Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky

And when a kid would assert something incorrect In class, he wouldn't tell them they were wrong, he would help lead them to the right answer and then when they admitted/ accepted the new information, he'd say "now we're both right! Nice work!"

this is cool and i respect what y'all are doing

Do you, though?

it's exceedingly difficult to get accurate, randomized data from voluntary surveys on any social media platform

It's exceedingly difficult to get accurate data about people in general, by any method. Every method has its pros and cons, and people using this data will be able to judge the pros and cons because I describe my methodology in the reports.

I don't know what you mean by randomised. Do you mean that in an ideal situation 10,000 researchers would be teleported into 10,000 living rooms evenly distributed across the world's land masses, will ask if anyone in the house is queer, if they're not then the researcher gets teleported to another house and another until they find a queer person. And then all 10,000 researchers ask the questions and then that data is considered 100% accurate and reliable?

In the event that no one is capable of carrying this out, the next best way to get accurate information is to consider a variety of sources that used a variety of methods, and consider the pros and cons of each in context.

One of those sources might be a survey shared on social media with a truly staggeringly large international sample that has been carried out for many years running.

tumblr is worse than most bc there's no algorithm

I would have thought it would be better if there's no algorithm. It'd be more random because the algorithm isn't selecting a certain type of person to show your survey to. Not that I know much about algorithms. :D

you have a massive sampling bias thanks to tumblr userbase demographics compared to queer/online genpop and reliance on participants' social circles as a distribution method (reblogs/blazes/promos/etc), among other things.

Yeah, obviously. Again, anyone using the statistics will have this information in the spreadsheet of results because everyone gets asked how they found the survey.

How would you recommend I accurately sample queer/online genpop? I'm not being rhetorical, I would love if you could reply and tell me what you think I should be doing. It might be something I haven't considered.

i'd caution against suggesting it's a valid way to gauge overall sociological trends

What would you consider a valid way to gauge overall sociological trends? I'm not being rhetorical, I would love if you could reply and tell me what you think I should be doing. It might be something I haven't considered.

i'd caution against suggesting [...] that anyone should use this data in an academic or scientific context.

Honestly, that's not my call to make. The academic or scientist can look at it and decide for themselves. And they have done so, and they have used the Gender Census data as a source in their published works. I know because they emailed me to say thanks and I asked to read the paper and they sent it to me and I'm super into that because I often learn a lot.

you unfortunately can't get accurate data for stats like "the total amnt of people using they/them in the uk" via this survey

Show me where I have implied otherwise. I am obviously not posting this survey through every door in the UK, that's absurd.

i don't mean to be a bitch

I don't know what it means to be a bitch but you did come across quite petty. Even if you say "I don't mean to be a bitch", if you say bitchy stuff you're still being a bitch, right?

Mainly I just don't know why you said it. It's like I asked my friend whether they liked Project Hail Mary and you stepped in randomly and screamed, "YOU CAN'T SCIENTIFICALLY JUDGE HOW MANY PEOPLE LIKE RYAN GOSLING LIKE THIS! I JUST DON'T THINK YOU SHOULD BE GIVING THAT IMPRESSION"

Like, yeah, we're not getting peer-reviewed here, please calm down. Jesus Christ.

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.

Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.

Spin the wheel to find out what!

aliexpress is seriously the best place to look at sex toys because they can’t show nudity so they have to finding other ways to show off the use of the toys.

one of my favorite things is when they decide to give you the whole hard sell.

instead of just being like “hey this is a good sex toy”, they instead try to explain why you’d even need a sex toy, from first principles. and that principle is usually “your boyfriend/husband sucks”. or doesn’t, I guess. 

so the sound of this sex toy is between a flower and a clock! 

I’ve posted about the Hammer Sex Toy before, but it turns out it’s not alone. There’s also… 

found another tool! it’s scissors this time.

another fun trope in aliexpress sex toys: just listing off all the rooms of your house you could use it in! 

ooooo

It has scenes from aesop's fables! Cherubs doing things! Beheadings! Greek muses! Little farm people! Intricate floral pattern! Goth stained-glass window like patterns! Fun little corner pieces! Eeeeeeeeeeeeee

https://www.antiquepatternlibrary.org/html/warm/C-TT008-180.htm

Publications include (for those who can't see the picture) :

Battenberg Lace, Beading, BerlinWork, Bobbin lace, Bookbinding (yes, bookbinding!!!)

Calligraphy, Carpentry, Crochet, Cross Stitch, Cutwork

Drawing, Dressmaking

Embroidered Net, Embroidery

Filet, Filet Crochet, Flower Arranging

Glass

Hardanger

Irish Crochet

Knitting, Knotting

Lace (soooo many forms of lace making)

Macrame

Paper, Point Lace

Quilting

Ribbonwork

Sewing

Tatting, Tulle Embroidery

Various

Waxwork, Woodworking

Workbasket Magazine -- a publication that usually posted multiple different crafts in each issue.

It's a wonderful site, and I've loved it for nearly 20 years!

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

OK

final one

for all the marbles,

this one doesn't have an illustration bc i think it was just a kids novel but i haven't been able to find ANYTHING about it on my occasional internet queries:

kids is staying with his (grandmother?) in the woods and she warns him not to look a fox in the eyes bc they're tricksy and will swap places with you. obviously that's the first thing the little boy does and gets body snatched by a fox who uhhhh proceeds to pig out with his new little boy human hands and the boy has to trick the fox into looking him in the eyes again to switch back...

i cannot express how much these are from memory, that's how internalized these artists and writers have become, they're a part of me now

The second one is likely Stellaluna.

[image 2: the periodic table of the elements, except that hydrogen and helium are in their own box labeled "Real elements", and elements 3 (lithium) through 118 (oganesson) are labeled "Mental illness".]

.