@voltaspistol / voltaspistol.tumblr.com
After several months of fierce fighting, with 256 initial combatants, we have made it to the FINALS
Now, it's time to determine Tumblr's Favorite Show!
Previous rounds can be found below the break:
If you're having a bad day, just remember that it's going to be winter soon and imagine what will happen to all the Cybertrucks ❤️
Salt-rusted unprotected steel panels... Meltwater getting into poorly constructed and poorly isolated electronics... Stuck in snowdrifts that a real truck would have been able to deal with... Oh, those are indeed happy images. Yes indeed...
It's winter in the US is anything happening to all the cybertrucks
No snow here yet. Lots of Cybertrucks in my area, so I’ll keep an eye out.
Keep us updated I am so curious to see how they handle Normal Weather
There should be Cybertruck Winter, like Fat Bear Week. Where we see which cybertrucks fall first and which ones make it to the end in usable condition.
Dispatch from the far northern hemisphere and have witnessed a Cybertruck in the winter wilds.
We're early enough into the snow season in that the damage isn't obvious. My guess is that exposure to road salts are really going to destroy these ambulatory dumpsters, but we won't start to see that until spring. Road salt is difficult to impossible to get off in a regular car wash, and we know that Cybertruck can't handle even that.
On the one I saw, any metallic shine that the Cybertruck had was completely lost in a combination of cold winter temps, light street grunge, and lower ambient sunlight. It was the same color as my friend's early 2000s silver pickup truck. One of the big draws, imo, is that stainless steel panelling and to see it turn into the same shade of grey as one of the most popular truck colors twenty years ago would be disappointing to me. It's not special anymore.
Local Cybertruck enthusiasts who are salty dogs at winter driving have started vinyl wrapping their automotive basket cases. The trend seems to be to go from the door windows down, which gives them a beach cooler vibe that is similarly underwhelming.
They’re already having issues! The head lights are sunken in for some reason. This means there is a shelf to hold snow in front of the lights and block them.
Now, every car has to have the snow cleared off the headlights before you drive, but this is way worse. That shelf collects snow as you drive. People have to pull over and clear the snow off mid-drive because they lose their headlights.
WHY ARE THEY BUILT THAT WAY
From here. If you think arachnids with long legs are just scary please watch this solifugid dig her nest (or try to) like SUCH a goofy little person creature. Look how she shoves dirt with her mouth and then gives it a little pat. Is she even making any progress?!
Fun fact: Camel Spiders aka Sun Spiders aka Solifuges are not true spiders because they lack the ability to produce webs, and their legs are arranged more like scorpions than spiders.
They’ve also been commonly attributed as having incredibly deadly venom, but actually the opposite is true. Their venom is pretty much harmless to humans and they rarely bite anyway. If you do get bit by one, the wound will likely cause you more problems than the venom.
And as a final fun fact, the Frostbite Spiders in Skyrim are heavily inspired by Solifuges.
More than that; they have no venom at all! Just very strong jaws for chomping up tough beetles, scorpions, centipedes, even lizards. They're the tyrannosaurs of arachnids, putting all the points they can into a huge heavy head and bite force!!
If you are tasty foodful centipede it has to be the frighteningst beast, but....they have this face about it:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mayraoyervides/3459624229
I have camel spiders where I live, and one thing people don't tell you:
They will chase you.
Now they're not intently chasing you, they often, if above ground, do not like the very hot sun, and will try and find refuge in shade.
Sometimes you are the shade.
So it is actually a pretty common occurrence for hikers to be relaxing, one of these little cuties that look like a scorpion and a tarantula had a baby, wonders what all the noise and vibration is, only to try and get out of the sun once they've realized "oh wow! Big ol thing right nearby me", and join you in the wonderful shade you are providing.
Of course most peoples reactions to seeing them is to try and be not near them.
But now you are moving the shade.
So they will (quite quickly) attempt to re-enter the shade.
And boy howdy, I do have some arachnophobia something FIERCE, so learning that the hard way was not a fun time!
