46 years ago today we walked on the Moon.
Neil, Mike and Buzz inspired me to do something different with my life. I cannot thank them enough for the gift they gave us all.
Tags:
#history #space #anniversaries #the power of science
Season 24 – Dragonfire
Tags:
#Doctor Who #Sylvester McCoy #puns #juxtaposition
Sitatunga (Tragelaphus spekii)
Also known as the Marshbuck, the Sitatunga is a species of Tragelaphus antelope which is found throughout Central Africa, with its range centering on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and parts of southern Sudan, Ghana, Botswana, Zambia, Gabon, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. Sitatunga are typically known to occupy marshes/swamps and other wet habitats. As an adaptation to this, Sitatunga posses a shaggy, water-resistant coat which varies by color geographically. Like other antelope, Sitatunga feed mainly on plant and vegetable matter.
Classification
Animalia-Chordata-Mammalia-Artiodactyla-Bovidae-Bovinae-Tragelaphus-T. spekii
Image:Løken
Tags:
#antelope #adorable
ok so i’m kinda curious about something, reblog this and add what the weirdest thing in your room right now is in the tags
Tags:
#I don’t know if this is *the* weirdest thing #but on my closet shelf I have a balloon aviary #every time I go to a festival with a balloon-animal maker #I ask for a bird #and if I get one (some of them don’t know how to make birds) I put it in my collection #I try to get a different colour each time #they’re deflated but they still hold their shapes
so HOW do i get young stalin’s hair without showing the barber a picture of stalin
not that i would ever cut my hair im just WONDERING
Hire someone else to get the haircut by showing a Stalin picture, give barber picture of them?
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
Pluto Shares its First Secrets!
Just one day after its successful Pluto Flyby, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft sent back the first close-up photos of the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon.
Not only does Pluto have a mountain range with peaks 3500 meters high which formed no more than 100 million years ago – quite young for a celestial object in a 4.56-billion-year-old solar system -, but Charon looks completely different with cliffs and canyons (one being 7 to 9 km deep!).
The spacecraft also sent new information about Pluto’s outermost known moons, Hydra. We now know that it is about 43 by 33 kilometers with an almost entirely icy surface.
These discoveries are quite impressive, but are also just the beginning. It will take up to 16 months to receive and collect all the data that New Horizons is sending. The spacecraft is now continuing its mission into the Kuiper Belt – a region of space beyond the planets consisting mainly of icy objects.
For the complete image gallery: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/images/index.html
Credit: NASA’s website
Tags:
#space #the power of science #Pluto #oh look an update
MEEHU2 – Day 2
In which I have the mind-blowing experience to end all mind-blowing experiences, at least until the next one comes along, preceded by a truly terrible dining experience.
Saturday!
What I meant to do: get up early enough to attend classes.
What I actually did: slept in til just before lunch time
Sigh. So apologies (again) to hypno-sandwich and also to daja-the-hypnokitten and hypnosisenthusiast, all of whom had classes that I missed. (Just keep repeating “it’s an UNCON”)
But man do I enjoy sleeping in. It’s one of my favorite things! So the next actual scheduled thing we (myself, Carneggy, and Kat) attended was the catered lunch, which was excellent. There were food and speeches, introductions and awards, and getting to know people. If you were at the table with us and read this please remind me who you are! Because, sigh, it is again all a blur. Part of that is I was still getting to know Kat and spent an awful lot of time focusing on her. Part of that is mind-entropy from not taking notes nightly. (No, that wasn’t a joke, I really did intend at one point to take notes every night.) So please let me know :)
After lunch I had intended to attend krullfelix2002 ‘s story telling class. Yeah, that didn’t happen either. Instead, we went back up to the room and…well you don’t really have to know, right? I’m sure you can guess that there was more getting comfortable happening. Right up until it was time to hit the one class I did attend in full, Carneggy’s Potato/Potatoe discussion. Which was fascinating. I am fairly pathological about being understood, and always try to use exactly the word that means precisely what I want to say, and have MANY MANY times ran into terminology issues where what I was saying and what other people were hearing differed. So very topical and appropriate to my interests.
Which is why I feel fairly bad about admitting that my favorite part of that class was before it even started, when hypno-sandwich grabbed my hair, and theleeallure grabbed my throat, and zanythoughts grabbed my hand, and between the three of them reduced me to a dazed and shaking semblance of a human being, who then had to spend most of the following discussion trying not to obviously shake while pressing my legs together and doing my best to just (fucking focus already!) pay attention to what Carneggy was saying.
I don’t think he minded.
And then it was time for the great meal debacle of MEEHU2 (part 1) – the trip to the Mexican restaurant. Which was chosen because it was close, and therefore faster and more time-efficient.
When the universe makes jokes, it really goes all out.
I waited tables for 14 years, I know of what I speak.
THINGS THE RESTAURANT DID WRONG
1. no splitting checks.
2. food taking almost an hour to arrive
3. food being less than room temperature but more than stone cold when it did finally arrive
4. NEVER bringing the check.
5. Making us late for Hysterical Literature
THINGS THE RESTAURANT DID RIGHT
1. the pineapple margaritas
Just in case you didn’t catch it, I was late to Hysterical Literature. We arrived a little bit into the first reading, zanythoughts performing hypno-sandwich ‘s story “ClickBate”, which I recognized right away since it was part of our first story challenge. What I didn’t realize was that much like in the original videos upon which this presentation was based, zany had a little help under the table. She got through the entire story, which was a real act of willpower! And not coincidentally hotter than hot.
