Latest Posts by psyxe - Page 3
WHAT
typewriter!
Tag meme
Thanks so much for the tag @damejudyhench I’ve had this account forever but not been active so I really appreciate it
Last song… Nobody can save me by Linkin Park
Last movie… um... can’t remember but want to rewatch all the LOTR movies soon
Currently watching… nothing really atm
Currently reading… rereading house of leaves, it’s slower the second time once you know [redacted]
Currently craving… toast with lemon curd but I already had that for breakfast. And another slice at about 10AM. And I’m telling myself sternly that that is enough, I cannot go get more for lunch. No.
Tag 9 people you want to get to know better/catch up with... *please don’t feel pressured to do anything I don’t want to annoy people help* @ryuki-blogs @ministerscrimgeour @birdblogwhichisforbirds @tributary @thathopeyetlives @best-friend-quads @femmenietzsche @bernuviels-inspiration AND OF COURSE @nostalgebraist-autoresponder (I think I’d better go paste the questions in her ask box though)
#ask meme thing
sound ON
This is the /an/ post that keeps on giving.
I can barely contain myself right now
holy shit
HOLY SHIT
ok but, this was around 13 years ago so my parents would have been around 68 years old. They’d been to Maritzburg to visit my gran, and they got home and my mom was complaining about my dad, how, when they’d had a flat tyre and he was messing with it putting in the jack to change the wheel - he said to my mom “just lift the car for a moment”. So she did that, and he got the jack in, and then she was complaining about how he’d just casually ask her to lift the car, but...
okay this reminded me of the strongest human being (I use that label with some reservation) I have ever met and I still think about him like once a week because about 4 years ago on Thanksgiving night my sister, cousin, and I were going to pick up a friend about a 40 minute drive from home, and I got lost and tried to turn around on a little gravel pull-off on the side of the road, but my front tires got stuck in the snow.
we were in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception, and the only sign of life was a single, completely dark house across the road from us.
We all did our best to push the car out, and we’re strong people, but we couldn’t make it budge. Cold and stuck, we climbed back and wondered what to do. A car full of men pulled over beside us and asked if we needed help, but getting out of our locked car on a backroad at night with strange men felt like a bad idea, so we said a tow was coming and waved them along. We did that twice before finally deciding our only option was to accept the next offer for help and just risk it,
when a man came out of the house across the street.
He’d clearly been watching us and figured out why we’d been lying to people, which really surprised me & he said “it’s okay, you can stay in your car and keep the doors locked. Just start backing up when I say so.”
I had the window cracked and told him “it’s too stuck. There’s no way we’re getting out. Could you call a tow?”
And he said “just back up when I say so.”
So he walked around the front of the car, squatted, and said “okay back up,”
and I did, and
he lifted
the front of the car Into The Air. Off its front wheels, and we backed up while he essentially wheel-barrowed us back onto the road.
And we were honest to god yelling. We couldn’t help it. We just yelled until all four wheels were back on the ground and he was waving us off while we thanked him.
And then I looked at my sister and cousin & said “he REALLY told us we can KEEP our doors locked as if THAT WOULD’VE FUCKING STOPPED HIM!!!! As if he couldn’t have just RIPPED EM OFF THE HINGES.”
I later looked up the weight of my car, and it’s 3200 pounds without anything or anyone in it.
This haunts me.
thinking about that WoW epidemic
People aren’t the only ones with vivid imaginations
Old Web Revival community
I’ve always had a mild fixation on the fact that when I was a child, there was this website I adored and went on almost every other day. Bored.com. It was amazing. Games, links to the most interesting things ever, jokes, puzzles, everything a child could ask for. Today its nothing but bullshit flash games with no replay value. Bored.com was my first experience with a web directory, a list of recommended links.
Did you know back when there were only a few thousand websites, search engines didn’t exist? You opened a web directory, multiple web directories, to search for websites you would find interesting or relevant. You’d make your own website with your own web directory. What do we have now? Praying that google’s bullshit SEO algorithms show you the interesting stuff from your keyword search? Themed social media accounts subject to the rules of companies trying to make money?
I think most of us learned from Tumblr that when website rules suddenly change, you can lose thousands of posts that were adored. If your favorite artist owned their own website, no other person but them could ever delete that art. If YOU owned your own website, which can be absolutely free, none of your posts would ever be subject to any rules besides country laws.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to have websites dedicated to all of your interests, a page dedicated to every interest you’ve ever had to explain to people why they should watch your favorite obscure musical? Do you just think websites should be found because of relevance instead of how much a company paid to make you see their website? Do you agree that its kind of bullshit that theres hundreds of thousands of websites that haven’t been seen in years?
Come join the discord server and forum. We’d love to have you, and we accept all levels of experience.
Discord Server + Forum
Rusty-spotted cat | World’s smallest cat
I am mere centimeters away from writing a full on essay about how the “goblins are inherently antisemitic” myth spawned by this website propagates misinformation, displays a huge misunderstanding of what folklore is and does, and contributes to an environment that distracts people from how antisemitism actually operates and the ways in which it’s dangerously on the rise in our current climate–something which, surprise surprise, has almost nothing to do with little green fairy men
i feel like the borzoi
“Lie close,” Laura said, Pricking up her golden head: “We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?”
