everyones out here posting about the death of tumblr and doomsday prepping like madmen just because it got taken off the app store yall know theres a website right
Look I may have not used the app in literally like seven years but that doesn’t mean I trust this website to keep functioning
tumblr has literally never worked even once and i promise its gonna keep on doin so until the sun burns out and thats dependability babey!!
using tumblr is like have a 20 year old junker car. Sure, it’s terrible, and never works right, but goddamn it’s yours! Just because it’s always a little slow, and it doesn’t always let you see where you need to go, and it’s hella uncomfortable to be in sometimes, and none of the features work, and it shifts between ‘Oh Shit!’ and ‘Ah Perfect’ at the drop of a hat…. Well, none of that means you don’t love it.
After all, it’s stuck with you for so long it’s hard to imagine using anything else, isn’t it? And for some of us, it was our first way to get into the world, our first big taste of freedom, and, well… even if it isn’t perfect, who doesn’t love that?
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms – they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”
I just died
I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”
Oh please please someone write this
the best thing about this post is that the way it’s written – by multiple human authors getting over-excited about ridiculous, wonderful, impossible ideas that ought by rights to be terrifying – is itself proof that we’re like this
“One of the serious problems with planning against Federation (especially human) doctrine is that Starfleet officers do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligations to follow their doctrine.”
“Captain,” the visiting emissary from the Vulcan contingent asked, “where is the operations guide for this vessel?”
“In Engineering.”
“So that it is accessible to repair personnel?”
“No, it’s keeping one of the bent warp core support struts from rattling.”
There is not a single word in all of this that is not terrifyingly plausible.
Also, I too lost it at “there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”
You know, there’s a lot I knew intellectually about the 1930s that I have a whole different take on now I’m reading up on it out of school. I knew about the Fireside Chats and I knew that they were an incredibly effective communication tool for Roosevelt – they were basically mass-marketing his presidency – but I didn’t think about how fucking bananas the first national ones were.
Like, we’re in the depths of the Depression, the ecology of the MIDDLE OF THE COUNTRY is falling apart, and in March 1933 there’s a run on like…every bank everywhere, and Roosevelt shuts down All The Banks for over a week. (He calls this a Banking Holiday which is just….such a stroke of genius and at the same time such a hilarious misnomer, I can’t even.)
And then he goes on the radio in mid-March. And you don’t know what the shit is going on, all you know is the President’s supposed to be on the radio, maybe you don’t even know that, you’re just hanging out listening to the radio and BAM. THE PRESIDENT. What the fuck. Is he going to close the entire country? Is this the end of life as we know it?
But no. What he does is, essentially, deliver a TEDtalk on the economy.
He talks for less than 15 minutes, explaining in simple words without any rhetoric what happened to the banks, what his plan is, and what you can expect as banks begin to reopen. He talks about how baseless fear over the incompetence of a small minority of bankers drove the problem, and how it’s your job not to give in to mass hysteria but to be smart and leave your money in the bank. He sounds confident and friendly and at the end of it you’re like, okay. I get it now.
People are so mad at this post for calling militant veganism “a vestige of colonialism” but it’s totally correct
Settler colonialism is literally the idea that you can come into a place and totally destroy all the indigenous knowledges about the land and how to live there, and replace it with your lofty intellectual ideal of What Everyone Everywhere Should Eat.
The point of the post is that what kind of food local farmers produce should be informed by the land they live on and what makes sense to grow there. Farmers should make decisions based on what is environmentally sustainable and ecologically sound.
So if you’re farming land that is naturally suited to producing rich, lush vegetation, by all means! Grow plants! Grow fruits and vegetables!
But if you’re somewhere that is hilly, arid, with scant, rocky, or saline soil, it makes more sense to farm livestock. In those places, producing meat is the ecologically sound choice.
Oddly enough, a farmer’s choice of what to grow, much like a person’s choice of what to eat, is incredibly complex and idiosyncratic and informed by so many variables that NO one-size-fits-all solution could possibly work!
But militant vegans take agricultural analyses that work in California and nowhere else, and ignore the role of water and irrigation to boot, and then claim they know what EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD should eat.
It doesn’t even really work in California. Even our coast is arid and our main farming area is an honest to G-d dessert. Livestock is more water efficient by an order of magnitude when you let animals graze for their food.
California is a prime example of a local ecosystem that should not be able to support veganism but it does thanks to global trade networks (read: imperialism).
It was kind of a dick move to create animals that require air, then confine them to the freaking ocean
If you are talking about dolphins they used to be wolf like creatures that due to scarcity of food they had to hunt in water so they slowly evolved into water mammals, dolphins still have claw bones but they are unnecessary and dolphins will get rid of them with time and will develop abilities to breath under water
(This also partially applies to whales)
They were what now?
Mother Nature, come out here I just want to talk
Whales are actually Ungulates, more so hippos, entelodons, etc…
Meaning they were somewhat related to big celebrities such as Daedon (the “hell pig”) and Andrewsarchus.
The appearence of the first ancestors of whales probably looked like a small hoofed thing called Indohyus.
(Illustration by julio lacerda)
(illustration by Tiffany Turill)
Basically they went from tiny hoofed herbivore to bigger hoofed carnivore to crocodile-like thing to seal-like things to big sea predators.
It’s important to mention that we now know dolphins will probably never need to develop true water breathing, because the fact that they breathe air from the surface is actually an ADVANTAGE for them. They get more oxygen at once than an animal with gills and it permits a much higher, more energized activity level for longer periods of time.
They are murderous monsters empowered by their access to the forbidden air
2) We don’t want to pause our music to talk to you.
3) We don’t even talk to each other on the phone — why would we want to talk to you?
But the biggest reason is A TRAIL. If I e-mail you back, you can see what was said in the future. You can’t tell me I forgot to tell you something because it’s right there. You can’t tell me I “never reached out” because we can both SEE it. I don’t have to trust your recollection.
And, in a group inbox, you can see who has been responded to. I got forwarded a voicemail from my supervisor (through e-mail! imagine that!) asking me to call some lady back for clarification. So I did, against my will of course…and she said somebody had called her yesterday.
Who? When? What did y’all talk about? Is follow-up necessary?
Phone calls back and forth only work in a workflow where the standard procedure is to *log* phone calls in a shared system with a brief summary of what was discussed. Otherwise, y’all need to let us e-mail. It’s not just about a generation gap. It’s also about efficiency.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Any feedback can be proffered via e-mail.
EDIT
Also: let’s keep it real – we multi-task better than you do. If I’m on the phone with you, I’m FORCED to do that ONE thing and put whatever you want above all the other things I could’ve been doing. If you e-mail me, I can research what you want (while doing other things), find the solution (while doing other things), and offer it to you in a nice concise package (while doing other things) without sitting on the phone with you in awkward silence looking for the answer to whatever you think is urgent. (It’s not urgent. You’re not dying. I know it’s not urgent.)
OP is being kind in saying “i don’t have to trust your recollection.” people straight up lie, especially customers.
DustAndFundamentalists 