Abstract The frozen mummy of the large felid cub was found in the Upper Pleistocene permafrost on the Badyarikha River (Indigirka River basin) in the northeast of Yakutia, Russia. The study of the specimen appearance showed its significant differences from a modern lion cub of similar age (three weeks) in the unusual shape of the muzzle with a large mouth opening and small ears, the very massive neck region, the elongated forelimbs, and the dark coat color. Tomographic analysis of the mummy skull revealed the features characteristic of Machairodontinae and of the genus Homotherium. For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied. For more read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-79546-1
I always knew it was possible, but I never dared to hope.
The saga of Peanut the Squirrel
I know this against my will but the owner of peanut was repeatedly warned that he needed to give him up and could not have him without a license, and the reason peanut was euthanized was bc he bit the cop that came to get him and since the owner had never bothered to get him vaccinated for rabies they had to euthanize him (peanut) to test his brain for rabies. So actually this really is pretty much completely all on the owner.
Every cop should get bitten by a squirrel and contract rabies. You’re a shameful coward
I didn't think I had to clarify my point was that every pet should be vaccinated against rabies at a bare minimum, not that peanut deserved to die for the crime of biting a cop. The cop biting part was admirable.
路駐してもバレないバイクちょっと良いな https://x.com/yuruhuwa_kdenpa/status/1840518223370088684
good morning
Thr man is caked up and he knows it
I was about to say....
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Some documentaries:
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
Looking at the digital quilt is heartbreaking. So many of mi gente, dead.
I’m in tears after reading some of that quilt
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be.
–The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
i think about this quote a lot in relation to HIV and my history.
Incidentally, this is why condoms are free. Because condoms prevent the transmission of HIV more than any other method. Because even with new medications like PEP and PrEP (which incidentally require you to be monitored and tested to make sure that they’re working and that your kidneys are still healthy), you still need to use condoms for them to be as effective.
I know that sometimes there’s this “why are condoms free and tampons and pads aren’t?” mentality. That’s why. Because the alternative was people dying because they were too afraid or too poor to walk into a drugstore to buy condoms.
–BB
Item: in the 1950s research was starting to suggest smoking cigarettes might be bad for you, so one company beefed up their filter with asbestos
Seasonal affective disorder havers how are we all coping
[ID: Two versions of the cat screaming at food bowl meme. The first has a clock showing 4pm and is captioned "WHY IS IT NIGHTTIME". The second has a November calendar and is captioned "WHY IS IT TEMPERATURES".]
I love how perfectly like clockwork this returns every November. Good morning northern hemisphere take your vitamin D
Good evening, northern hemisphere! Light therapy devices for seasonal depression can be cheap, safe and effective!
While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.
Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.
Also worth noting that The Onion is partnering with EveryTown for Gun Safety on the launch of this.
Knitting, 2021 - by Joseph Ford, English
this is one of a [series] and they're all fantastic
joseph ford is the photographer and the knitter who made the pieces is nina dodd (ninadoddknits.com)
ilove when someone posts about an issue that's supposedly plaguing society and it's painfully obvious that said issue is not a thing that matters if youre not on tiktok
reminds me of this reddit comment I have saved
If Mel Brooks made movies today he would be like the most hated man in America he got away with so much shit
is that the qanon anti semite actor or the guy who made blazing saddles i always get mixed up
Blazing Saddles guy
Ok I'm not going to say he isn't problematic. But!
Blazing saddles destroyed a genre by being such a scathing satire.
There were more things that did it, but pre blazing saddles tv was like 80% cowboy stuff. Post Blazing Saddles the genre practically disappeared.
To make a fictional comparison: Imagine that at the hight of ACAB thoughts and awareness, (like late 2020 vibes I think?) A movie came out that ripped cop procedural shows so bad that by the next year almost all of them are off the air and less than 10 new ones come out and they all are dropped by the end of the next year.
Like, that's how hard Blazing Saddles went. People did hate it. He ruined the image of the idealistic picture of cowboys and westerns being perfect pillars of American morality.
Blazing Saddles didn't just say that the average Western character was racist, he called them idiots. Straight to the camera in the most loveable moment of the show.
This isn't to excuse anything in it. Just to let you know that this shot was a head shot to an American revisionist giant.
And that counts for something.
like to charge, reblog to cast
Venus Flytrap or the Little Shop of Horrors?