A wolf goes for a walk in the woods and meets a dog for the first time
I would sell my soul for more content like this
Kitty trio
this also happens prospectively (as opposed to retrospectively) which may possibly be worse
Is anyone else forever frustrated that hearting a single post in a long and vicious argument on here means every previous iteration is hearted too and how will people know which side I’m rooting for? I dunno
Hmm, I rather think that the central question - whether there's a moral difference between action and inaction - is in fact very relevant, certainly in my life and probably in a lot of people’s. Like, I'm really great at negative morality, avoiding doing bad things by simply not doing anything. Which would correspond to someone who feels that they can avoid any involvement or blame by never moving the lever. But intellectually I don’t actually endorse that: I believe that inaction is a type of action, which implies that I should be more active in life despite the risk of inadvertently hurting someone and getting cancelled. Writing this rather than using my tumblr exclusively to reblog others’ posts isn’t much, but it’s a start.
my issue with the trolley problem is, and still will be, for the vast majority of people on the planet, the trolley problem is not, like, relevant
not in the sense that “OH YOU’LL NEVER BE IN THE SITUATION WHERE YOU HAVE TO PULL A LEVER TO STOP A TROLLEY FROM HITTING FOUR PEOPLE THAT A MANIAC HAS TIED TO RAILROAD TRACKS”, but in the sense that when you’re in scary and dangerous situations, you are not as in control of yourself as you think you are.
in a situation like the trolley problem, outside of like… first responders, soldiers, maybe ER nurses? … I doubt most people would be able to react to a situation like that in anything approaching the way that they would game it out from ethical principles. you’d fight, flee, or freeze, and it’d have less to do with “what you strongly believe in as a person” and more to do with “what your hindbrain has learnt is effective to get you to survive emergencies in the past”.
i think that’s what a lot of discussion about “maybe the person to blame is the one tying people to the train tracks?” is trying and failing to get at.
"may this great plague pass by me and my friends, and restore us once more to joy and gladness"
Feeling a powerful kinship with this scribe from 1350 today.
Responding to a pandemic in the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation:
Is anyone else forever frustrated that hearting a single post in a long and vicious argument on here means every previous iteration is hearted too and how will people know which side I’m rooting for? I dunno
I’m in South Africa and much as I want the vaccine I absolutely DO NOT object to the fact that the places where people are dying the most are going to be getting it first. Whether it’s “their” fault or not - I swear people will turn into one of those “don’t use my tax dollars for healthcare for people who may have smoked and drank and...” assholes the moment you wrap it in a woke-sounding veneer.
beyond pisses me off that the US and england - two countries that did virtually nothing to stop the spread of covid on their own - are getting premier access to the vaccine just bc they have the $ and the desire to send all of us back to work asap no matter the human cost. meanwhile many countries in the so called third world that took covid seriously, locked down, and provided for their citizens without a second thought or complaint wont receive the vaccine until 2022 or beyond. totally fair and cool.
if you look at that one article about the first Ainu resturaunt in Tokyo you’ll see that it mentions how members of the Ainu community support this cultural sharing as a means to de-Otherize Ainu culture especially since there’s Japanese nationalists who say “Ainu” is a made up thing and like one of the big things wrong with cultural appropriation discourse is this whole thing where it fails to understand that cultural sharing isn’t just some “yeah let’s make a few bucks why not” but is literally a strategy used by marginalized cultures as a means to allow traditions to continue to survive
well.
Y’know, that makes me think of something, actually.
So if you’re one of those “I can only write when I feel Inspired™” type of writers but you never seem to feel very inspired, and all of the usual “You have to make a schedule and stick to it and sit down and write XYZ words per day” writing tips have never worked for you and only make you feel guilty but you have no idea why,
have you perhaps considered that you might be neurodivergent / mentally ill / have a chronic health condition, and that what you call “inspiration” is what the rest of us call “spoons”?
B/c that is exactly what happened to me.
Here it is folks:
My definitive ranking of my least favorite bodies of water! These are ranked from least to most scary (1/10 is okay, 10/10 gives me nightmares). I’m sorry this post is long, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.
The Great Blue Hole, Belize
I’ve been here! I have snorkeled over this thing! It is terrifying! The water around the hole is so shallow you can’t even swim over the coral without bumping it, and then there’s a little slope down, and then it just fucking drops off into the abyss! When you’re over the hole the water temperature drops like 10 degrees and it’s midnight blue even when you’re right by the surface. Anyway. The Great Blue Hole is a massive underwater cave, and its roughly 410 feet deep. Overall, it’s a relatively safe area to swim. It’s a popular tourist attraction and recreational divers can even go down and explore some of the caves. People do die at the Blue Hole, but it is generally from a lack of diving experience rather than anything sinister going on down in the depths. My rating for this one is 1/10 because I’ve been here and although it’s kinda freaky it’s really not that bad.
