physicist seeing a group of six things: omg... just like quarks from my standard model...

physicist seeing an up and down arrow: woagh… just like quarks from my standard model…

physicist watching Deep Space Nine:

"it's all in your head" correct! unfortunately I am also in there

i had a dream i worked in an underwater restaurant and people kept ordering ice in their drinks and then getting mad at me when it would float away. and i’d tell them beforehand that the ice would float away & they’d be like lol no that’s not how it works just give me the ice. I’m fighting customer service battles never seen before

people have been saying squidward on this all day but this is the first one that made me laugh

my best advice for new writers : try to get disillusioned asap. after you've had the horrible moment of realizing all the best artists are working as cashiers posting their best art online for 12 notes, you will finally understand that no publishing gatekeeper is going to show up & gift you your career. from there, you can build a readership (and career!) for realsies, without illusions

this sounds scary said so baldly, but please know it's a good thing. once you realize how bloodless the traditional publishing apparatus is, competition isn't scary because it's like, really easy. my friends and i have currently amassed 45 voluntary readers of our substack, which is more than most pushcart prize nominees. by every metric except "approval from institutions which are currently capitulating to fascism," the life of a genre writer who self publishes is most based

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

“[March 21 1951]

Student explaining to me (after getting 55) that when reading a novel (’Ulysses’ in this case) he likes to skip ‘passages and pages’ so as ‘to get his own idea, you know, about the book and not be influenced by the author’.”

“Cordel literature (from the Portuguese term, literatura de cordel, literally “string literature”) are popular and inexpensively printed booklets or pamphlets containing folk novels, poems and songs. They are produced and sold in street markets and by street vendors in Brazil, mainly in the Northeast. They are so named because they are hung from strings to display them to potential customers, and the word for rope in Portuguese is corda, from which the term cordel is derived.” — Wikipedia

attention all retail workers: make receipt dogs NOW

uncle max gay little lean moment

tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows

for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016

each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen

you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster

in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could

lest we forget

This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.

- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.

- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.

- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.

- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards

- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)

- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work

- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon

- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak

- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself

- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great

- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone

a whole chapter of my tumblr memoir will be “lizard election 2016”

it was the first project i ever led myself, and i thought i’d be fired for sure by the end of it. completely worth it. would do it all again.

my only regret, echoed by @zacksultan and a few of the other creatives, was that we didn’t get BuzzFeed and other press in the war room with us at the time. it was magical.

Trump's desire to get Greenland is a direct attack on indigenous lands and it needs to be framed this way a lot more. Greenlandic Inuit make up about 90% of Greenland's population; they're frequently under attack from Denmark's government and now they're facing the US president threatening war just to tear their lands apart.

*tarrifs your blog*

Nevermind ghibli is awesome