Twirling Around Cause It's Just So Good

corn mazes were invented WHEN???

Okay. Okay. I’m still not over this, but I’m starting to piece it together in my head.

This is NOT an accurate telling of the history of corn mazes. This is just a hypothesis.

So. What do we need for a corn maze? Well, we need cornfields, and we need the concept of a vegetation maze.

Hedge mazes are a European concept, first created in the mid 16th century.

And while indigenous Americans obviously had corn, they typically grew it alongside other plants and not in vast monocultures.

And so corn mazes can only exist after the widespread adoption of maize by Europeans AND the existence of hedge mazes.

But during this time, is a corn maze a good idea?

A corn maze isn’t something you make on a whim. It’s something that has to planned well in advance— and not only that, but with every path you draw, you’re losing some of your crop! And if you’re a farmer, that’s your entire livelihood! While the wealthy elite can afford to splurge on a purely decorative plant to make a maze from, you certainly can’t do the same with your product.

So a field with a maze needs to somehow bring in more money than a field without a maze to be worth considering. How does that happen?

Agritourism.

Agritourism only works as a concept when most of the population doesn’t already live on a farm. There’s no reason to draw people to your farm in colonial America, where 90% of everyone there sees a farm every day.

So this rules out any year before 1900 on principle alone.

Not only that, but to earn any actual revenue, you need a lot of middle and even lower-class people from cities and towns actually coming to your farm specifically. This isn’t feasible without the widespread adoption of the automobile.

And so corn mazes can only exist after 1920.

But why would anyone in 1920 focus on agritourism? The added costs of labor, advertising, and crop loss would far outweigh any revenue gained. The vast majority of family farmers were doing fine without it!

Until they weren’t.

As farming became more consolidated by massive corporations, family farms were suddenly seeing less and less money. All of a sudden, agritourism became a viable option. If you aren’t making that much money off of your crops in the first place, then it doesn’t matter too much if you hack them up a bit.

And when do we see a significant dip in the profits of family farms?

(from the USDA)

A large dip in 1975, and a nearly vertical slope around 1989.

Now the idea of a corn maze is a feasible one. Especially when the pressure to create new, novel experiences in your farm starts really packing on near the turn of the decade.

Corn mazes can only exist after 1989.

corn mazes are possibly a direct result of unchecked corporate oligopolies

#hell yeah #into the fridge you go

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ADDITION

peishathebookity reblogged

thejakeformerlyknownasprince answered:

Anonymous asked:

Probably crack and a result of staying up way too late, but how do you think an AU where Peter dated and married Naomi instead of Nora would go?

This officially goes on the list of “ships I never considered before, but now that you say it I can kinda see it.” Peter’s clearly got a competency kink, between Eva and Nora. Naomi deserves better than Dan. They’re both overworked single parents who try to do what’s best for their kids, and don’t always succeed. Peter’s good at the nurturing and hug-giving and supportive side of things, not so much at the day-to-day practicalities. Naomi’s excellent at making sure everyone is fed and sheltered and keeping up in school, not so much at the touchy-feely stuff. Yeah, I can see it.

Anyway:

