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Calling in sick to work

What I said:

“Some kind of weird balance thing”

What they heard:

“An inner ear infection of some kind”

What it was:

The world has tilted on its access and deposited anything containing joy or life to sink into an endless void, leaving a thick tide of emptiness that flows like molasses, exorably slow, breathlessly fatal, and unfathomably deep. I have sunk, and I will drown, and I will sleep until it passes.

Hope to be back in tomorrow!

mihrsuri:

wearelibrarian:

greenreticule:

peggedpirate:

thefrysh:

brunhiddensmusings:

crazyintheeast:

marzipanandminutiae:

tallahasseemp3:

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This is just The Magnus Institute.

Nope.

They have a gas-based firefighting system instead of sprinklers for obvious reasons. It does lower the percentage of oxygen in the building, but not enough to kill anyone.

I found this by googling “Yale library fire oxygen.” It was literally the first result.

Fact-checking is your friend.

It’s true. It’s not the fire suppression system that kills you. The Librarians come and personally murder you for starting a fire in a library. But you didn’t start a fire you say? No matter. You are collateral damage. Everybody gets killed to show that arsonists have no chance of escaping justice

an orangutan traveling at non-euclidean speeds erupts from the aether to clothesline you into another dimension

god im trying so hard to decipher that last addition and im coming up empty

what’s not clicking

#you learn about the non-euclidian orangutan in semester 1 of an mlis - @cappurrccino

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@bibliothekara

Three things:

  • The orangutan is a Discworld reference. In the second book the librarian of the Unseen University is turned into an orangutan in a wild magic surge, and decides immediately that anyone who attempts to turn him back - or call him a monkey - should have their head unscrewed in a distressingly literal fashion.
  • For a little while I worked for a server company company with datacentres (place where servers live) in London and Hemel Hempstead.
  • The London office was equipped with a with an argon fire suppression system similar to the Yale one. If someone pressed the fire alarm button you had sixty seconds to GTFO before the air in the room would be rapidly replaced by argon, in which fire doesn’t burn, humans don’t breathe, and servers (as well as books) are fine. There was a Very Specific Alarm for this, and it was very much On The Training, even for me who didn’t work on the actual servers (I was developing monitoring and deployment systems).
  • Fourth Bonus thing: The Hemel Hempstead estate was based in the industrial estate outside the town, where land was very cheap. One of the reasons for this was that less than five years previously a nearby oil storage facility had a Very Bad Day. There was a Very Specific - and different - Alarm for any possible reoccurrence of that Very Bad Day, and the GTFO instructions were - while very similar and equally definite - a lot more complicated.

lily-ohfally:

WoL QotD: What made you choose your WoL’s name? Does it have any important meaning or did it just sound nice?

Follow up: Is it lore accurate? If it isn’t, why not?

I’ve named my main character the same thing since the early 2000s, and generally fit the race to the name.

dear 98% of the people that follow me that dont talk to me

alias-milamber:

tamaraldbrennan:

Who are you

I am me. Sometimes I am other people, but mostly those are also me. 

Whats your favorite color

A deep and abiding blue.

Favorite ship

HMS Belfast

Favorite ice cream flavor

Vanilla

Do you have a cat

Nope

Thank

You.

Ten year anniversary update:

Still me.

Still blue

SS Richard Montgomery

Fancy vanilla

No, I have a dog

You.

aquarions-of-history:

“On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

— —Charles BabbagePassages from the Life of a Philosopher (via alias-milamber)

Thanks to modern developments in language models, you can put anything you like in and get the wrong answers out.

randomslasher:

flightsofwonder:

flightsofwonder:

being an adult is just saying to yourself “this is the weekend i’ll clean my [x]” and then proceeding to not do that because it’s the weekend and you deserve to relax, goddamnit

why does this have 85K notes

because we reblogged it instead of cleaning our [x]

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My weekend tasks list, as of 00:38 Monday morning.

captain-cargoshorts:

xeansicemane:

gansmaltz:

whitepeopletwitter:

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common misconception. what they’ve actually invented is money but worse

Countries definitely love it when you go around minting a competing currency within their borders. This will go well and see no complications.

Are they trying to imply their money is high tech in that picture with the tamagotchi and the games from two decades ago?

These are fungible tokens.


I think I know why scientists have discovered the centre of the planet is much younger than they expected. It’s because this story depleted the earth’s irony core.

duckbunny:

americans really do just say “criss cross applesauce” like that’s normal

A paraphrased conversation with an American friend:

Yr Hmbl Rptr: “… you call it ‘Criss-Cross Applesauce? Why?’

American Friend: "Y'all howdy because it’s better than what we used to call it, yee har freedom.”

