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Shot silk has been around for quite a while and is one of my favorite things to point out to friends in art museums- “do you see that cool fabric in the painting? The really made stuff like that!” It’s so fun.

Hands down my fave thing about hurricane season is when zoos put their birds in the bathroom to protect them from the wind and we get images like this

Photo from St Augustine Alligator Farm

omg, I had no idea zoos did this!

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another favorite of mine

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I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

I spent so much of my life romanticizing the Great and Powerful Enormity of the Sea, reading about the salt and the sweat of the sailors straining to haul the sails or anchor while dreading the monsters in the cold, icy deep fathoms below…and now you tell me that a fathom is only 6 feet deep -

Six feet is still more than enough for a grave.

Hi, that is the most metal addition you could have possibly made to this post

Every summer I forget how much I fucking love spiders I’ve drunk one every day this week

Drinking spiders??!

You put ice cream in a glass and pour soft drink over it. It creates a thick layer of delicious foam on top of a sweet, creamy drink with ice cream in it.

And yes I did attempt to get a picture by googling “Australia spider” like a fucking moron.

I think that’s called a float in the states. Although we usually plop the icecream into the glass after the soda. Similar effect though.

We wouldn’t be able to call it that because the word is way too easy to confuse with a floater, which is a meat pie floating in a bowl of pea soup. It is every bit as delicious as a spider though. I should get some pies and pea soup.

I would like to announce that this is not a standard Australian food, it’s exclusively a South Australian one and the rest of Australia is just as appalled as the rest of the world.

It’s not our fault that the rest of Australia is incorrect about food.

#WE HAVE SPIDERS IN AOTEAROA and they serve CUNT#im gonna steal ice cream from work this weekend and make spiders with it. i will steal the fizzy from work also#i fucking hate my boss 

Living your best life I see

“average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in South Australia and BADLY misinterpreted our survey question,,

[tumblr] has two jokes and this one will outlive all of us

#spiders#floats#spiders georg#I think i blew my coworker’s mind last week when I told him my favorite float is chocolate ice cream and cherry coke#it tastes like a liquid chocolate covered cherry 

Shoutout to this genius who has invented the Black Forest Spider.

Speaking of Poe, I remember learning a while back that a sign of repeated low-grade carbon monoxide poisoning manifests in a really particular facial asymmetry that is super exemplified in him. 

One side of the mouth will turn upwards, and the brow on the same side will turn down. It can definitely be seen in images of other people from this era, and also coincides with homes and spaces being increasingly lit with coal gas.

Symptoms of low-grade carbon monoxide poisoning can also manifest as feeling like you’re being haunted. Unease, visual and auditory hallucinations, all that. There have been instances of people today who think their house is haunted finding that they have something leaking CO into it instead.

Victorians have absolutely solidified their place as Spooky Ghost People who influenced…so much about how ghosts are thought about and portrayed today. And while there are a lot of Actual Reasons as to why things like Spiritualism really took off in the mid 19th century…ongoing CO poisoning probably didn’t help with people NOT seeing ghosts.