They meet through the PTA, naturally. Naomi’s there to stage a formal protest about the high school’s suspension of late-bus service, and Peter’s there because this is the once-a-month night out of the house that Marco keeps scheduling for him. Naomi makes a sarcastic comment about the U.S. government’s idea of “sufficient funding”, Peter jumps in with a one-liner about science grants, and four hours later they’re still companionably trashing the NSF over their third round of bake sale brownies. Peter makes the first move, of course. Naomi sets the time, the venue, the curfew, the transportation, and the expectations for the night, of course.
Jake thinks this is the funniest thing that has ever happened to him in his entire life. The more both Marco and Rachel call him to complain about their respective parents, the funnier he finds it to be.
Both Naomi and Peter are pleasantly surprised at how well their kids get along. They were both vaguely aware that Marco and Rachel knew each other through school, but neither one is prepared for the instantaneous companionable banter the teenagers fall into the moment Peter first brings Marco over to meet Naomi.
The first four or five times Marco comes around Rachel’s house for dinner, Jordan hides under her hair and watches him in enraptured silence. After about two months’ worth of this, Rachel drags Marco aside after an Animorphs meeting and has a stern conversation with him.
Neither of them will tell the others what they talk about, even though Ax expresses concern at the brilliant red shade both their faces have taken on and Cassie gives them a knowing smile. Technically Tobias overhears the whole thing — the others tend to get so caught up in hawk eyes that they forget all about hawk ears — but he’s nice enough to keep his silence.
The next time Marco’s over at Rachel’s house, he lets out a seven-second belch after downing an entire can of Mountain Dew in one go. Over the next ten minutes, he insults Jordan’s favorite boy band, picks his nose in front of everyone, claims he’s going to die alone because girls are gross, and (to Rachel’s quiet shock) too-casually acknowledges his raging crush on Brad Pitt.
Anyway, it works like a charm. Jordan gets over her crush pretty quick after that.
“You didn’t have to go quite that hard in the paint, you know,” Rachel says to Marco much later. “Pretending to like Brad Pitt, I mean.”
Marco is lying on her bed, looking through one of her back issues of CosmoGirl with the air of a forensic anthropologist picking apart the dismembered remains of a human sacrifice. “What?” he says, back in that too-casual tone. “I can appreciate a good pair of lips, no matter what type of human being they grow upon.”
Rachel spins around, looking away from the mirror where she was fixing her hair. Marco is now staring at the magazine as if trying to detect a coded message between two lines of the spread comparing different brands of eyeliner.
“No matter what type?” she asks.
Marco lifts his chin. He doesn’t back down, and he doesn’t laugh. There’s a defiant set to his smirk, and the careful confidence in his expression is betrayed by the slight trembling of his fingers clenched around the Cosmo.
Their parents are engaged, that’s all. And it’s not something he’s ever told anyone… but he also thinks it’s maybe the sort of thing that one tells one’s siblings.
“So you do agree with me and Cassie about Jeremy Jason McCole!” Rachel says triumphantly.
Marco gags so hard he risks straining his own throat muscles. “I have taste! You, clearly, have none.”
If Jordan still has any romantic interest in Marco at all even after the you’re going to be step-siblings news broke, it disappears the instant that Naomi announces Jordan and Sara are going to be sharing a room from now on, because Marco and Peter are moving in with them. A week later, Jake’s mother has a stern conversation with him about the extent to which he’s been running up their phone bill. He grumbles that he didn’t ask to be everyone’s agony aunt, but that doesn’t get him out of being grounded.
Marco teases Rachel endlessly when he figures out why she leaves her window open every night, even — especially — when it’s cold or rainy outside. But he also helps cover for her and Tobias without being asked, and one night in gorilla morph he deforms the oak tree out in the back yard so that a sheltered branch rests directly underneath her windowsill.
Rachel stops in the door of Marco’s room the day after the confrontation with Visser One outside the fake hork-bajir valley. She doesn’t bother to knock. He didn’t bother to shut the door.
Marco’s sitting in the narrow space between his bed and the wall, staring at the blank blue paint in front of his face. His knees are drawn up to his chest, his hands limp at his sides.
“They didn’t find a body,” Rachel says, blunt as ever, standing over him. “I know that’s not good news or anything. But I also figured you had a right to know. There’s no sign of Vis— Of her body.”
Marco squeezes his eyes shut, hard, but still can’t stop the tears. “Shit.” He lets his head fall back against the bedspread. “Shit.”
Hesitating only a second, Rachel scoots in next to him. She doesn’t try for a hug or anything stupid like that, but she sits shoulder-to-shoulder with him. She’s the kind of person given to stillness, but she stays put as he struggles to breathe and swipes his sleeve across his face time and time again.
“It’s never going to end, is it,” Marco says at last, when he’s got enough air for words.
Rachel shrugs. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”
“Shit,” he whispers again. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“You wanna play Sega?” she asks. “Not think for a while?”
Marco shakes his head violently. “I just need some space, okay?”
“Sure.” She stands. “I’ll tell my mom not to expect you for dinner.”
