Things and Stuff

 Ecola State Park, Oregon by manyfires

all i wanna do is eat nectarines and think about aurora borealis st. elmo’s fire gigantic jets ball lightning green flash earthquake lights and will-o-the-wisps

SPECIAL INTEREST MENTIONED YALL!!!

Look at my jellyfish sprites boy

Sundogs

Asperitas clouds

Glories

Russian Light Pillars

Nacreous Clouds

Mammatus Clouds (tiddy clouds lol)

Morning glory clouds

St. Elmo's Fire

I could go on for HOURS!! Remember that the would around you is much weirder than you know and the only difference between magic and science is we put names to the latter!

see she gets it

All other TLEs in case sprites aren't enough for you

If you'd like to see them in action, I recommend this video by storm chaser Pecos Hank.

every year i'm on this site the color of the sky gets weirder

“Why should rich people pay more” because fuck ‘em

“So you are okay for paying more when you have money” I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘em’ when relevant

“I am not excluded from ‘fuck ‘‘em’ when relevant” is surprisingly powerful as both a statement and philosophy

I assigned a writing prompt a few weeks ago that asked my students to reflect on a time when someone believed in them or when they believed in someone else. One of my students began to panic.

“I have to ask Google the prompt to get some ideas if I can’t just use AI,” she pleaded and then began typing into the search box on her screen, “A time when someone believed in you.”

“It’s about you,” I told her. “You’ve got your life experiences inside of your own mind.” It hadn’t occurred to her — even with my gentle reminder — to look within her own imagination to generate ideas. One of the reasons why I assigned the prompt is because learning to think for herself now, in high school, will help her build confidence and think through more complicated problems as she gets older — even when she’s no longer in a classroom situation.

She’s only in ninth grade, yet she’s already become accustomed to outsourcing her own mind to digital technologies, and it frightens me.

When I teach students how to write, I’m also teaching them how to think. Through fits and starts (a process that can be both frustrating and rewarding), high school English teachers like me help students get to know themselves better when they use language to figure out what they think and how they feel.

. . .

If you believe, as I do, that writing is thinking — and thinking is everything — things aren’t looking too good for our students or for the educators trying to teach them. In addition to teaching high school, I’m also a college instructor, and I see this behavior in my older students as well.

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This! This is what scares me the most about AI! Physical exertion is difficult if someone isn't used to it, and it gets easier the more often it's done. When it's done often enough, it becomes a habit. Mental exertion is exactly the same. Thinking is a learned skill just like a sport is, and an entire generation is growing up without that most critical skill.

An unthinking populace is a more easily controlled populace.

The sooner yall remember that Hollywood is the propaganda arm of the US military, the sooner yall will stop fangirling over a bunch of your White boy faves making war criminals look good becos that's strategic too.

Also, lmao at these tweets:

"Everything is based on memory", cool bro will you include this then?

Ray Mendoza sir, is your memory long enough to remember the death toll of Iraqi casualties as a result of the Iraq war?

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

are you really bad at it or are you in "good at it" spaces

Me: ah shit, I misidentified that yellow rumped warbler as a female goldfinch, I should literally be hung at the gallows for this. I'm such an IDIOT

My friend, pointing at a vulture: check out that fucked up crow lol

We are coming. Fascists beware.

Join the correct side of history.

Chicago:

Boston

New Orleans

Utah

Sanderling (Calidris alba) going nyoom

D.C.:

Atlanta:

Philadelphia:

(source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4, source 5, source 6, source 7, thread containing pictures 8, 9, and 10; thread contains pictures from other cities, too)

Anti-Trump protests around America on 4/5/2025.

David Hoffman, London, 1973

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.

— Frank O’Hara, from The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara; Personism: A Manifiesto.

you have to admit it: most if not all animals are very brave. they do a lot of things and dont always know whats going to happen. they have beautiful eternal souls because of this