sometimes i wish i had facial hair
like sexy stubble or something that would be so cool
perfect
im not coming back to tumblr i just needed to find this post in order to dunk on my younger self. you absolute baby buffoon. you dumbass
I love how we got the introduction to TREE LAW a few weeks ago, when that story went viral on Twitter about the person whose neighbor illegally had all of their trees chopped down because they wanted a city view, so that we would understand what was happening when Universal thought it would be funny to deprive strikers of shade by "trimming" city-owned trees to the point of destruction.
This is an excellent example of organically teaching concepts without relying on tedious tutorials or forced, immersion-breaking expository cutscenes.
A++++ game design. 10/10, no notes.
I love it when people take fic writing seriously. I love when it's not 'Here's this dumb thing I wrote' and instead it's 'Here's this thing I put blood, sweat and tears into. Here's this thing I slaved away at, trying new writing techniques and editing over and over. Here's this dialogue that kept me awake at night. Here's this beautiful turn of phrase I thought up. Here's this thing that I wrote with vulnerability and heart, and I am proud to share it with you.'
“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.
Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.
They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.
“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.
Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption.
No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price. Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar.
Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.
“If we have five years of really sustained efforts, making sure we reorient our businesses and our governments toward sustainability, then from that point on, this transition will seem quite seamless. Because it will just be this gradual reshaping of options,” Chan says, adding: “All these things seem very natural when the system is changing around you.”
Hoping people with more relevant knowledge and science parsing skills than I do might comment on this …
I think it is absolutely vital that people be able to picture The Healed World. Honestly I think it’s one of the most important things we can do.
Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)
It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.
And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?
Huh.
Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.
So, basically, yes, let’s just say it and start saying it regularly. The work is now and we have to do it. It isn’t impossible. Yes there is hope. Yes it can all be done. Yes there is a future for fucksake. It’s within our grasp. that is what futures are.
👆 Not sure if I’ve already reblogged this, but @elodieunderglass is 100% right here. We find it so easy to picture doom, but we find it so hard to picture healing.
Also, giving up on a future that is still possible means not only giving up on your own life, but the lives of your loved ones, on the poor and disadvantaged people who will face the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and giving up on nature itself.
For some people, climate disaster is already here. There are millions of people already fighting for survival. They don’t have the privilege of sitting back, giving up, and waiting for the apocalypse to come.
They don’t have the privilege of saying “Oh well, the world’s doomed anyway so why should we bother?” And neither should anyone else.
artemis-the-sinister asked:
What if one of the animorphs turned out to be allergic to their battle morph?
thejakeformerlyknownasprince answered:
Oh no. Considering Jake, Tobias, Rachel, and Marco all get their battle morphs in the first book, that is not ideal. Cassie gets hers in #3, and Ax rarely morphs to “level up” except occasionally to hork-bajir, so we can count him as getting one in #13.
Jake: Would, like Rachel, probably try and tough it out without telling anyone. Would assume that he’s just still getting a handle on this whole morphing thing and that that’s why he keeps uncontrollably turning into a dog and a lizard and whatnot. Would eventually barf a tiger, which would of course end badly. By “badly,” I mean that Homer would be eaten by a tiger, and then Michelle would be forced to shoot said tiger before it could eat anyone else, and everyone would be sad. The only upshot would be if the tiger also killed Tom before it could be stopped, thereby solving a lot of problems the Animorphs wouldn’t even know they had.
Marco: Would tell all his friends immediately, not that they know anyone at that point in the series who could help. He would not only hole up at Tobias’s house and refuse to leave (Tobias hates this, of course, but there are controllers in Jake’s house and Rachel refused to let Marco stay), but he would complain loudly for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week until he finally barfed out the gorilla. A gorilla loose in a house is less of a concern than a tiger, so I imagine the boys just chasing it outside and into the woods. For years after, there are hundreds of Bigfoot sightings in southern California forests.
Tobias: Would be so freaking sad to lose that hawk morph. Tobias’s “I’m fine, this is fine, everything is fine,” would be a completely different flavor from Jake’s — Tobias doesn’t care if everyone knows he’s sick, but would want to avoid deterring the others from morphing. Turning into a cat and a hawk uncontrollably isn’t ideal, but Tobias is also a lot less supervised than Jake, so it wouldn’t necessarily be catastrophic. Anyway, Tobias would make a whole broody ceremony out of releasing the hawk once he’d barfed it up, and within 10 minutes would be off to Cassie’s barn to go get a different raptor morph.
Rachel: Like we see in canon, probably the least equipped to handle an allergy. Lots of collapsed floors when she turns into an elephant, lots of losing control of a morph she didn’t mean to make. Also, Rachel being Rachel would mean that she’d make a lot of demands that the others solve the thing. Without Ax, this would mostly be Jake reading the NatGeo Kids and Zoobooks entries on elephants, Marco hysterically suggesting they just go ask Visser Three if he’s ever had this problem, Cassie having the only helpful suggestion (meditation and deep breathing), and Tobias staring up at the stars wondering if the andalites have fated them and that’s why they’re this way. Anyway, the elephant would probably also warrant a call to Michelle once Rachel barfed it out, but would be even more confusing than the tiger because no one can explain its origins.