Their parents are downstairs cooking. Laughing. Arguing companionably over one of Naomi’s cases. Every clink of dishes, every fond word, feels like a spike driven under Rachel’s fingernails right now. And if that’s how she feels…
“Anyway, I know you think I’m a crazy psycho killer, but for what it’s worth I think you made the right call.” She says it sharply, standing to go. Marco doesn’t respond, not that she expected him to, and she yanks his door shut when she goes.
Peter doesn’t try to be Rachel’s dad. But he helps her with homework and shows up to her gymnastics meets and acts more excited than she is when she aces a history test. He asks her what she wants to study in college, not whether she’s going or how they’re expected to pay for it. He doesn’t try, and he does pretty well anyway.
The Animorphs meet in Rachel’s room almost as often as they do in Cassie’s barn. It’s more centrally located, even if it doesn’t have nearly the selection of morphs right at hand. Jake and Cassie both have preexisting excuses for showing up several times a week, and Tobias and Ax never bother using the front door anyway. Marco’s also taken the time to confirm that no one in the house is a controller, so it saves everyone a little peace of mind.
Rachel wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. No, that’s not it; she’s screaming in her sleep, and then Marco snaps the light on and wakes her. He sets a glass of water on her nightstand. Tilts the alarm clock so she can see the time. Pokes her in the arm to remind her that she’s human, at least for now. When it becomes obvious that she’s not going to talk about it, he turns and leaves without ever saying a word.
“I need you,” Marco says into the phone, middle of the night, apparently apropos of nothing. “They took my dad.” He gives the address, and then he hangs up.
He and Rachel have come to a decision, without discussion, without niceties like consulting Jake, by the time they’re done fighting off the half-dozen controllers who were dragging Peter toward the portable yeerk pool. Rachel demorphs as Peter watches. Marco goes through the explanation the first time, then the second.
Midway through the third round of attempts to convince Peter he’s not crazy, Rachel gives up. She herds both Peter and Marco into the backseat, and drives back to the house. “Pack for a long trip,” she tells them both, and goes upstairs to tell her mom.
Maybe, Jake concludes, exhausted just at the thought, they could’ve kept going if it was just his parents, or just Cassie’s. But Rachel and Marco can’t both disappear without rousing too much suspicion, and getting rid of just one of them will put the yeerks on the tail of the other. “I guess it’s time,” he says. “Better get ready to tell our own parents, then.”
By the end of that day, Rachel’s and Marco’s blended family is in the hork-bajir valley. By the time two days have passed, Jake’s and Cassie’s families are there too, even if Tom is currently secured with about a half-mile of duct tape and will need to be babysat by several hork-bajir for the next three days. A week after that, Tobias shows up with Loren in tow. One hellish mission later, and Visser One is dead, but her host is rapidly recovering.
Naomi and Eva circle each other like a pair of housecats thrust into the same room, at first. They’re prim and aloof and wary, unable to know what to make of each other. Peter helps exactly nothing by retreating from the conflict entirely, busying himself with an elaborate irrigation project the hork-bajir don’t actually need his help with. But he can’t escape them forever.
One night, all three of them get roaring drunk on some kind of regrettable fermented-bark thing, and finally have it out. Peter makes a passionate speech or two about his love for them both before retreating into morose silence. Naomi’s sixth drink ends in her making an elaborate attempt to draw up a timeshare contract over who will keep Peter on which night.
Eva slams a hand down on the table, and they both fall silent. She won’t share, she announces quietly, and she won’t be with a man who cannot choose. She’ll find her own way.
Her own way, as it turns out, is even worse than Marco could have possibly imagined.
“Why?” Marco cries, flopping on the ground in the middle of the next Animorphs’ meeting. “Why, why, why does this keep happening to me?”
“Pretty sure we’ve been over this before, back when it was your dad, and concluded it’s not about you,” Jake says. “Anyway, the yeerks —”
“No!” Marco sits up. “We have more important things to talk about than yeerks. Tobias, back me up on this!”
«Uh, yeah.» Tobias looks over at Rachel. «By the way, all those times you talked about how weird it was when your mom started dating again… Sorry for not being more sympathetic. Now that I’m in your shoes… It’s really weird.»
Rachel sniffs. “You only met your mom like a month ago. It’s still worse for me.”
“And it’s worst of all for me!” Marco has flopped back over. He emits a noise something like a wookiee being murdered. “Please someone acknowledge that it’s worst of all for me!”
Cassie pats him on the back of the head. “It’s worst of all for you,” she says.
“Thanks,” he says into the grass.
“Okay!” Jake throws up his hands. “Marco’s mom and Tobias’s mom have a thing going. Now do we have it out of our systems?”
«Personally, I think Loren and Eva are most compatible,» Ax says.
«Nobody asked you,» Tobias snarks. «And Jake, just imagine for a second if it was your mom who was macking on—»
“Nope!” Rachel says loudly. “Nobody is thinking about anyone’s mom and anyone else’s mom. Or dad. We are ignoring it, we are pretending it’s not happening, we are carrying on as Marco and I have been for over a year now, we are killing yeerks.”
“Yeah, like I was saying.” Jake rolls his eyes. “There are aliens invading the planet, remember?”
“The horror,” Marco mumbles, still facedown in the grass. “The horror!”
Cassie gives him another sympathetic pat on the back of the head.

