calling a trans woman 'brother' while talking about how important it is to respect the gender identities of cis people. actually beyond parody

Brevity is the soul of wit & this was so damn creative

This is my favorite character, Drugs. She's on some hideous cocktail of hallucinogens and is very gender.

more good news from tiktok: they’ve started blocking celebrities.

they’re calling it block party 2024. just blocking and ignoring countless celebrities who havent said shit about palestine. influencers, actors, anyone who went to the met gala, whatever, they’re getting blocked. and people keep talking about how cathartic it is, how good it feels, how they never realized they could DO that. there was some kind of subconscious law against blocking famous people, but it’s broken, and people are LOVING it. and it’s WORKING. a social media/digital advertising coordinator was talking about how ad companies are PANICKING, because they can’t accurately target anymore. so many big influencers, including fucking LIZZO started talking about palestine the MOMENT their follower counts started going down. and the best part? no one is forgiving them. lizzo posted a tiktok asking people to donate to palestinian families, and all the comments just said you’re a multimillionaire. put your money where your mouth is. blocked.

i feel like i’m witnessing the downfall of celebrity culture, right here right now. people are waking up.

“It’s a handbag.”

our new head chef Barbecue Pistol is going to rock your world with his brand new fry sauce which is a mix of ketchup and mayonnaise and a little sriracha for that pistol kick

can’t stop reading this over and over

A Historical Space Fuckup

Geostationary satellites. You know the ones, right? Hanging out 5.6 Earth radii above the Equator and sending us cat videos and premium TV channels? Let me tell you about their worst few years.

Background: GEO satellites are just big fat bent pipes. They take a weak signal from the ground, amplify the fuck out of it, and send it back. The amount of dollars you can make doing this is related to the total power of the amplifiers, so everyone making money like this wants more power. How do you get more power in space? Bigger solar arrays. What's the catch? Bigger solar arrays are more expensive: your 15kW solar array might cost you ten million dollars. Bigger solar arrays also mean a satellite that costs more fuel to control, and running out of fuel is the primary way these satellites die (and stop making you money). So everyone's looking for cheat codes here.

1999. Hughes Satellite Systems (just before it's bought by B̷̧͛o̶̹̕ẻ̴̙i̴̩̓n̴͎͆g̵͉̈) develops a really mass-/cost-efficient way to make the solar arrays bigger: trough concentrators. Instead of adding more solar panels, instead they'll add cheap, lightweight, super-reflective panels that redirect more sunlight onto the existing solar panels! This increases the amount of light hitting the solar panels (++power), while also increasing their temperature (-power), but they did the math, it's positive, let's launch some concentrators.

Let us digress for a second. Space is a vacuum (citation needed). In our Earthbound experience, a lot of matter stays where you put it because atmospheric pressure is keeping it there. In space, some materials start to escape much faster, but other materials stay in place. Spacecraft solar arrays are made of semiconductor (stable), glass (stable), copper (stable), aluminum (stable), and glue (INCREDIBLY VOLATILE). Oh also, the glue is selected to be really clear, but it stays that way only because it's usually hidden behind something. When direct sunlight hits it, it turns SUPER BROWN. Brown doesn't let sunlight through it.

What happens to a molecule when it starts to fly free? It picks a direction to go and flies that way until it hits something, where it maybe condenses and stays put. When the solar panels are flat, this is fine, because most directions have nothing to hit:

However, with trough concentrators, a large fraction of the glue hits one of the concentrator panels and stays there... and then some fraction of that glue evaporates, hits the solar panel, and stays there (but browner):

Oh, okay, yeah that's worse. Spacecraft that were supposed to lose 5% of their power over 15 years instead started looking like they were going to lose 20% of their power in that time period, meaning you can't keep the TV channels running, meaning you can't make any goddamn money! Very embarrassing for Hughes (/Boeing). They launched 6 satellites with this issue before they noticed the problem and started freaking out. "Freaking out" in this case means almost bankrupting the people they'd sold satellites to, and nearly exploding themselves.

My aunt started working at Hughes during this timeframe and was given a commemorative pin for the satellite she was working on. Six months later, they asked everyone to please give back the commemorative pins; the company urgently needed to fix a design issue with the satellite that would change how the pin looked. My aunt kept her old pin, which... still had the concentrators in place :)

Anyway, right around this same time, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, whose existence was classified at the time), had exactly the same issue on some of its satellites, as far as I can tell. NRO also freaked out about it, and because they're the government, they started an annual conference with all of the country's high-clearance solar power experts to help them figure out what the fuck was going on. That conference slowly got less and less classified over the years, and my wife was invited to speak at it this year! There were a couple of graphs presented by government speakers that lampshaded the Late Nineties Concentrator Fuckup, but absolutely nobody mentioned it directly. (another win for "getting a bee in your bonnet at exactly the right time and then making your spouse listen to everything you've learned about the bee")

Tumblr is full of people whose favorite rapper 100% would have been Drake if they didn't learn about him a week ago from the Kendrick beef.

Cat standing on his own tail

(Source)

he Hates it

Polistes fuscatus ♂

8/31/23

in bed absolutely fucked up on pillow and blanky

hello white tumblr user. you have sixty seconds to explain why you don't like rap as a genre without being overtly racist or acting as if its a monolith, or the saw trap goes off.

the current trend of "tumblr users embarrassing themselves by proudly announcing why they don't listen to any music made by black people" is really astounding.

i cannot help but think this is a direct result of liberal White Guilt and how people have interpreted "anti-racism" as form of cultural self-segregation - the kind of person who thinks trying to cook chicken curry is cultural appropriation, or sends white people anon hate for wearing a kimono (yes, this kind of discourse happened). like, "oh, no, i could never participate in this culture, i'd get my evil white hands all over it! it would be more Progressive if I only did White things."

if you're a poc you've seen this, i'm sure - this deer-in-the-headlights stare you can get from white people when you play music / show art / share a story / anything that is Racially Coded, this total refusal to actually engage with it out of fear that it is in some way Wrong for them to have any opinion on it. because they read somewhere that it's bad to use AAVE but the only lesson they actually learned from that is "gotcha, white people are not allowed to interact with other cultures as punishment for my White Crimes. this helps to fill up the gaping pit of my white guilt and makes me one of the Good People." this transforms their discomfort around non-white cultures (black culture, especially, i should add) into a kind of virtue

anyway if you are white and reading this. go listen to some fucking haliu mergia. ethiopian jazz. will knock your dick right off. go listen to rap or reggae or bollywood and have a genuine reaction to it - like, an actual, from-the-heart reaction. you are allowed to not like some of it. but you will definitely like at least a little. yes, you can compare it to lemon demon (or whatever) if that helps you get into it and that's your only point of reference. maybe don't say that part out loud. but don't, like, separate yourself from it, like you are seeing it in a museum and the only polite thing to do is go "ahh, huh, very interesting, so much culture here."

new type of guy discovered