Cassie: Probably the best equipped to handle an allergy of anyone on the team (no matter what AniTV seems to think). She’s highly self-aware and mindful of her surroundings, so she’d probably be the fastest to figure out the “emotion = uncontrolled morphing” link on her own, and the most skilled at remaining calm in spite of it all. She’d probably spend a week or two not going on missions, doing a lot of deep breathing and soothing rides with her horse and other relaxing activities, and then would also simply be able to chase the resulting wolf into the woods behind her house. Since Southern California woods had wolves re-introduced (#3), it’d probably be fine on its own.
Ax: Would be so embarrassed by the problem. He is an andalite, he is an aristh, he is supposed to be the expert on this team, he is better than this, he is… turning into a shark right now. Dammit. Would stiffly insist that this is nothing to worry about, and he has a handle on the problem which will surely resolve itself momentarily. Would greatly appreciate Tobias sticking around to comfort him while he’s benched from missions, and would appreciate even more that Tobias never tells anyone just how often Ax ends up turning into a human or a snake or a seagull by accident. The extra hork-bajir is a whole other source of identity horror that I barely want to touch, but Toby’s group would probably end up adopting the clone and just trying not to think about where it came from.
...A cursed thought just occurred to me. What if Tobias was allergic to Ax and now they have an Andalclone to take care of?
They name him Ax 2: Electric Boogaloo and feed him cinnabons
The horrifying implications of cloned sentient beings getting birthed out of nowhere continue…
Yeah, no, this is definitely the worst of all possible timelines.
On the positive side, you could probably frolis an endangered species back to semi-stability with enough time and awfulness.
01010101010101010111-deactivate asked:
All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?
mylordshesacactus answered:
i very much want to do that.
I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.
But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.
There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.
She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.
This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.
So is the German submarine U-55.
She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.
The second torpedo hits the engine room.
Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.
The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.
She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.
The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.
Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.
There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.
This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.
And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.
There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.
U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.
HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.
She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.
U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.
Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.
But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.
The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.
Smart girls are the fucking best
But like
They did such a good job
The poses
Massive props to the camera person too
genuinely though i love that the critique that gets lobbed at tng sometimes is that it's boring because the characters sit and think and talk and many of the episodes resolve with very few explosions, and yes! that's the point!!!
like the whole ethos of tng was "space (and everyone in it) is not a threat once you understand it" and sometimes you have to get quiet about it for a minute or have a productive group discussion or do some pontificating to reach that moment of understanding and communication, but at the end we warp away having made a friend or gained a greater understanding of the complexity of the universe and maybe it was a little bit silly or a character learned how to be a better version of themself along the way and that's why i love it!!
I miss boring.
Ballister in the opening scenes is so wound tight and so restrained, he puts up with Todd getting all in his space and is the one to hold Ambrosius back and just radiates control and holding himself up to outside standards. even his affection towards Ambrosius is small touches and Ambrosius coaxing him to open up.
and by the midpoint he's just loosened up so much even in the midst of a fight there's a relaxed confidence about him that he just didn't have before that I think comes partly from Nimona's influence and partly from the fact that he's already lost everything he was trying to hold onto with his control and he's already tried the controlled way of getting it back and that didn't work so he's letting himself go back to his core from being a kid that gatecrashed guard training to fight for what he wanted
and it just makes me think about Ambrosius, who is such an exuberant dork when it's just the two of them and prods at Ballister for being mopey/thinky, but who also definitely has some degree of understanding public/private face seeing how he is with the other knights and in the market scene but he's overall a lot freer with his actions.
After everything, will Ambroius look at the person Ballister is now and the person he was when they were together as knight-candidates, and have to think about how maybe that was the happiest Ballister could be under those circumstances but if they'd been knighted and got that conventional happily ever after, even when it was just the two of them and Ambrosius could drop the weight of public expectations, Ballister probably never would have been as confidently joyful as he has the potential to be and Ambrosius would never even have known what they were missing because Ballister had been holding himself in for so long that everybody (including probably Ballister himself) just assumed that restrained was part of his personality.
I want to go to this exact point and run around it saying “I’m in Sweden!” I’m in Finland!” “I’m in Norway!” until I get tired
i aspire to great things in life
According to Google Maps, that point is in the middle of a small lake.
So we’ll do it in January when it’s frozen.
actually that’s why they’ve helpfully dropped a big-ass cement block with a bridge surrounding it in the middle of the lake: for the express purpose of doing what OP aspires to do
there’s so much beauty in the world.
Toothless paintings from the last year ^_^ 🌿🎃 Wallpaper size on Gumroad! https://munchimo97.gumroad.com/
derinthescarletpescatarian