Now we just need some way to get Cassie related to everybody else!

Cassie is going to marry into this family in this timeline, thus completing the bizarre multi-headed ouroboros of connections the Animorphs have to each other

nana-glass-chillhop-radio-hour

I didn’t even think of that! Yes, this must happen, even if it’s just Cassie marrying Jake several years down the road.

Y'all are doing incredible work out here also “Even if it’s just Cassie marrying Jake” oh my god the shade of it all

What happens when they finally all get to meet Ax’s parents? (Let’s just pretend for the sake of straight up having a good time right now that Rachel lives)

#animorphs #hell yeah #crack #crack treated seriously #that one commenter that says Ax/Marco #and the other one about Rachel/Tobias #yess #i need this #i need this crack #into the fridge you go #mother fucking monster fuckers #anifam

peishathebookity reblogged

silly-soup-drinker

YOU THINK I’M JOKING BUT I’M DEAD SERIOUS

one day this comic will reach a million notes and then i’m going to quit my job and become a couch

Huh? What’s this? I don’t remember ordering something that big.

Oh, it’s a sofa? I already have one, though…

Hang on, my job sent me this? Is this some sort of bonus or something?

Huh??? It’s empty?? Then why was it so heavy…

Oh hang on what’s this?

I’m not sure I can reach it…

Oh crap!!!!

Everyone who isn’t reblogging this version is a coward and a villain

world-heritage-posts

world heritage post

peishathebookity reblogged

#into the fridge you go #tumblr be like

whitepeopletwitter

injuries-in-dust

Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!

They were also called Nightingale Floors, and looking up to make sure I had the right term, I found they were super clever! They were more than just ill-fit boards or whatever makes floors creak normally, they actually used little metal bars under the boards placed into small holes in the boards to cause the creak.

swan2swan

The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.

peishathebookity reblogged

#into the fridge you go #tumblr be like

whitepeopletwitter

injuries-in-dust

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!

swan2swan

The best things on the internet are when someone makes a joke and then Miss Frizzle rolls up for an educational adventure.

peishathebookity reblogged

thejakeformerlyknownasprince answered:

gay-ghostwriter asked:

This is extremely important. Was Aldrea a monster-fucker?

EVEN MORE IMPORTANT: if she was, does that mean that Elfangor was a monster-fucker too?

What about Arbron? Did he ever have Taxxon babies? I choose to believe he did and had a big happy family of Yeerk-fighting caterpillars.

The only canonical non-monsterfucker is Ax and I firmly believe he’s the odd one out here

Officially, Andalites are heavily discouraged from falling in love with aliens.

