Arkred´s Playground

here are a few other “secret” dashboards:

Posts from your “crushes”

“What you missed” (will be empty if you already visit Tumblr every day)

“Trending”

176: Blood Ties

177: Wonderland

178: The Processing Line

179: Accomplice

180: Moving On

181: Ignorance

182: Wellbeing

183: Monument

184: Like Ants

185: Locked In

186: Quiet

187: Checking Out

188: Centre of Attention

189: Peers

190: Scavengers

191: What We Lose

192: An Appointment

193: A Stern Look

194: Parting

195: Adrift

196: This Old House

197: Connected

198: Precipice

199: Seeing it Through

200: Last Words

🥳🥳🥳

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

Portal Accident, Take Two

So excited to finally share my pieces for @invisobang!

A huge thank you to my wonderful author @jumping-mirrors and fellow fic artist @ghozteevee for making this project so fun! It was a pleasure to work with you both!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Check out the fic here:

As a certified hater of the military-industrial complex, my opinion is that I love NASA and I want to see our space exploration budget greatly increased.

I understand why some people are skeptical, because historically NASA and the military-industrial complex have been bound together by the aerospace industry and military R&D funds, and NASA would never have gotten off the ground in the first place without the Cold War as an excuse for new science spending. But NASA has a fundamentally civilian mission, their goals do not require any violence in our foreign policy, and they cooperate peacefully with other nations around the world (including some of our official "enemies" through stuff like space traffic management). The fact that they maintain close ties to the Air Force and Space Force doesn't change the fact that they serve a civilian mission, and they serve it well.

But the most important reason to be in favor of space exploration is not just that it's inspiring or an impressive achievement in itself. Public research spending at NASA has been behind some of the world's most important technological discoveries over the last century. Literally thousands of technological developments have come out of government-funded NASA research. If you wake up on a memory foam mattress in a fire-proof apartment building and make a breakfast smoothie using freeze-dried fruit, then you've just benefited from three NASA developments before you've even started your day. Every dollar we spend on NASA produces several dollars worth of useful technology that benefit all of us. This is the kind of public sector innovation that keeps the world running.

paramedic: hi, I'm Allan

me: you told me. and your colleague is Jim, and the man who found me is Peter. guess my short-term memory is okay

me: well my feet are still freezing but it's okay, I know you need to focus on getting my core temperature up first

A naked eye 3D pterosaur installation at Shanghai Natural History Museum