my brother started calling our cat “doobie brother” which he then lengthened to “dubious brother” and has since morphed into “brother dubious” like he’s some sort of fucked up little monk
brother dubious
“My liege, I’m afraid I have reason to believe your concubine plots against you. Worry not, your eminence, you can still trust me, of course…”
I love tumblr because you’ll see a beautiful poetic text post cross your dash saying something like “when two characters loathe each other but only because they perceive the self in the other, a jagged reflection whose gaze they cannot meet. They circle one another eternally like spiral galaxies, and neither will ever be able to admit that they understand the other better than anyone else they’ve ever known🌌”
And then you read the tags your mutual put on it and they’re “#SO true #this is Glomgold and Scrooge McDuck fr🥺” and you have to go about your day and deal with that
Oppenheimer gets a lot of shit these days for the whole “oh I created this city-destroying bomb but I feel so bad about how it was used” etc etc, and people clowning on him for that, but I wonder how a lot of people on this site who call it a black and white moral choice would react if they were in that same situation, which is to say if their country was at war against the Nazis, and where the big fear was iirc that they were also working on developing the bomb.
Like, okay, nuclear bombs are bad, obviously, but imagine you’re some dude in the 40s, you are a scientist rather than a politician or military strategist, you have limited information but your country is in the middle of a catastrophic global war with a massive fascist alliance the like of which the world has never seen. The physics community has just solved the equations and realised that this weapon might be possible, and that it is powerful enough to change the course of warfare forever, and the scientists who had escaped evil fascist alliance are telling you “look, the scientists who discovered this was possible were German, the Nazis are probably working on this and they might be further ahead than we are”.
So the government comes to you and says, “we need to try and develop this first, because if not then they will use it to wipe us all out.” And you have no reason to believe that’s not true, because the science did come from the area of the Evil Fascist Alliance, and your country, your community and friends and loved ones, are already engaged in fighting the catastrophic world-ending war and there have been no holds barred.
I don’t know, a lot of people manifest pretty strong principles in hindsight looking at the actual circumstances of the bomb’s use by the US military, but given the sort of uses of violence I see advocated here for fighting back against fascists over much lower stakes than “literally World War II” (not judging whether that is correct or not, just observing), I am fairly sure that a large chunk of the people making snarky jokes about Oppenheimer would have built the bomb and handed it over to the US on the spot, perhaps feeling misgivings at the time but feeling it is necessary, then only coming to feel truly bad about it after the fact, following, like… the exact trajectory that I believe Oppenheimer did.
Not for nothing, but there are a lot of people on this website who love saying “tee-hee punch a Nazi!” right up to the point where you ask them to have an ounce of perspective on a team of scientists largely comprised of leftist Jewish refugees who literally fled the Holocaust (or in Oppenheimer’s case, the first-generation son of German Jewish immigrants who still had family in Germany when Hitler came to power), and then suddenly it’s like “What outlook could have possibly motivated these people to work on something so terrible?”
Like, I am not defending every choice these guys made. Hell, we know for a fact that many of them were filled with regret and would have done things differently in hindsight. But jfc learn to apply some goddamn context, and don’t talk about punching Nazis if you can’t understand why a bunch of people whose families were literallyannihilated by the OG Nazis might have been preoccupied with developing this weapon first.
Out of all the cool stuff that mythbusters ever shot on high speed camera, shooting a soccer ball at 60mph out of a truck traveling 60mph is one of my favorites
Just look at it. It is the most perfect visual representation of Newton’s 2nd law of physics I’ve ever seen. The ball, which was shot out of a CANNON, drops straight down. Two equal and opposite velocities completely canceling each other out, leaving the soccer ball to drop to the earth with a net velocity of 0. Sir issac newton would be proud to tears of this gif.
And yet this “myth” is nothing more than basic physics at work. A 10 year old with an interest in science could have told us this is possible. 60mph in one direction minus 60mph the exact opposite direction is 0. Basic.
But what makes this so frieken cool is the fact that they went through all the trouble to actually demonstrate the invisible laws that govern the way our universe works. To get this shot both the soccer ball and the truck had to be moving at the exact same speed. Real world variables make that extremely difficult to pull off. It took them hundreds of attempts to get it right. They went through all that trouble to “prove” something we have known as fact for hundreds of years. And we get this amazing gif to watch as a result.
Mythbusters is incredible. Science is incredible. And the fact that this experiment in physics can be used in science classes for years and years to come to help children learn about physics is incredible.
Despite its tremendous mass there was an elegance to its motion, a wolflike grace, but also an arrogance. No, the student thought, not arrogance. Arrogance implied a false sense of importance. There was nothing false about the leviathan.
My interpretation of one of the Engines of Calamity from @normal-horoscopes’ Amber Skies!
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Let me tell you a story.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a “master-planned community,” constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don’t exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
![aliceavizandum:
“fabledanarchy:
“That’s Odin
”
ME: ☝️ no it isn’t
YOU: but that’s clearly-
ME: [sotto voce] Odin gets upset when he feels he isn’t tricking people, just indulge him. [loudly] hail and well met, ordinary subway peasant
ODIN: [to self]...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/011cfd11cb19a795d1ef1404180a3c42/f3adaf690bbb4100-8c/s500x750/746ef4effec7ce69a431eba5dfdfcb53d8bf9a8d.jpg)