Unofficially, it’s common enough that it needs official discouragement.

Offworld exploration and military personel all have to sit through a very official PSA video about how tempting it is to fall in love with aliens but all have to do their part for the good of the Andalite race and resist the sexy siren call of cross-species romance. Please. Think of our gene pool if nothing else.

Side note, when Elfangor, Arbron and Alloran all disappeared while escorting two aliens back to their homeworld, high command was probably like “oh fucking hell, not AGAIN” and no one thought any further.

I love how scarily close that PSA thing is to some of my notes. I am glad we agree on that. xD

Post-war Daytime TV is going to just get out of control when Andalites and humans start regularly socializing

10 years post-war, Tobias is gonna be like “I thought I was special. Turns out I was wrong. Andalites be popping out human babies all over the damn place.”

An entirely new field has to be added to census forms because of this nonsense

Oh noooooo

gd-gone

Now I’m imagining young Andalite cadets hiding pinups of Marco (Because he honestly would model for them) and Ax internally screaming every time he hears about someone getting caught with one.

baaradia

I have been saying the Andalites are a race of repressed monsterfuckers for YEARS and everyone thought I was mad!! Mad, I say!!

After all, what *else* would prompt the creation of a reality-breaking shapeshifting device like that-

Prince Aximili would have his own arisths to deal with, and his warriors will tell you, never does he look so tired, so weary, so absolutely done with it all, as when he has to hold up a sexually-provocative image of his former comrade-in-arms and discipline the cadet responsible for bringing onto his ship

I can’t decide if this post is funnier if Ax used to tap that and now has to deal with everyone else also wanting to have his favorite human’s bod-deeee, or if Ax respects Marco as a perfectly acceptable human who nevertheless has a hideous human nose and is therefore (in Ax’s eyes) utterly unfuckable.

Definitely the latter, because Ax is the only canonical non-monster fucker. That’s the real reason he doesn’t fit in with the other Andalites after the war - not because he’s become so human, but because he’s spent so long among them without fucking one of them, and the other Andalites just don’t get it.

The ultimate version of this headcanon would be if Ax and Marco dated for a hot minute but for whatever reason (their age, sexuality, mental health, Ax apparently being the Andalite military’s only non-monster fucker, etc, take your pick) they never fucked, so whenever Ax sees one of these pinup posters he’s just like “how dare you, excuse me, that’s my ex, and also, btw, at least I admired Marco for his personality, you deviants”

Marco finds out about it and whenever they meet up he flirts outrageously in front of cadets

zarohk

Escafil: I invented an easy, one-button transitioning device, but apparently y’all use it for monsterfucking. And what are those humans even doing with it!

(Also, according to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, homo sapiens interbred the other human species out of existence, so being a monsterfucker is a positively selected-for trait.)

lilacnothlit

I am not only aghast, but desperately want to draw a comic of my Animorphs Historian OCs fervently debating this conversation over coffee.

“But when Rachel was brought back to life by those Satanic cultists in San Diego in 2014, she said she learned while dying that Andalites all inherited thoughtspeak from an Andalite diety taking on an Andalite body and having kids, so perhaps they got it from him?”

“Althsa, you can’t be serious, they were a prey race at the time that was described.”

“And they probably thought their predators would be the kinkiest things imaginable.”

Associate Professor Lam, who lost a leg to one of Visser Three’s tentacle morphs once in a fit of pique during his time as a host: “So now I wonder. After Esplin had Alloran acquire all his monsters, what did he do with the monsters themselves?”

“You can’t possibly be pondering what I was already pondering.”

“Esplin was a yeerk, not an Andalite. You’re saying he went native?”

“He was a weeaboo. A weeaboo about Andalites.”

“Andaboo?”

“My host wants you to know that all of you are going to hell for this.”

For the record: since you can’t get a good mashup of Andalite and Weeaboo, I suggest Wandalite or wannalite. The original term was Wapanese (for Wannabe Japanese), but people were calling each other Wapanese so often that it became a bannable offense. The euphemism for the original word comes from the idea of having a forbidden word.

