I’m going to hang up this phone, and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
The Matrix (1999)
This repeat reblog brought to you courtesy of Tumblr’s poorly implemented adult-content-review process.
Taxonomy is tricky. Moths and butterflies make up the insect order Lepidoptera. But… just like technically wolves and coyotes are already dogs (canids = dogs-ish I guess?), butterflies are just a type of moth. A very, very small group of insects in a gigantic, humungous, incomprehensibly more diverse order of insects. Allow me to demonstrate.
POP QUIZ! QUICK! FIND THE MOTH!
Got it? Good. Here’s the answer key (NO PEEKING BEFORE SPOTTING IT YOURSELF!).
From Left to right: TOP: Painted Lichen Moth, Moonseed Moth, Beautiful Tiger (moth), Grote’s Buckmoth (endangered) BOTTOM: Eubaphe unicolor (moth), Eight-spotted Forester (moth), Ailanthus Webworm Moth, Chickweed Geometer Moth
Wait… ALL OF THEM ARE MOTHS? Of course they are. There are so few butterflies in the giant sea of moths, it’s amazing you even notice them!
Okay, okay fine. That one was tricky (or was it?). Here’s another.
AGAIN! QUICK! FIND THE MOTH!
Easier this time, right? Let’s see how you did! (NO CHEATING)
From Left to Right: TOP: Checkered Skipper, Soldier Pansy, Funereal Duskywing, Dotted Checkerspot (endangered) BOTTOM: Texas Powdered Skipper, Tawny Emperor, Reakirt’s Blue, Fatal Metalmark
Wait… so which one is the moth? NONE OF THEM THESE ARE BUTTERFLIES. “What do you mean these are butterflies, they are boring?!” Shut up I love them. “But moths are supposed to be the boring ones!” Shut up moths are cooler than a T-rex with a mohawk riding a skateboard.
Left: Eggplant Leafroller Moth, caterpillars live on plants; Right: Jalisco Petrophila Moth, caterpillars are aquatic and grow up in freshwater and the adult female moths will swim into the water to lay her eggs GUYS SHE IS A MOTH!!!!!! Also: they are jumping spider mimics! Look!
#219. I saw the first of what ended up being eight of them that I counted, flitting from log to log on the beach in the flotsam that came down Carpinteria Creek in the storm. It had been all Cassin’s Kingbirds around here since the beginning of the year, and at first I assumed that’s what the bird was, but then it flashed its white outer feathers, and that made me look closer at the throat, and yup; it was gray without the contrast-y malar patch of the Cassin’s.
Trump is ranting about Curiel’s bias not because doing so is part of any kind of rational political strategy, but because he is going to lose the case. And if he loses, it must be somebody else’s fault. He’s not just talking about himself instead of something that actually matters to voters. He’s talking to himself, telling himself a story of how big a winner he is, no matter how often he loses. And he’s doing it in front of the entire country.
In a very basic sense, this is the emotional connection that Trump forged from the beginning of his campaign. Trump sees himself as a winner whose occasional setbacks are the result of other people’s unfairness or incompetence. He has connected with a slice of the voting public that sees America’s problems in similar terms: the fault of corrupt, incompetent, and disloyal elites. But successful political leaders — whether they operate within established norms or, like Trump, gleefully flout them — use that emotional connection for something larger. It’s the ground on which they build loyalty to a political program and organization.
Trump isn’t building anything. Indeed, he hasn’t built anything in a good long time; for decades, he’s been a marketer whose only product is his own mystique. And so it is with his political campaign. The purpose of the emotional connection he has forged is entirely personal: to reaffirm his own greatness, his own winningness. “I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is,” he told supporters on the Monday conference call. The conversation keeps coming back to him because that’s where he wants it to go. Because that’s all his campaign has ever been about.
Just wanted to let you know that we’re putting the finishing touches on replies, and making sure they play nicely with everything else on this platform.
“Why did they go away? Why, staff, whyyyy?” Fair question. We had a gaggle of overlapping message-like systems—namely, asks, fan mail, reblogging with commentary, question posts (rare!), and, yes, replies. When we finally introduced actual instant messaging a couple months ago, we had a lot of untangling to do.
In order to make all these systems work together, we had to do some back-end retooling, which meant taking down replies for a bit. For longer than we expected. Sorry about that.
And we get it—replies fill a very particular need (and you were very clear about expressing that need). They’re a kind of super like. A way to fully express your feelings about a thing without expecting anything in response. A gift.
When they come back, they’ll be even better. People will be able to reply to your posts multiple times, and you’ll even be able to reply to your own posts. Simple changes, yes, but ones that open up lots of possibilities.
Best of all, we’ve laid the down the engineering and design groundwork for even more substantial improvements down the road. Replies will be able to develop side-by-side with messaging.
More to come, soon enough. We know you all miss replies. We hope you enjoy their imminent return.
Do this for every informative/news-related post you want to reblog. The fewer reblogs a false report gets, the less it spreads.
The best thing you can do for a false report is not reblog it at all, OR start your own post to debunk it, with a link to the original. If you reblog to debunk it, your reply will get lost in the huge amount of notes, and you will just end up spreading the misinformation further.
Sometimes a totally unlikely story turns out to be true! It’s even more fun to reblog it when you’ve confirmed that it’s real.
We all slip up sometimes but hey do what you can folks. Only you can prevent Tumblr fires.
It began as a point of light. Then, it evolved into a fuzzy orb. Now – in its latest portrait from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft – Pluto is being revealed as an intriguing new world with distinct surface features, including an immense dark band known as the “whale.”
As the newest black and white image from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) appeared on the morning of July 10, members of the science team reacted with joy and delight, seeing Pluto as never before. There will no doubt be many similar moments to come. New images and data are being gathered each day as New Horizons speeds closer to a July 14 flyby of Pluto, following a journey of three billion miles.
“We’re close enough now that we’re just starting to see Pluto’s geology,” said New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur, NASA Headquarters in Washington, who’s keenly interested in the gray area just above the whale’s “tail” feature. “It’s a unique transition region with a lot of dynamic processes interacting, which makes it of particular scientific interest.”
New Horizons’ latest image of Pluto was taken on July 9, 2015 from 3.3 million miles (5.4 million kilometers) away, with a resolution of 17 miles (27 kilometers) per pixel. At this range, Pluto is beginning to reveal the first signs of discrete geologic features. This image views the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon, and includes the so-called “tail” of the dark whale-shaped feature along its equator. (The immense, bright feature shaped like a heart had rotated from view when this image was captured.)
“Among the structures tentatively identified in this new image are what appear to be polygonal features; a complex band of terrain stretching east-northeast across the planet, approximately 1,000 miles long; and a complex region where bright terrains meet the dark terrains of the whale,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. “After nine and a half years in flight, Pluto is well worth the wait.”
Petition to smash the patriarchy if Theron doesn’t get nominated.
Really curious, actually, what they do with it. A Best Picture nomination seems unlikely, even given the 10 slots, just because Ozploitation genre and industry fuckwittery. But Best Actress is the one I think could happen, and should happen if there’s any justice. As well as director and a bunch of technical awards. But who knows?
