the BEST THING about America is that one of their timezones is called mountain time. i cannot tell you how funny that is to me. it sure is always time for mountains in one fourth of america

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

Inside · 2007 Dir. Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo

online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.

surely no one in academia cares at this point

You must understand that historians are not allowed to cum unless they're calling someone a crackpot fraud.

The Matrix (1999)

Many books of the Bible that didn't make it to the official canon(s) and other incredibly important pieces of scripture and literature are only known today because they were preserved in the Ge'ez script in Ethiopia. It is very likely that there are lots of other texts dating to the earliest days of Christianity that are still to be "found", only because there aren't enough international scholars who know the Ge'ez script or work in Ethiopia. There are many, but not as much as it deserves. (Important note is that Ge'ez is both a liturgical language, like Latin, and also is a script, much like Latin or Chinese characters, used by many Ethiopian languages, but others can be written and indeed are written in Ge'ez script, this is why it has preserved such a range of literature)

Ge'ez looks like this:

ሀሎ! ይህ በአማርኛ ቋንቋ እና በግእዝ ፊደል የተጻፈ ነው! ለእርስዎ እና ለቤተሰብዎ በረከቶች!

There was briefly a very bad taste meme calling it a "demon language", with people even copypasting random religious literature in Ge'ez thus making it seem more "sinister". I won't comment on how ignorant and offensive that is.

Ge'ez is an important script and language, much like Greek or Latin, because of its connection to major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ethiopia is a wonderful country with a deep, rich history, and is an example of how Africa has always been part of world history. But like all languages, it's also a cultural heritage on its own, worth cherising, preserving, and learning about, regardless of its importance to the rest of the world. Instead of being ignorant for a racist joke, we could always take our time and learn and appreciate such things.

If you've never ever turned on the news to see a burning pile of corpses in a city where your true love lives ,

where that one final tiny soft spot left in your heart went to school and lost their first tooth and hugged their grandma,

then I don't want to hear your opinions on imperialism and war.

tumblr is wild because you’ll see a post that’s vagueing about another popular post and go like huh yeah you’re right. but then you finally see the post that post was talking about and it’s just literally not what the person talking about it claimed it was

weird anti ideology finally leaking out into the mainstream

So, *why* is NoFap so common as a magical practice? Why does it keep showing up over and over again, specifically? It seems kind of weird. It's clearly not just "It's hard to do", because not everything that is hard to do is a magical practice. Like, eating a fist-sized rock would also be hard to do and requires willpower, but I've never heard of that being a magical practice, so neither "difficulty" nor "demonstrating willpower" are sufficient explanations. So why is NoFap so common?

Its got that good good Haptic Feedback Loop.

You're really horny. You want to beat your meat. But you don't. You cool off and continue reading your manuscripts or whatever. It **feels** like you've conquered something.

There's also an accessibility element to it. Not everyone eats rocks on the regular. But most people have been in a situation where they wanna beat their meat, but need to tamp down their impulses for some reason.

Also semen is a pretty common Magical Substance. That goo makes people. Surely, it must be metaphysically important to the Great Ladder of Being or whatever. There's a sort of magical value to semen that your average rock doesn't have.

imagine if doorways grew back like scabbed over with fresh drywall and you had to keep carving them back out with a jabsaw to keep the doorway clear etc

Someone described Korean trans women being born with huge targets on their backs due to the military conscription as another example of trans discourse "centering trans women," and like, I dunno what to tell you, but patriarchy demanding that these women go to the conscription to get abused (physically, sexually, and emotionally) and creating a moral panic when the institution of solidarity for men is rejected by trans women is not "centering trans women." Trans women are not consciously making this decision, and I can tell you that near 100% of them will be more than happy to never have to think about the conscription. It's absurd to frame the patriarchy putting a target on trans women's back as "centering them," as if trans women had any autonomy on this matter.

Something I want able bodied people to understand is that I don't want a diagnosis cause I wanna be sick so bad; I want a diagnosis because there is already something wrong with my body but I don't know what the fuck it is.

Anti-flat-earth arguments from 900ce in the Turba Philosophorum