Andalites enthusiastic about human culture: eagerly accepted by humans.

Humans enthusiastic about andalite culture: rejected by humans and andalites alike.

roach-works

i want to point out that this is because andalites are canonically arrogant and humorless, so the kind of humans that get really into Superior Andalite Culture are going to be super gross about it. the kind of andalites that get really into human culture just show up on earth, pay you ten thousand human moneys for an authentic human lawn mower, try to talk to your dog, and eat whatever you hand them. that’s a lot more fun.

whetstonefires

an andalite wanting a lawnmower is so funny.

it’s like, ‘haha these aliens have a slice-up-dinner-and-throw-it-at-the-wall device, i have negative amounts of use for this, i must have one.’

Andalite Chronicles mentions andalite grass-smoothies, so maybe lawn mowers are a shortcut to snacky deliciousness?

lilacnothlit

Haven’t you ever just wanted to frolic in a severed pile of foodstuffs? Grass piles are the new leaf piles.

roach-works

andalite cooking channels have lots of guest humans show up, muscularly wrestle a lawn mower around a meadow with no shirt on, and then handsomely rake all the chopped grass around into aesthetically pleasing lines (with no shirt on) before leaning attractively against their enticingly primitive gardening tools and watching with rugged approval as their andalite chef co-host trots around in the results

humans are the space orcs of the galaxy but we sure do plate a good salad

time-official

the way i thought this string of reblogs was about some old book trilogy circa like, lord of the rings, until i got further down.

this post is about fucking ANIMORPHS?????? what the fuck happens in these books?????????? are y'all okay????

what the fuck happens in these books??????????

None of the monsterfucking is onscreen, but it’s canon that Aldrea fucked a 7-foot-tall “walking razor blade” and that Elfangor fucked a human.

are y'all okay????

Of course not. We all accidentally bought the most radically anti-violence war epic ever written at a Scholastic book fair, and none of us have been normal since.

kinsey3furry300

Don’t forget that by book three we had a kid trapped in the body of a hawk trying to pick between:

1, His human crush.

2, Fucking a hawk.

3, Killing himself because his life had become an existential nightmare.

Book three, people.

And he later turned out to be a product of said Andalite monsterfucking.

The monsterfucking is the least weird or extreme idea these books would put in your 13 year old head , and that why we loved them.

Same kid who in book 43 is involuntarily yet deeply attracted to the woman who tortured him most of the way to death. Either that, or he gets gender euphoria by turning into her and has that confused for sex-feelings. Both interpretations are supported by the text.

kinsey3furry300

Tobias is proof that cross-speacies psychosexual trauma towards Blond bad-girls runs in his family, and Ax only avoided it due to his cast-iron disinterest in monster-fucking.

zarohk

I know I don’t know about Tobias, but #43 certainly gave me secondhand gender euphoria. And that definitely makes up for all the secondhand PTSD.

kinsey3furry300

I think for a lot of people Tobias is the “Oh right, I feel the way I do, like this” character for years later when you discover that you are Queer or Trans, despite them not being overtly written as such, and I love it, it’s just such good writing. But yeah, the second hand PTSD hits hard. Truly, this family is the Ellimist’s fucking chewtoy.

#long post #cursed post #the real monsterfucker is the friends we made along the way #animorphs #into the fridge you go #I LOVE THIS FANDOM #i hate these children <3 /aff

It is canon that Ax has a poster of cinnamon buns hanging up in his room and stares lovingly at it while other people are talking to him. So yes, Ax’s one true love is human food.

peishathebookity reblogged

thejakeformerlyknownasprince answered:

Anonymous asked:

The Animorphs becoming less politically aware as the series progresses is very funny. Rachel knows in 6 that their governor is preparing to run for president. Jake recognizes that a mask is supposed to be Newt Gingrich in 27. But by 51, not one of them even knows the governor's name or gender. Talk about tunnel vision.

