Today I Learned - Tumblr Posts
Oh, interesting! Nothing bad has ever come from a Car company buying a rail line, nope nothing at all
If you live in the USA and you're pleading for donations to pay your rent, bills, or get food then dial 211! Please dial 211 before the last minute!
It's a toll free service with people who will help you find programs in your community to pay those bills, find food, and find housing! They will give you numbers to call so you can get help.
It is not 100% foolproof. Their job is to direct you to a program they believe will help your current issue, but it's still a step up from praying random strangers online will give you enough cash before a deadline! The added benefit of these community programs, which get funded by the local government most of the time, is if there are more people using them then they can get more money to help more people.
You're not taking resources from other people if you use your community services. Your taxes pay for them. Use them.
Dial 211 first to see if they can help, and if for some reason they can't, then make your donation posts!
https://www.211.org/
What on earth is going on in the Star Trek fandom today, it's like my dash exploded
lol 28 years ago today, the Star Trek Voyager episode "Threshold" aired. The premise of the episode was that humans cannot travel at or faster than warp 10, because if they do, they would be traveling at "infinite velocity" and would exist in all points of space time simultaneously. Tom Paris found a way to travel at this speed, and doing so accidentally hyper-evolved him and his captain (Janeway) into giant salamanders, whereupon they immediately reproduced and created 3 baby salamanders. They were then turned back into normal humans, and forced to leave their salamander babies on the planet they had escaped to.
The episode was long held as the worst star trek episode. Not just the worst Star Trek Voyager episode, but the worst episode, period, because it was extremely weird and people turning into salamanders greatly annoyed a lot of people who don't know what fun is. Tumblr, having discovered this episode like excavating an exciting fossil, has taken a shine to this episode and many people now produce art and memes and eat pepperoni pizza in celebration of its air date, mostly to annoy the episode's creator, as in a very Arthur Conan Doyle way, he hates this episode and wants it de-canonized.
Anyway, happy Threshold Day!
i learned that in August 2014 Women’s Voices for the Earth commissioned testing of four types of Always menstrual pads, manufactured by Procter & Gamble. The certified laboratory STAT Analysis Corporation analyzed the products for volatile organic compound.
“The results of the testing indicate that both scented and unscented Always pads emit toxic chemicals, including chemicals identified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Toxicology Program, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and the State of California Environmental Protection Agency as carcinogens, and reproductive and developmental toxins. None of these chemicals are disclosed on the product by the manufacturer.” (x)
Ngl i prefer the 2016 version purple on the right.
Imagine if baking bread was a skill any person living independently in their own house needed to have at least a passing familiarity with, so there were endless books, blogs and websites about how to bake bread, but none of them seemed to contain the most basic facts about how bread actually works.
You would go online and find questions like "Help, I put my bread in the oven, and it GOT BIGGER!" and instead of saying anything about bread naturally rises when you put yeast in it, the results would be advertising some kind of $970 device that punches the bread while it's baking so it doesn't rise.
Even the most reliable, factually grounded sources available would have only the barest scraps of information on the particularities of ingredients, such as how different types of flour differ and produce different results, or how yeast affects the flavor profile of bread. Rice flour, barley flour, potato flour and amaranth flour would be just as common as wheat flour, but finding sources that didn't treat them as functionally identical would be near impossible. At the same time, websites and books would list specific brands of flour in bread recipes, often without specifying anything else.
An unreasonable amount of people would be hellbent on doing something like baking a full-sized loaf of bread in under 3 minutes, and would regularly bake bread to charred cinders at 700 degrees in an attempt to accomplish this, but instead of gently telling people that their goal is not realistic, books claiming to be general resources would be framed entirely around the goal of baking bread as fast as possible, with entire chapters devoted to making the charred bread taste like it isn't charred.
Anyway, this is what landscaping is like.
So when are people going to realize that this map is really fucking bad and stupid
helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!
really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:
The SS Warrimoo, a passenger steamship traveling from Vancouver to Australia, was silently knifing its way across the mid-Pacific waters. The navigator had just finished calculating a star fix and handed the results to Captain John DS. Phillips.
The Warrimoo's coordinates were LAT 0º 31' N, LONG 179 30' W. The date was December 31, 1899. "Know what this means?" First Mate Payton announced, "We're only a few miles from the intersection of the Equator and the International Date Line."
Captain Phillips was prankish enough to seize the opportunity to do the nautical feat of a lifetime. He summoned his navigators to the bridge to double-check the ship's position. He altered his course slightly to focus directly on his target. He then altered the engine's speed.
The calm weather and clear night worked to his advantage. At midnight, the SS Warrimoo rested on the Equator, exactly where it had crossed the International Date Line. The ramifications of this odd arrangement were numerous.
The ship's bow was in the Southern Hemisphere, in the middle of summer. The stern was in the Northern Hemisphere, in the midst of winter. The date on the aft portion of the ship was December 31, 1899. The date on the forward half of the ship was January 1, 1900. The ship experienced multiple days, months, years, seasons, and centuries simultaneously.
Know what I’m salty about?
In all my art classes, I was never taught HOW to use the various tools of art.
Like yes, form, and shape and space and color theory and figure drawing is important, but so is KNOWING what different tools do.
I’m 29 and I JUST learned this past month that India Ink is fucking waterproof when it dries. Why is this important? Because I can line something in India Ink and then go over it with watercolors. And that has CHANGED the ENTIRE way I art and the ease I can create with.
tldr: Art Teachers: teach your students what different tools do. PLEASE.
my favorite side effect warning is for antidepressants
pros: you won’t want to kill yourself
cons: you might want to kill yourself
Not my meme but figured I'd share for those about to ride out the storm
Edit bc I'm seeing a lot of confused international reblogs: this was posted because of Hurricane Milton absolutely demolishing Florida this week after Helene went through and because US insurance agencies are kind of assholes. Stay safe out there and thanks for signal boosting!
TIL: You can get disability income in the United States for being an alcoholic.
I'm gonna start doing some substance just so I can get disability because apparently having crippling anxiety isn't a good enough reason for the ass backwards government to give me some help.
TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)
