As an extremely overly-sentimental person, I'm just a puddle over here reading this.

sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute

In the 1980s in France, musicologists and archaeologists Iégor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois used their voices to explore caves with notable Paleolithic wall paintings. By singing simple notes and whistling, they mapped their perceptions of the caves’ acoustics. They found that paintings were often located in places that were particularly resonant. Animal paintings were common in resonant chambers and in places along the walls that produced strong reverberation. As they crawled through narrow tunnels, they discovered painted red dots exactly located in the most resonant places. The entrances to these tunnels were also marked with paintings. Resonant recesses in walls were especially heavily ornamented.

In a 2017 study, a dozen acousticians, archaeologists, and musicians measured the sonic qualities of cave interiors in northern Spain. The team, led by acoustic scientist Bruno Fazenda, used speakers, computers, and microphone arrays to measure the behavior of precisely calibrated tones within the cave. The caves they studied contain wall art spanning much of the Paleolithic, dating from about forty thousand years to fifteen thousand years ago. The art includes handprints, abstract points and lines, and a bestiary of Paleolithic animals including birds, fish, horses, bovids, reindeer, bear, ibex, cetaceans, and humanlike figures. From hundreds of standardized measurements, the team found that painted red dots and lines, the oldest wall markings, are associated with parts of the cave where low frequencies resonate and sonic clarity is high due to modest reverberation. These would have been excellent places for speech and more complex forms of music, not muddied by excessive reverberation. Animal paintings and handprints were also likely to be in places where clarity is high and overall reverberation is low but with a good low-frequency response. These are the qualities that we seek now in modern performance spaces.

Sounds Wild and Broken, David George Haskell

Savior Convent in Voronezh region, Russia.

I don't want to make ““doctor’s appointments””and ““schedule a follow up.”” I want to be coaxed gently into a crate and taken to the vet.

if you are distressed about not receiving a response from someone you'd like to be actively talking to, you have to take a moment. step back from the conversation, put yourself in their shoes. perhaps they're busy with something right now. you have to consider the possibility that maybe they hanging upside down by their ankle. everybody has their own schedule, and sometimes people spend time away from their phone or computer because they are currently suspended from a tree branch by a rope tied around their ankle that they unnoticingly stepped in because it was concealed by a pile of leafs. it's not that they don't want to respond; imagine that they can see their phone screen on the ground below but it's a good few inches out of reach and even if they bounce and flail on the branch their fingertips just can't touch it. sometimes life gets in the way

Remembering perfect Ginger Pye on National Beagle Day

“how’s the writing going?” i’m glad you asked! my room has never been cleaner and i’ve decided to take up baking

Magnolias are so ancient plants that almost every other plant and insect who came to being around the same time as them has gone extinct by now. They are the loneliest plants in this world. Does anybody understand how much grief it gives me that the symbolic flower of Kuras is magnolia.

Hey! Are there blacksmiths in your story? I'm a hobbyist blacksmith and I'm here to help!

Blacksmithing is one of those things that a lot of people get wrong because they don't realize it stuck around past the advent of the assembly line. Here's a list of some common misconceptions I see and what to do instead!

Not all blacksmiths are gigantic terrifying muscly guys with beards and deep voices. I am 5'8, skinny as a twig, have the muscle mass of wet bread, and exist on Tumblr. Anybody who is strong enough to pick up a hammer and understands fire safety can be a blacksmith.

You can make more than just swords with blacksmithing. Though swords are undeniably practical, they're not the only things that can be made. I've made candle holders, wall hooks, kebab skewers, fire pokers, and more. Look up things other people have made, it's really amazing what can be done.

"Red-hot" is actually not that hot by blacksmith terms. when heated up, the metal goes from black, to red, to orange, to yellow, to white. (for temperature reference, I got a second degree burn from picking up a piece of metal on black heat) The ideal color to work with the metal is yellow. White is not ideal at all, because the metal starts sparking and gets all weird and lumpy when it cools. (At no point in this process does the metal get even close to melting. It gets soft enough to work with, but I have never once seen metal become a liquid.)