It's true. That said, I feel like this is also down to personality. Rachel is more connected to politics because of her mom, whereas Tobias is like "is the governor a bird and/or a hork-bajir? No? Then I don't give a shit."

#emohawk #''my name is Tobias. just Tobias. no last name. none that I can tell you anyway.#cause. uh. my mom and my dad and my stepdad and my uncle and my bio dad's human morph (don't ask)#all had different last names and now i'm super unclear on which one's legally mine''#this kid canonically doesn't know his own birthday #200 miles north? he can find no problem #sacramento? never heard of it

@twilight0wanderer

Given that the governor mission was given to bird-boy, alien-boy, and Marco, it's lucky they even knew where the capital was

Tobias: We can't tell you where we're from. No really. I can't. I kinda... missed what state my aunt said she was sending me to? And, look, a lot has happened since then, and anyway...

Tobias: I keep hoping Ax will ask someone else what state we're in within my earshot, but so far he appears unaware that states exist. So that one's probably a bust.

matt-lock

tags from prev:

Now I need reasons why all 6 Animorphs literally cannot tell you who they are or where they're from.

#marco: we live in an annoying border region between a couple different states and honestly it's too annoyingly hard to answer where EXACTLY #we are #Jake: I've committed to keeping this shit secret so hard that i forgot how things work #Cassie: I don't actually ideologically vibe with the idea that the USA is a legitimate government but I'm afraid to admit it to anyone #Rachel: Grr. Argh.#animorphs

And poor Ax's whole thing is that he's from nowhere and belongs nowhere.

#animorphs #i hate these children <3 #into the fridge you go

peishathebookity reblogged

moominvalley-state-of-mind

k1nky-r0b0t-g1rl

on their clit like morse code

estrogenesis-evangelion

"S.O.S. we're going down"

k1nky-r0b0t-g1rl

fuck dont be funnier than me on my own post

k1nky-r0b0t-g1rl

No stop that

foone

... - . -. -.. . -.-.

oddlysexypancake

uhh?

foone

In 1947, an British flight from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Santiago, Chile reported their status over Morse code as "ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 HRS STENDEC". That last word is nonsense, so the tower asked for clarification. They repeated: STENDEC. STENDEC.

They were never heard from again. 11 people vanished, apparently along with their plane, and the only clue is that last word.

And no one knows what the fuck "STENDEC" means.

peishathebookity reblogged

your-local-squip-fanatic

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

badwificonnection

Blood is what now?

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

badwificonnection

GIF by lesbee-dee2

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums?

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

badwificonnection

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

It’s not my fault you’re human.

apatheticshipwreck

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

elodieunderglass

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

kyrosion

It has been MONTHS, @elodieunderglass, and I am still mumbling “furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship” under my breath as a comfort phrase, and the FUCKING INDIGNITY that it came from this godforsaken post about THE HORRIBLE WETNESS OF MAMMALS!

#into the fridge you go #humans <3

“The horrible wetness of mammals” would make a great band name.

gallusrostromegalus

“hold hope, internally, at 37.5 degrees” and “Mammals internalize everything (eggs, grudges)” Now live permanently in my vocabulary

dragons-locator

When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true.

dragons

DRAGONS LOCATED

peishathebookity reblogged

omghotmemes

No, no it isn’t.

moonlit-aura

this gif is perfectly timed because it gives you enough time to read it, comprehend it, and still have this too-long-for-comfort moment of suspense before being punched square in the solar plexus

the-real-yahoo-mail

@same-pic-rick-roll

spaghetti-o-fficial

Holy shit that gave me whiplash

the-official-goose-god

the jump scare I needed

peishathebookity reblogged

translating-your-post-10-times

So my friend’s kid has celiac and dyslexia and reading labels is difficult for them (also they’re like 7) so he’s teaching their pigeon, Grey Boy, to read the labels and identify ingredients with gluten. It’s going well, other than Nick thought it would be a good idea to make the behavior when the pigeon does find a bad ingredient to just fucking…wing slap the box. Just beat the shit out of it like, “no! BAD gluten! BAD!”