YHR: “What did you used to call it?”

AF: “Indian style”

YHR: “Oh.”

AF: “Yes. Yee Har Howdy Freedom.”

agoodcartoon:

prismaticpastry:

electricslug:

electricslug:

SAME GENDER MARRIAGE PLANE FLIES IN TOTK

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SKILL ISSUE

@agoodcartoon

checkmate homophobailures

The best part about this aeroplane is that it’s now entirely left wing.

hollowboobtheory:

hollowboobtheory:

idk when we decided that explaining yourself shouldn’t be part of an apology but like. if someone was a dick to me and apologizes but I still don’t understand why they did it I’m not gonna feel any better

“Sorry for hurting your feelings earlier. I was trying to say x, but I guess it came across wrong. I don’t think you’re stupid.”

or

“Sorry I snapped at you. I didn’t get enough sleep last night so my patience is a little low today.”

is a better apology than

“I want you to know that I am sorry that my actions offended you. I take full accountability for my actions and I am listening and learning. I hear you.”

I know this one, it’s when “intent isn’t magic” became a stock response to anyone attempting to provide context for their actions.

Also, the latter distances the speaker from the past and focuses on some nebulous actions in the future.

asylos:

zingring:

naniyou:

I watched the live with the CEO, here is the tl;dr

The good news:

  • Chronological dash is here to stay! Whether you have to toggle it weekly or new users default to “For you” was not elaborated on but at least that’s confirmed.
  • Custom themes are here to stay! Once again, may be buried for all I know but, for sure will remain an option.
  • Search updates are in the works!!!!

The neutral news:

  • Tumblr is seriously in the red financially and needs more support, Ad-free for example is not widely used
  • They would not comment on the suggestion to bring back NSFW behind a paywall (which we all know would get them a boatload of money)
  • They’re possibly going to add a donation system like Ao3 and Wikipedia.
  • They would “rather not” sell data to make up the costs
  • Most of staff are pre-2010 tumblr users including the CEO who joined in 2007, so they do actually use the site and have for a long time

The bad news:

  • Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward. The reason cited was to meet “certain expectations” of users coming from other social media, which isn’t good.
  • Disability features (specifically turning off flashing ads for epileptics) was met with a request to purchase Ad-free

Overall it was more chill than I expected, @photomatt and @zingring seem to be far more in tune with the userbase than u/spez.

Under the bad news column:

I did ask our ads team to investigate any kind of vibrancy or flashing on ads - we do not want to accidentally trigger seizures or cause distress with flashing etc. Buying ad-free (or gifting ad-free to someone else) is always an option, but that is not the solution (and of course, some folks simply can’t afford it). Sorry that it sounded dismissive in the session! That was not my intent.

Condensing reblogs could be a toggle like shorten long posts?

The porn ban wasn’t Tumblr’s moral puritanism, it’s the fact that the App Store/s will somewhat randomly apply “Family Values” guidelines to public-content apps, resulting in whether you get your app blocked or not depends on what the underpaid reviewer saw on a default dashboard and whether they thought it was art. Until this either goes away or becomes consistent, we’re likely to keep seeing the same problems.

(“But what about Twitter and Reddit?” Twitter’s better at keeping its NSFW stuff opt-in than Tumblr’s set up to, and Reddit apps routinely got blocked for the same reason, which is why a lot of them just wouldn’t show images marked NSFW. Then Reddit “fixed” the issue of having too many users).

theodoradove:

sometimes i am struck by the fact that there are people i follow on tumblr because we were friends on livejournal TWENTY YEARS AGO

Some of my tumblr friends list is from people I met in David Eddings fandom 25 years ago.

Some is from Pratchett fandom over the last 20 years, some from LARP over the last 10.

From Usenet, IRC, Opendiary, Livejournal, Deadjournal, Opendiary, Friends Reunited, Facebook, Twitter to Tumblr. Friendships, acquaintanceships and mutual followings going back decades and (I hope) forwards too.

There’s a song that reminds me of this, it’s called Long Line of People by Misty’s Big Adventure, and it starts like this:

Some times, I get down with the world.
Times have changed, life gets strange when we grow old.
But today I woke up and I found that it’s okay. Life’s not always as bad as I’m told.
For there’s a long line of people I have known, and that line has grown (yes it’s grown), and though some may soon be gone, I know I’ll never be on my own.

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A small puppy photo dump, in roughly reverse order.

petulantworm:

I’m curious about something

I’ve talked to the person I reblogged this from

I’ve never talked to the person I reblogged this from

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Talking meaning chatting online, interacting irl, or even exchanging one or two messages. I just want to see how much tumblr users actually talk to each other!