Blacksmithing takes fucking forever. Not even taking into account starting the forge, selecting and preparing metal, etc. etc. it takes me around an hour to make one (1) fancy skewer. The metals blacksmiths work with heat up and cool down incredibly fast. When the forge is going good, it only takes like 20 seconds to get your metal hot enough to work with, but it takes about the same time for it to cool down, sometimes even less.

As long as you are careful, it is actually stupidly easy to not get hurt while blacksmithing. When I picked up this hobby I was like "okay, cool! I'm gonna make stuff, and I'm gonna end up in the hospital at some point!" Thus far, the latter has yet to occur. I've been doing this for nearly a year. I have earned myself a new scar from the aforementioned second degree burn, and one singe mark on my jeans. I don't even wear gloves half the time. Literally just eye protection, common sense, and fast reflexes and you'll probably be fine. (Accidents still happen of course, but I have found adequate safety weirdly easy to achieve with this hobby)

A forge is not a fire. The forge is the thing blacksmiths put their metal in to heat it up. It starts as a small fire, usually with newspaper or something else that's relatively small and burns easily, which we then put in the forge itself, which is sort of a fireplace-esque thing (there's a lot of different types of forge, look into it and try to figure out what sort of forge would make the most sense for the context you're writing about) and we cover it with coal, which then catches fire and heats up. The forge gets really hot, and sometimes really bright. Sometimes when I stare at the forge for too long it's like staring into the sun. The forge is also not a waterfall of lava, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.

Welding and blacksmithing are not the same thing. They often go hand-in-hand, but you cannot connected two pieces of metal with traditional blacksmithing alone. There is something called forge welding, where you heat your metal, sprinkle borax (or the in-universe equivalent) on it to prevent the metal from oxidizing/being non-weldable, and hammer the pieces together very quickly. Forge welding also sends sparks flying everywhere, and if you're working in a small space with other blacksmiths, you usually want to announce that you're welding before you do, so that everyone in a five-foot radius can get out of that five-foot radius. You also cannot just stuck some random pebbles into the forge and get a decent piece of metal that you can actually make something with, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.

Anvils are really fucking heavy. Nothing else to add here.

Making jewelry is not a blacksmithing thing unless you want jewelry made of steel. And it will be very ugly if you try. Blacksmithing wasn't invented to make small things.

If there's anything here I didn't mention, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.

Admitting my star sign was a mistake.

i want there to be more fanfic aus where everything is the same but for one minor detail. everything is the same but there’s sentient animals wandering around. everything is the same but everyone is called gerry. everything is the same but two characters are siblings for no reason

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

I was thinking a couple of weeks ago how rich an varied joy is as an adult. On Sunday I'm super excited because I'm seeing Dethklok in concert, and on Monday I'm super excited because the bags I ordered to store onion sets arrived.

advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

I get very frustrated with "masks don't work" debates because people don't understand the very research they are citing to make their claim.

Masks absolutely work. We have tested this scientifically. Even with shitty masks, they can prevent large droplet transmission. So coughing, sneezing, talking. And better masks can stop small droplet and aerosol transmission.

What has had less success is *community* masking. And it has nothing to do with whether or not masks can physically block virus particles. This requires mass education, motivation, adoption, and also vigilance. Keeping the mask on and wearing it properly at all times can be difficult for anyone.

I don't think these problems are insurmountable, but it is very difficult to do effective masking at scale. And that is what most of these large community studies have shown. The takeaway shouldn't be that masks don't work, but that people are flawed.

A lot of mask studies were done in healthcare settings. And these studies showed that masking didn't work well. Not because the masks failed, but because when you are around sick people for long periods of time, it is very difficult to be vigilant about your masking every second of that time.

Perhaps we need to design better masks that are easier to wear for longer periods of time. I think that could help with the vigilance problem. But I don't know what to do about the more social aspects. There are just so many people who are not willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of their community. And they will enthusiastically misinterpret information to justify their choice.

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out, click your blog ➡️ blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)