I see a lot of “they taught a pigeon to read?” comments and thought I’d explain a bit more.

So it’s not really like their friend’s pigeon now knows how to read. He’s not going to be terribly interested in a novel you hand him (unless he decides it looks like a good nest.) However pigeons are remarkably good at pattern recognition, especially visual patterns. They out-perform humans when it comes to things like identifying artwork/distinguishing between different artist’s works. So it is pretty easy for them to recognize a visual arrangement of ink, such as a printed word, and be taught to respond to that particular pattern. So when looking at an ingredient list the pigeon learns to pick out the specific pattern(s) he’s been taught to react to among the other patterns (words.)

So he sees “wheat” and doesn’t read it the way humans do (w-h-e-a-t spells wheat), but rather sees the arrangement of pigment that he has been trained to slap. So he slaps it.

He will have to be taught every single gluten containing ingredient for it to be super useful, but it is definitely possible, which is super cool! Plus it makes a little kid’s life easier, and enriches Gray Boy.

Skinner did experiments with pigeons that showed how a pigeon can learn to respond to a visual pattern cue, if your interested more in the science behind it.

My friend’s son has celiac disease, dyslexia and difficulty reading labels (e.g. the number 7), so he taught his pigeon, Gray Boy, to read labels and recognize gluten-free ingredients. Well, except that according to Nick, doing it when the pigeon sees the only bad thing to fry… box wings, is a good idea. Take it from the right side: “NO! Gluten is bad! BOD!”

I see a lot of “people learning to count pigeons?” comment and thought I’d explain a little more.

So Preab’s friend can’t count now. He doesn’t care about the love you give him (unless he thinks it’s a good nest). But pigeons are very good at recognizing patterns, especially visual patterns. They are better than humans at finding works of art/differences between works of different artists. So it’s very easy for them to recognize the visual pattern of ink as a typed word, and we teach them to respond to that pattern. Therefore, by looking at the list of ingredients, the pigeon learns certain patterns and learns to respond to other patterns (words).

So you see “wheat” and you don’t read it as a person (wh-e-at is spelled wheat), but instead you see a pot that has been taught a lesson in giving fullness. So they succeeded.

This is a must for any affiliate promoting any program. It also makes life easier for young children and makes Gray Boy even richer.

Skinner conducted experiments on pigeons that showed how pigeons learn to respond to visual patterns, if you’re interested in the science behind it.

peishathebookity reblogged

quevidamastriste

I keep laughing.

ruaniamh

HERE COMES THE AIRPLANE

EAT THE FUKCING CHIP YOU PIECE OF SHIT

#into the fridge you go #the last one had me cracking #rbs

peishathebookity reblogged

funki-shark

tomcruisingthroughlife

peishathebookity reblogged

obsessingoverl

Loving how as soon as electricity was like, a Thing, people just went "you can make toast with this" and started working on electric toasters but they didn't quite have the whole heating element thing down so there was a not insignificant chance of it just exploding

People have been making bread crunchy by heating it up for Ages but for some reason I thought electric toasters would be happening around the same time as like, refrigerators but no people went "easier crunchy bread?" as soon as the technology was available. Not even remotely safe but like, existent. It took Way longer to figure out how to make things cold with electricity

I specify electric toasters because before that they had these bad boys

You just put your slice of bread in there and hold it over your fireplace and bam it's toast time

Actually you didn't have to use those, if you find yourself wanting some toast in victorian england you could also stick your bread on one of these motherfuckers right here

These are the very creatively titled (/s) toasting forks and they look metal as hell for the purpose they serve

You might notice that the tips are bent upwards, which is actually not for inflicting more pain when tormenting the souls of the damned but rather because the bread goes on them like so

And the bend helps keep the bread from sliding off

I know this is the most niche interest shit in the world but just look at that. The victorian era had no reason to go as hard as it did but every day I am grateful for it

definitelynot-darcy

But sliced bread didn't exist until... I dunno, but it was after Betty White was born. So would the Victorians just stab a wad of bread and toast it like a s'more or what?