But wait, do you, gentle reader, even know what Hysterical Literature is? Here, go check this out – but be warned, Stoya is definitely NSFW!
Hot, right? Well, in our version, each of us who read got hypnotic coaching beforehand to achieve the same result as Stoya’s hidden vibrator.
Here, as best I can remember, is the lineup that night. (In no particular order. Because reasons. Because I don’t recall who went when until the last of us.)
Well, except obviously…
1 = zanythoughts
We also had: HotPleasure reading from MindPlay
Solarianne reading from the MindPlay Study Guide (which weirdly seems to only be available in the UK right now)
ashcatred reading one of her own (unfuckingbelievably hot) works
RoseSpells and Doomsux reading from an absolutely hilarious radio play (the name of which I do not know, although it sounded very familiar) about trying to remember the title of a movie
hypnokittencalico reading chapter 9 of The Fellowship of the Ring (hobbitsssss!)
dreamdropdazing – who was soooooo funny and soooooo good and sooooo inspired me to go out and get the book from which he was reading- John Hodgman’s “The Areas of My Expertise”
hypnosubdude reading from, I kid you not, a choose your own adventure book called “You Are A Shark”
me, reading chapter one of Harry Potter & The Methods of Rationality, aka the best fanfic of all fanfics ever written and everyone should go out and read it right now, it’s free for crying out loud
and hypno-sandwich, reading from the recent and historic Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, which was hands-down the most moving reading of the night. (And I didn’t link to the whole thing, just the article, you can find the whole thing for yourself if you want.)
IT WAS AMAZING. As you can probably imagine, most of us who participated have a certain flair for the dramatic even without the aid of hypnotically induced orgasms. I would go so far as to say that some of us who participated have probably been brought to near orgasm just through performing on some other occasion. (And please let me know if you have!)
After that I got to play a little bit of hypno egg with both Kat and orchid-girl, and found out that the writer of Harry Potter & The Methods of Rationality was interested in having me post a file of my reading online for him. Because his housemates were at MEEHU.
I fucking love this world I live in now.
And then Carneggy, Kat, and I meandered past the con suite and up to the room, and you know, got more comfortable with each other.
Wait–they–what–
…of fucking course Eliezer Yudkowsky’s housemates were at MEEHU. I shouldn’t even be surprised anymore: I already knew that my life (well, Brin’s life, anyway) was a perpetual Orange Volkswagen effect of hypno-fetishists.
(I was wondering where all the MEEHU recaps were. Then I heard you’d gone, and I looked, and apparently they’re all on your blog.)
Tags:
#shut up Brin nobody cares #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw #I still don’t have a rationalist tag #I tried to insert a readmore but I couldn’t get it to work right #oh well at least it’s tagged #in that case I should also tag it #long post
Meanwhile on a comet, warmed by the nearing sun, our tough wee lander is groggily awakening.
Tags:
#space #oh look an update #Rosetta #(I know the lander’s Philae but I checked and that’s my tag for stuff about this mission)
Reblog with what you would tell your 13-year-old self in the tags.
{{OP by thursday}}
Tags:
#my tag ramble was *so* long that Tumblr cut off the end #luckily I realised at the last minute that it might do that and took a screenshot of the draft #here is the final bit re-typed: #things make a lot more sense now don’t they? #and that’s just a *single fact* #I have more where that came from #I’m going to teach you sex ed the way that only I can #the way that no one else will ever think to do it #(save for the occasional scattered bits and pieces of truth) #(drowning in misinformation aimed at people for whom *that* is truthful) #just promise me one thing okay? #if you ever manage to reestablish this connection #tell me what you’ve learned and figured out given eight years’ head start #tell me what advice you have for me #so then: let’s get down to business #((a heavily personalised sex-ed class would then follow)) #((but this is very long as it is so I will leave it out of the tag version))
Reblog with what you would tell your 13-year-old self in the tags.
{{OP by thursday}}
Tags:
#so you know how you don’t quite trust devout Jews? #(if you haven’t decided you distrust them yet please forgive me) #(you know how terrible we are at remembering *when* things happened) #(and having a functional ultra-long-term memory compiler–while totally awesome and highly recommended–does not make that easier) #(it just gives you an even *wider* span of time in which the thing may have happened) #(anyway) #it doesn’t quite seem *right* that they’re so enthusiastic about Heritage #and you kind of suspect that given half the chance they would force you into their mould #heedless of what bits they would have to carve off of you to make your proverbial peg fit in that hole? #(and denying all the while that they’re carving you) #(because you have the same Heritage so of course you must already fit) #(they’re only making you see it) #well you had the right idea #but the first time around you didn’t apply it broadly enough #you were born to and raised by feminists #and that makes feminism part of your Heritage too #I’m not saying don’t be friends with enthusiastic feminists #the same way you shouldn’t avoid being friends with enthusiastic Jews #but keep them just a little bit distant #just distant enough that they can’t take a whittling knife to your soul #(and hope like hell that the divergent-timeline butterfly doesn’t have you fall in with a *worse* crowd) #so that’s the bad news #here’s some good news #depending on how far you are into 13 you may have heard of asexuality #and you thought it was great and wished you could be like that #well you *wanted* to be like that because you *are* like that #also: there’s this thing called hypno-fetishism #it’s possible for hypnosis to be *sexual* for some people #no don’t worry I’ll wait here while you re-evaluate your entire life #…
