"Absolutely No One Comes To Save Us But Us."

Have you considered a voluntary subscription for the site as a whole? It's the last social media site standing for me, I wouldn't mind paying per year for it.

Yes! We launched the Supporter badge which is 29.99/yr or 2.99/mo. You can also subscribe to ad-free which is a similar price. Subscribing, and encouraging as many people to also subscribe is the best way to support Tumblr. If you do it on the web we pay less to Apple/Google. Out of the 11.5M monthly active users of Tumblr, only about 27k have subscribed, or about 0.2%. If that were 10 or 20% we could run the site forever.

“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”

— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)

You know, the toughest thing is to love somebody who has done something mean to you. Especially when that somebody has been yourself. Have you ever done anything mean to yourself? Well it's very important to look inside yourself and find that loving part of you. That's the part that you must take good care of and NEVER be mean to. Because that's the part of you that allows you to love your neighbor. And your neighbor is anyone you happen to be with at any time in your life. Respecting and loving your neighbor can give everybody a good feeling.

Fred Rogers

very emphatic button emoji

•

Two kilometers down in the deep sea, out of reach of sunlight, lives a siphonophore called Erenna (no second name). It is a pale, gelatinous, delicate animal, a continuous swimmer, and a patient hunter. This thing catches fish using a cluster of lures on its tentacles that flicker back and forth, glowing bioluminescent red. It was the first evidence of luring behavior among the siphonophores.

This is all rather weird though: Erenna itself has no eyes, no light sensing organs at all. And we really thought those fish couldn’t even detect red light. What do they see in each other, these entangled creatures, each doing its best to live, moving silently forward? What signals are they passing in the cold dark?

•

I don’t know if I’m late to the party here noticing this, but @staff what the actual hell is this. This is what I get when I click on the link to my own mantis shrimp post, shared on Twitter. I can see the first half, and then I get forced to log-in to keep reading.

I write a free blog on your free platform, and you’re using link sharing on mobile to try to force people to sign up? Not only is this absolutely not okay - this isn’t a paywalled site and my content isn’t subscription only - but it really fucks me over as a science communicator who relies on posts being shared easily to disseminate information.

This is absolutely not okay. I’ve used this site for eight years to do for science outreach and loved it. This choice leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth.

Nautilus Reading Lamp

The shape of the nautilus shell provides the perfect space to conceal a light bulb, the newest form of technology at the time. As a result, this lamp was a critical success and sold both in this original form and with the later alteration of a bronze mermaid for the stand and an actual nautilus shell for the shade. By Tiffany Glass & Decorating Company (around 1899–1902)

source

fucking relatable master yupa