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Oh crap. I’m so sorry.

I’ve been trying to remember. I guess I’m fighting against a long-ingrained habit of reblogging gifs without thinking about it. I think I’m doing a little better at least with my own gifs, but I realize that doesn’t make any difference to someone trying to avoid them.

Thanks for putting up with it while I work on re-habituating myself, and for letting me know when I screw up.

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Is it just me or does she have a serious Elijah Wood thing going on here?

“I will take The Ring to Mordor. Though I do not know the way.”

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allegoryofart:

Water Lilies, Claude Monet, c. 1915

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skunkbear:

Ophiocordyceps sinensis is a fungus that invades the bodies of ghost moth larvae. The caterpillars burrow underground and the fungus grows, eventually killing and consuming most of its host.

The fungus is used in traditional medicine, and a recent demand (mostly from China) has caused the prices to skyrocket. Thanks to its value, O. sinensis has been implicated in the Nepalese Civil War, environmental degradation and several murders.

Learn more here.

Top two photos: Daniel Winkler

Bottom photo: Deng Fei/Corbis

I did not expect to learn about this when I woke up today.

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I love the stories that bookshelves tell. Not the stories of the individual books, but of all of them together.

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lonequixote:

Death and Life ~ Gustav Klimt

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little-king-trashmouth:

Dear staff,

I understand the need for sponsored posts, the beast must be fed somehow. BUT!!! Personally, I find it disgusting, disturbing, and down right insensitive to be scrolling down my dash and see a GIF of slabs of ribs flopping onto a grill, courtesy of tgifridays

I’m sure my other vegetarian, vegan, and non meat eating friends would also appreciate not seeing it, considering most of us have taken special care to make sure the likelyhood of seeing nastyass meat eaters wet dreams on our dash is slim to none.

Is there a way to have people select the sponsored posts they might be interested in seeing? And block the ones they definitely 100% do not ever EVER EEEVVVEERRR want to see? If there isn’t, lets try and make that happen because I am really sick and tired to being bombarded by this shite.

sincerely,

Claire

As with me and the horror movies, Tumblr created their own predicament here by making the site compellingly good at letting users curate exactly the mix of content they wish to see. We users work hard to construct that mix. We value it. We feel protective of it.

Being able to choose whom to follow is Tumblr’s superpower. Sponsored posts, at least as currently implemented, are kryptonite.

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3 days in

Above is a gif showing the official race tracker run forward from just after the Leg 2 start until 1540 UTC today. They all raced east-southeast from Africa to get into the good winds of the westerlies, and now they’re gybing back and forth along the northern edge of those westerlies, trying to get east as quickly as they can.

Assuming they’re all going to come together at some point, the actual lead should be measured by who’s furthest downwind. And that’s… Alvimedica? ADOR? Those northern boats are all super close.

Just from the current angles, though, the south is actually looking kind of good. If that pays off Vestas could be leading by the time they come together. SCA could also gain in that scenario, possibly by enough to pass one or more of the northern boats.

In a few days they’ll have to turn north and cross that belt of light winds, which promises to reshuffle the winners and losers by more than the current separation. So really, it’s anyone’s race at this point. It all depends on the wind, and which teams do the best job of anticipating and responding to it.

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Heh. More cool gybing action from Dongfeng in today’s batch of videos.

It’s interesting to compare this to the Leg 1 gybe I posted yesterday. The wind is lighter, but the ocean is rougher. There’s a big leftover swell coming from behind, along with a wicked cross sea. Welcome to the Southern Ocean. Despite the potentially frustrating circumstances, though, the gybe is impressively smooth and quiet.

Compare it to the gybe starting at about 2:35 in this video from Mapfre. Similar conditions, similar result. But there’s a just a touch less smoothness, a touch more chatter. Mapfre feels like a boat being sailed by a bunch of really talented individuals. Dongfeng feels like a boat being sailed by a team.

The main attraction for me in watching these videos is indulging the Walter Mitty fantasy of actually being on board. The fantasy feels different for each boat, because each crew is different. So I wonder: If I had my choice, who would I sail with?

