantescapism
lizzibennet

opens news article. closes three pop up ads. backs out of the survey page i was redirected to. closes a pop up video ad. rejects cookies to make the cookie window go away. dismisses the requests to receive notifications from the website and the offers to sign up for it. dodges ninja lasers and poisonous arrow traps. body of the page is finally visible. i have reached my monthly limit and can’t read the article

blatantescapism
huffy-the-bicycle-slayer

Growing up, did anyone else think that the phrase "heard it through the grapevine" was refering to a litteral grape vine?

I always imaged two people picking grapes and talking shit about a third person that was blocked from view by grapevines

jv

I always thought it was about hearing it through a grapevine roof. Like, either you're in the first floor of a house and people are spilling the tea under the grapevine or viceversa m

jv

Wait, maybe those are not common knowledge everywhere?


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thebibliosphere

This is far more visually appealing than the actual origins of the phrase, which because of this post, I just looked up, and apparently, the phrase originated with the telegraph, and people thought the wires looked like the strings used to train vines. Hence, they heard it through the "grapevine."

The more you know.

duisarcus
thatlittleegyptologist

Anyone talking about 'curses' and 'letting curses out if you open things' on the Pyramid post, but also y'know Ancient Egypt in general?

Thanks for perpetuating Orientalist othering!
That's pretty racist of you!

✨Go Fuck Yourself✨

ktempestbradford

The only time I felt that was an appropriate joke was when they were gonna open the black sarcophagus they found flooded with sewer water. There's no way THAT wasn't cursed and should never be opened.

Otherwise, she's right.

thatlittleegyptologist

It wasn't an appropriate joke then, either, tbh. That was genuinely one of the worst times to be an Egyptologist, because everyone was caught up in 'oooooh spoooooooky cuuuuuurse of the sarcophagus' that they didn't listen to any explanation of why what they were seeing was nothing out of the ordinary.

  • Many sarcophagi in Egypt are made from black granite. This is a normal building material for statuary, stele, and sarcophagi for most of Egyptian history. There's nothing strange or unusual about it. In fact, fellow Egyptologists and I made posts back in 2018 (this one from Rudjedet) about how granite sarcophagi are nothing unusual or scary. People just saw the word 'black' and associated it with bad things, and they probably need to consider why it is they do that.
  • That being said, it is clearly a reused sarcophagus. The burial is Ptolemaic, but the coffin is Late Period. Judging by its size I'd wager a guess that it might have been for an Apis Bull at one point. Or at least a large animal burial. Sarcophagi like this would have been extremely expensive, so the reuse of one isn't at all surprising.
  • To no one's surprise, it was filled with sewer water because it was found near to a leaking sewer
  • Inside were two men (one in his 30s and one in his 40s) and one woman (in her 20s), and they appear to have been purposefully buried there as there are some small gold items that represent rebirth. I can't remember if we found out if they were all related, but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a family burial. One of the males was initially thought to have suffered an arrow to the head, and thus they were thought to be soldiers, but it turns out it was a trepanning hole that had healed long before their death.
  • It was discovered in an area of Alexandria where Ptolemaic royal buildings would have once been, and probably still are they're just under the modern city. So we tend to find these things piecemeal, and lacking context.

If this sarcophagus had been found anywhere else, people would have laughed about poop skeletons and never mentioned curses. I think people need to ask themselves just why that is.

deafmangoes

How much of it do you take as Orientalism versus generic "it's bad to disturb the dead/places of the dead" that we find in most cultures?

I understand there's the whole association with "curses" and Egypt because of our erstwhile 1920s/1930s graverobbers and journalists, but wondering where that intersects with discussion about, say, finding a "spooky" Roman or Celtic burial in the UK.

(Interesting to learn that stuff about the sarcophagus! Thanks for sharing it!)

thatlittleegyptologist

Most of it. There's a specific 'flavour' of this behaviour that comes alongside dealing with finding anything in Ancient Egypt. It's never just with tombs when it comes to Egypt. It's with every single artefact we dig up from pots and cookery stuff, to papyri and statues, has multiple comments or articles about how it should be put back because it's cursed. Meanwhile, a giant mosaic is uncovered in Rutland and no one bats an eye. Uncover Roman burials in York and everyone says 'oh wow I wonder what these people were like?' Discover two skeletons entwined in a burial in Rome and everyone romanticises them as lovers. There's an effort to show what these things actually are, and how they functioned, which you don't get with discoveries from Egypt.

There is also significantly less push back and pantomime for the discovery Roman and Celtic burials in the UK than there is for literally anything coming out of Egypt. The Roman little girl who was found when archaeologists surveyed a building site of what would eventually be the Gherkin in London? I've posted about that, and the responses I got were all about how sad they were that she was found all alone. If you google her, you get lots of sites telling you about her and what happened to her after she was discovered. Contrast that with the two bits of information I've posted about discoveries in Egypt in the last week. The new intact Book of the Dead? More than half the comments/tags were 'put it back it's cursed'. The new tunnel discovered in the Pyramid? Many tags are 'don't go in there it's cursed' or 'don't unleash the curse on this world' Even going back to the sarcophagus mentioned above; if you google that then your results are overwhelmingly 'look at this spooky black coffin' or 'mysterious coffin that might curse us all has been found'

The occasional 'spooky celtic burial' comment is absolutely nothing compared to the overwhelming amount of bullshit I have dealt with regarding any archaeological find from Ancient Egypt.

lizzibennet
lizzibennet

one thing about me is that i love a theme. you give me a dress code and i will basically orgasm on the spot. i love being given themes and i’m really like ??? when people are surprised i follow them to a t lmao. like what did u expect. it’s a theme!!!

lizzibennet

friends invited me to a 2000s night at some bar? showed up in basically full jenna rink cosplay in That Dress, you know the one. oh the party has a recurring theme of purple? purple crop top i made out of the official merch, purple cut crease, purple braids in my hair, purple glitter all over my body. festa junina at school (basically a cowboy themed party)? i show up in my cutest durango western boots. another festa junina? i make a veil and spend an hour gluing ribbons to my hair so i can show up as a bride (this is accepted within the context of a festa junina. don’t ask why idk either) and fake marry my girlfriend in the party. what am i supposed to do? NOT slay? don’t think so