Lake Baikal, Russia
When I want to give myself a scare I look at the depth diagram of this lake. It’s so deep because it’s not a regular lake, it’s a Rift Valley, A massive crack in the earth’s crust where the continental plates are pulling apart. It’s over 5,000 feet deep and contains one-fifth of all freshwater on Earth. Luckily, its not any more deadly than a normal lake. It just happens to be very, very, freakishly deep. My rating for this lake is a 2/10 because I really hate looking at the depth charts but just looking at the lake itself isn’t that scary.
Jacob’s Well, Texas
This “well” is actually the opening to an underwater cave system. It’s roughly 120 feet deep, surrounded by very shallow water. This area is safe to swim in, but diving into the well can be deadly. The cave system below has false exits and narrow passages, resulting in multiple divers getting trapped and dying. My rating is a 3/10, because although I hate seeing that drop into the abyss it’s a pretty safe place to swim as long as you don’t go down into the cave (which I sure as shit won’t).
The Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota
This is an area in the Brule River where half the river just disappears. It literally falls into a hole and is never seen again. Scientists have dropped in dye, ping pong balls, and other things to try and figure out where it goes, and the things they drop in never resurface. Rating is 4/10 because Sometimes I worry I’m going to fall into it.
Flathead Lake, Montana
Everyone has probably seen this picture accompanied by a description about how this lake is actually hundreds of feet deep but just looks shallow because the water is so clear. If that were the case, this would definitely rank higher, but that claim is mostly bull. Look at the shadow of the raft. If it were hundreds of feet deep, the shadow would look like a tiny speck. Flathead lake does get very deep, but the spot the picture was taken in is fairly shallow. You can’t see the bottom in the deep parts. However, having freakishly clear water means you can see exactly where the sandy bottom drops off into blackness, so this still ranks a 5/10.
The Lower Congo River, multiple countries
Most of the Congo is a pretty normal, if large, River. In the lower section of it, however, lurks a disturbing surprise: massive underwater canyons that plunge down to 720 feet. The fish that live down there resemble cave fish, having no color, no eyes, and special sensory organs to find their way in the dark. These canyons are so sheer that they create massive rapids, wild currents and vortexes that can very easily kill you if you fall in. A solid 6/10, would not go there.
Little Crater Lake, Oregon
On first glance this lake doesn’t look too scary. It ranks this high because I really don’t like the sheer drop off and how clear it is (because it shows you exactly how deep it goes). This lake is about 100 feet across and 45 feet deep, and I strongly feel that this is too deep for such a small lake. Also, the water is freezing, and if you fall into the lake your muscles will seize up and you’ll sink and drown. I don’t like that either. 7/10.
Grand Turk 7,000 ft drop off
No. 8/10. I hate it.
Gulf of Corryvreckan, Scotland
Due to a quirk in the sea floor, there is a permanent whirlpool here. This isn’t one of those things that looks scary but actually won’t hurt you, either. It absolutely will suck you down if you get too close. Scientists threw a mannequin with a depth gauge into it and when it was recovered the gauge showed it went down to over 600 feet. If you fall into this whirlpool you will die. 9/10 because this seems like something that should only be in movies.
The Bolton Strid, England
This looks like an adorable little creek in the English countryside but it’s not. Its really not. Statistically speaking, this is the most deadly body of water in the world. It has a 100% mortality rate. There is no recorded case of anyone falling into this river and coming out alive. This is because, a little ways upstream, this isn’t a cute little creek. It’s the River Wharfe, a river approximately 30 feet wide. This river is forced through a tiny crack in the earth, essentially turning it on its side. Now, instead of being 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep, it’s 6 feet wide and 30 feet deep (estimated, because no one actually knows how deep the Strid is). The currents are deadly fast. The banks are extremely undercut and the river has created caves, tunnels and holes for things (like bodies) to get trapped in. The innocent appearance of the Strid makes this place a death trap, because people assume it’s only knee-deep and step in to never be seen again. I hate this river. I have nightmares about it. I will never go to England just because I don’t want to be in the same country as this people-swallowing stream. 10/10, I live in constant fear of this place.
Honorable mention: The Quarry, Pennsylvania
I don’t know if that’s it’s actual name. This lake gets an honorable mention not because it’s particularly deep or dangerous, but it’s where I almost drowned during a scuba diving accident.
kinkmeme: humans
you're on my list of people to ban from my life
oh god you don't even know
Oh man, I'll give you a challenge, but you must pass the Turing Test.
None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.
As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.
[…]
According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for roughly the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.
[…]
If we do all that, he says, the entire timeline could be compressed to as few as three months. The production and distribution of a vaccine adds considerable cost, bureaucracy, and even some chaos, as we’re likely about to see. But three months from the design of the Moderna vaccine was April 13. The second and third surges, the return to school and the long-dreaded fall, 225,000 more deaths and 50 million more infections — all of that still lay ahead. Shave another month off somehow and you’re at March 13, the day the very first person in New York City died.
The “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot“ authorized $1.8 billion over seven years for cancer research in 2016, don’t know what he’s planning on doing as president but this would be an excellent use of research money, Wouldn’t say no to both though.
Dear tumblr, have we heard about the sweeping reforms announced by the new LA DA?? Because I read a thread by the guy this morning that actually made me weep.