I can’t sail on SCA because I’m chromosomally disqualified, but if I could I’d probably pick them. So maybe ADOR, because those guys are just amazing. I’m totally envious of Matt Knighton’s ringside seat to the awesomeness.

But honestly: these guys. It’s just seems like such a cool vibe on their boat.

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wannabeanimator:

Robin Williams – In Motion | Every Frame a Painting

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In the intro to “Helter Skelter” on Rattle and Hum, Bono says, “This is a song Charles Manson stole from The Beatles. We’re stealing it back.”

I’m stealing back the phrase “Chinese gybe.” From now on I’m only using it to describe a gybe performed quietly, precisely, and with a certain air of Sino-Gallic élan.

Source

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Gybing Dongfeng – Source

On October 30 Dongfeng’s OBR, Yann Riou, uploaded one of my favorite videos from Leg 1. Mostly it’s about language, the difficulty of communicating on a boat where the only shared language is English and no one speaks it natively.

Toward the end of the video is this 16-second shot of them gybing. I loved it when I first saw it, and when I used the tracker to try to figure out when it took place I loved it even more.

The video was shot on the afternoon of October 27, around 15:20 UTC, when Dongfeng was 350 miles off the coast of Brazil. How can I be sure? Because in the six days between leaving the doldrums and entering the Saint Helena high, Dongfeng only gybed twice: This gybe, from port to starboard, and again two hours later, from starboard back to port.

Which means this quiet ballet, broken only by the call of “gybing” from the helm as the gennaker comes through and a curt “go” from one of the grinders, was necessarily a one-take kind of thing.

I’ve always been a sucker for a nice tracking shot.

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Some great video off SCA. First we see an accidental gybe that interrupted an interview with Libby down below, with shouts from the deck to “Put the vang on! Put the vang on!”

I’m guessing that quickly tensioning the hydraulic boom vang might be helpful in terms of supporting the mast, or in keeping the main free of the old (now leeward) running backstay, or something like that.

In the view from the stern camera you can hear the helmswoman shouting, “I haven’t got it! I haven’t got it!” as the gybe is beginning. Maybe turbulence under the stern lessened the effectiveness of the rudder. The rudders on the Volvo 65 are small, to reduce drag, but that makes control an issue.

I’m surprised they were able to recover so quickly. I credit the helmswoman for that; she must have been able to use whatever steerageway she had from the boat’s forward motion to crank them back onto starboard gybe before the lee helm of being heeled over forced them around to the point of no return.

From the subsequent discussion by Libby it sounds like SCA’s poor performance relative to the other boats over the past day has been due in part to working out what the most effective “modes” are, in the sense of which sail combinations to use and how far off the wind to sail. The wipeout at the start of the video apparently reflected their having decided to switch to the A3 gennaker, the boat’s largest sail, in a bid for speed.

So they’d been sailing slightly conservatively, sacrificing power in return for control, as they rode the bucking bronco of the Agulhas current.

At the end of the video is some intense footage from Stacey Jackson up the mast, apparently making a repair on one of the mainsail batten cars. I’ve mentioned before what a wild ride it is going aloft in a rough sea. I can definitely tell you that the GoPro footage doesn’t do it justice. The boat’s apparent motion down at deck level is minimized by the wide-angle lens, and there’s no real frame of reference; she’s gripping onto the halyard and shrouds for dear life, and since she’s doing it successfully it all looks quite ho-hum.

It’s not. That mast is whipping back and forth violently. Stacey’s clinging to the end of a 100-foot stick while an angry giant tries to shake her off. You can hear the stress in her voice, along with the nausea.

Later, in today’s “Inside Track” episode, Genny Tulloch interviewed her. Stacey said:

I actually felt really bad. I cut Corinna off just after I got down. I was about to have a moment, and I didn’t really need it recorded. It wasn’t an enjoyable trip yesterday, it was quite bumpy, but it was the last chance to do it before it got worse.

It’s hard to describe it to compare it to something on shore. It’d be a little bit like a roller coaster ride where you just hang on with your hands rather than sitting in a seat. You sort of pirouette around the mast at times. There’s nothing to hold you to the mast. I used some short straps on my own harness, but otherwise you adopt the koala bear technique quite a bit when you need to work with your hands. So you wrap your legs around the mast where you can.

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