TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

i want 60 thousand votes by next thursday

I just wanted to say... don't give up on us. Please.

queen of the world to me

LIVE EVENT NEWS! I’m beyond thrilled to be returning to the mighty @thewritingcommunitychatshow on Friday 10th May at 8pm UK time! And I’ll be bringing with me some of my Lockwood notebooks, where I developed the ideas, plots and characters for the series! Join us to take a look at where it all began, and to chat about #lockwoodandco, #ScarlettandBrowne, #Bartimaeus and much more!

To become part of the live event, follow this link: https://youtube.com/live/7IO0JTDa5J4

Hope to see you there! ⚔️

I think Tumblr will love this

Morning dew on tulips.

Osaka, Japan.

Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

let that sink in....

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.

One evening, looking for some artefact from Lockwood’s parents in the clutter she shares the attic with, Lucy finds a battered old suitcase containing lots of Lockwood’s childhood toys. There's toy cars and action figures from the Fittes Agents Saturday morning cartoon. She takes it down to show Lockwood and casually mentions how she always really wanted some of the action figures as a kid but her mum never brought her any and how she used to stand outside the toy shop for hours, staring up at the toy Fittes Base they had on display in the window.

And a week later, Lucy returns home to find Lockwood and George have bought her a Fittes Base toy with all the figures that Lockwood didn’t have and they spend hours playing around with it. And even after the novelty has worn off, Lucy finds herself and the boys moving the figures around inside the base (George keeps putting them in inappropriate poses and Lockwood and Lucy keep setting them out in scenes from their favourite episodes of the cartoon)